Diary of a Network Geek

Aliens live in our oceans.

I know I’ve been reposting a lot from Boing Boing lately, but this is just too good to not share. As both a fan of science fiction and an eternally hopeful writer of science fiction, I’m always fascinated by intelligent animals that live with us on our own planet. One of the most intelligent and yet different species which shares our planetary home is the octopus. I can’t remember the exact quote, or who said it, but a science fiction author once challenged his fellows by asking that they create an alien that could think as well as mankind, but differently. I’m not going to claim that an octopus can think as well as a human, but it sure does think differently. And, having watched the fascinating video The Insane Biology Of The Octopus, I can absolutely see a very different way of thinking than the one we land-dwelling mammals are used to using. While we have done a lot of research into the intelligence of dolphins, we’ve really only just started looking at the octopus, relatively speaking.
The video is about twenty minutes long, which is easily viewable in a lunch-hour. You won’t be sorry if you have any interest in aliens, alien thinking, or even just strange animals.

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words!

Here’s hoping you have a very “Florida Man” birthday!

Okay, so after last week, I feel like I need to share something completely light and without a deeper political message, no matter how far down you scroll. Thankfully, I can rely on the proverbial “Florida man” from the news to help me sink to the appropriate level. In this case, it’s a website that calls itself the Florida Man Birthday Challenge. The idea is simple, just select your birth month and day and the site will serve up a real, and really weird, silly, stupid and ridiculous, news story starring that most infamous low-rent perps, the proverbial Florida Man.
It looks like they’re still building out the site and collecting news stories that are linked to each and every day of the year, but they’re really getting there. For instance, the story on my birthday is actually about an event from October, but, one assumes that the news story hit the papers in December, possibly when the Florida man in question was arraigned. I’m not sure when they started, and the site is riddled with advertising, but the idea here is that no matter the month and day of your birth, a Florida man has done something stupid enough on that day to make the news or police blotter.

See? Like I told you; low-brow and the antithesis of last week’s post!
Come back next week to see what I come up with next!

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words!

I know I’m a little late to this trend, but all these modern folk songs are fun, so I’m sharing it anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you the unusual juxtaposition of modern songs done in a Medieval style called “bardcore”. This week, it’s sea shanties of several stripes and union work songs. They’re actually pretty similar in style, I think, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. Two of these three came to my feed by way of Boing Boing and they talk about the third, but I’d already discovered that in a list of old 78s on the Internet Archive Audio Archive .

So, first, I’ll share two TikToks that I found from Boing Boing’s post on sea shanties. The first is jax.in.the.box_, and she’s got a beautiful voice. I honestly don’t know anything about her except the music she shares on TikTok, which goes well beyond sea shanties, but is generally of a folk singing style that she really makes the most of. And, also, nathaneveanss, who also goes beyond the sea shanty style, but is also quite good. Both of these performers are really good and their acapella work is absolutely their best in my opinion. And, after listening to them both, I started to think that the secret was either an Irish or a Scottish accent.

Now, before you think these sea shanties are all just fun and games, Boing Boing has a cybersecurity sea shanty by Rachel Tobac. It’s good opsec advice about not reusing passwords and capitalizes on the popular TikTok trend to, hopefully, reach some folks.

The last links I’m going to share are to the Internet Archive. Lately, there’s been some good reason for the “little guys” to talk about economic disparity, not to mention the recent efforts of both Goole employees and Amazon employees to unionize, with mixed results depending on where it was happening. These songs mostly go back to the mid to late 40’s. My favorites are The Union Boys – Songs for Victory; music for political action, but you can find more old 78s with a “union theme” there, too.
But, if you need more, Spotify has some for you. There’s the Utah Phillips – One Big Union – We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years, Solidarity Now: Workers, Union and Protest Songs (which includes the Chemical Worker’s Song that jax.in.the.box_ linked above performs), and another, easier way to listen to The Union Boys – Songs for Victory; Music for Political Action.

For any future employers, I’m not advocating unionization necessarily, but the less we pay workers the more reason they have to complain about how oppressed they are. Extreme wealth disparity is something that should concern everyone because when it gets extreme enough, upheaval happens.

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words, my much more personal blog.

There’s something terrifying about musty, forgotten, anonymous backrooms.

As someone who’s done a little bit of urban exploration with my camera, I can tell you, there are few things more unsettling than a building full of empty, discarded rooms left to molder into decayed disuse. And, in another life, I’ve had some other reasons to know more than I’d care to about out-dated and disused space in semi-industrial settings. Old offices at the back of old buildings that smell like damp wallboard and receded floodwaters. I think if H.P. Lovecraft were alive and writing today, his nameless horrors would lurk in places like that. I’ve been thinking about it lately thanks to Mark Frauenfelder’s article in Magnet about “The Backrooms”, a 4Chan meme that’s been given deeper life thanks to procedural generation and people stuck at home. His article has videos, but more importantly, links to the deeper world of this horror space. The videos and games are … Well, they’re interesting and disturbing and something you sort of need to experience. I probably should have saved all this for Halloween, but, I didn’t think it would keep any longer.

Go and look for yourself. Yes, it’s unsettling, but it’s also a safe distraction from the more unsettling things happening in our world today.

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words!