Joseph Dunphy / The Abyss posted a photo:

See my profile about this image. You aren't missing anything. This is the blank space graphic I use to create negative space in various places on Flickr. Better this than relying on some external service, and maybe getting a few of those ugly red x marks on the site, I think.



return

Joseph Dunphy / The Abyss posted a photo:

.





Illustration for my review of the "Be Jackson Pollock" site on the Abyss, My Stumbleupon blog.



.

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

Download (0MB image)

I never knew that I could be so darned irresistable, but I guess I must be, because women all over the planet are expressing their undying love for me with one voice. In fact, they're sending the same letter. Repeatedly, and from different accounts.

"Hello Dear,"

"I saw your profile today in this site (www.my.mashable.com)

On which little was to be found but my Yelp and StumbleUpon reviews, but I can see why that would arouse your interest, especially when you came to the Jazz anthology review, because Yiddish has long been known to be the most sensual of languages. "You're an unemployed engineer AND you watch Futurama - and you're not taken?" I know, I know, it amazes me, too.

"and i stopped to take a very good look at it."

Maybe not that good a look.

"I want you to know that i will be intrested to know you better because you sounded very sweet in your profile and i will like us to become friends and know each other the more."

You mean, like on my review of the Third Coast of whose service I wrote "but the kindest word that can be honestly applied to the service is 'uneven'; at times, I would use the word 'psychotic'. I still remember the server who was so angry that I'd ask for a spoon to stir my iced coffee with, that he threw it at me, ..." Yes, the love shows through.

"Here is my email address (address deleted) send me an email today please!

Yours forever,

kate."

Gosh, I don't know what to say. May I call you Katie Bear?

"(Remember that distance,age or colour does not matter in a real relationship but love matters alot)."

Enough that surely, later on, when one has established an online relationship with this new pen pal, one will surely be willing to send Katie some money to help take care of her poor sick grandfather, or save the family farm, or ... get the picture? Say hello to our old friend, the confidence man, who sees great promise in his fellow man and even greater promise in the anonymity offered him by the Internet, and the hope of consequence free grifting it offers.

"I am waiting for your reply now"

I think you just got it, "Kate".











AFTERMATH, 12:28 Chicago Time: Alas, my love was not true to me, for "she" proclaimed herself to be "yours forever" to many, oh so many users on Mashable, as one can see by visiting her Mashable Profile.



What a suprise. All I can do, now, is go out and drown my sorrows in caffeine, and find solace in the thought that the better man (or woman) has won my Katie's heart. If that is "her" real name.

Posted on my Tribe blog on Saturday, February 23, 2008 at 9:31 AM and then reposted to Xanga on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 1:15 AM

Originally posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4:00 PM on Tribe, then reposted to Xanga on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 1:06 am, slightly reformatted.

I've abandoned the notion of making this journal a theatrical blog, having found another purpose for it, a mildly urgent one considering the visible ill health of another provider.

Why is my StumbleUpon blog named The Void? As I've tried to develop my own style, I think that my use of negative space has been one of the more effective changes that I've put in place, and that thought suggested the name.



This will, in part, be a metablog, on which I comment on what I'm doing on my StumbleUpon site (hence the name) and other review sites.

The comments above originally posted to a Tribe.net blog of mine entitled "Stumbling into the Void" on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4 pm. My Stumbleupon blog has since been renamed the Abyss because having the name of one of my blogs being a string within the name of another one of my other blogs seemed kind of lame. The name "the Abyss" still fits for a few reasons which I've already decided on, and which I hope will become clear to anybody following that blog.

This site has become a temporary resting place of sorts for Stumbling into the Void - let's say it's SITV in beta. Tribe has become extremely unsatisfactory as a host, experiencing far too much downtime and being much too troll friendly, with little functionality as a blogging platform even when it is working. I needed a new place for my posts. The service would have to be one whose feed included the entirety of one's posts, which would seem to eliminate almost every service other than Uber.com, Blogger and Xanga. This was necessary so I could run my posts on my Tribe profile, without the Tribe profile looking strange. What I wanted was for the profile to look as much as it did before the change, as possible, so much so that one would barely notice that anything had changed at all.

At the time of this writing, Uber.com has been down for a month, and given earlier announcements of impending bankruptcy, would seem to have entered the dead pool. I already have blogs at Blogger, so by elimination, that leaves us with Xanga, and so here it is - within limits. We still have the issue of the user not being able to choose the name for his own blog, leaving us with the shoddy looking title you see above, if you're viewing this on Xanga: josephdunphy's Xanga Site.

I'm never going to view any site on which I have that kind of unreasonable limitation on my creative freedom as being anything other than a sandbox, as I currently understand the term. I'll play around with the blog a little, probably leaving the original posts here, but when the blog gets going and takes on that personality of its own that I've been speaking of - I'll find a host with more functionality, and move the action over there. This might not be for a while, but eventually, that is what I will do, assuming that I continue on with this blog.

The next two posts will be reposts from my soon to be shut down tribe blog, and then new material will follow.

How can one not be moved, even if one has been a little preoccupied lately, when one reads something like this?  

Sounds good, and no, I haven't been ignoring Xanga. I merely haven't gotten around to Xanga, yet. Sounds like I'm not valuing my membership? Quite the contrary. I'm valuing it enough to be sure to make it meaningful.

A few months ago, not so long ago as it feels, I started looking into social networking sites other than Blogger, and found myself presented with a wealth of resources, each of which I'm exploring as time allows. While I suppose that I could test my readers' patience (assuming I have any of those) by periodically saying "and I'll be blogging here this week, and there the next", I had something much different in mind. I'd like each site I work on to be distinctively its own place, with its own purpose and character, and character is not something that can rush  into existence. I've taken a leisurely pace, allowing each site to define itself over time. The Abyss (my StumbleUpon blog) is sort of my online playground, on which I encounter new sites, and maybe not just tell you what I think about them, but play around with and sometimes build on what I see on them, letting myself be taken in unfamiliar directions in the process. Monday Never Comes is where I go to be a Centrist, and Darkroom Without Shadows (my DeviantArt page) easily defines itself, given the nature of the service. But what was my Xanga page about? That I had to think about, and having thought about it, I found that I had some work to do, in the real world, for what I wanted to do to become practical.

I had thought of it as being a place to post and discuss my amateur efforts at art, the journal at DeviantArt being as unsatisfactory for that purpose as it is. (I like the community, but the site offers no feed for our blogs, and doesn't allow us to embed images into the text). I might do some of that, but I'm leaning more toward this becoming an amateur theatrical journal, which is where the real life work comes in - where am I going to find the other players? Where we'd perform is simpler - outside, most likely, when weather permits, stage space being as costly as it is, and many of us being as poor as we are.  But finding those who are interested, with that special condition I set ("that they not be unpleasantly insane") is not easy. There is that awkward moment when the first person shows up, and it's just the two of you, and I have never been very outgoing in general. Getting past that first moment is difficult, and that is what I am working on at the moment.

Aside from that, I'll just see what this place becomes.

Nothing much, yet. Still at the "registering and setting up my sites" phase. Yes, very dull, I know, but it gets more interesting from here, I promise.

BTW, should I be concerned about the fact that I have no pulse? That's usually not a good sign.

"The Ravine" is the name I've attached to the space associated with this account on mine on Diigo, and associated pages elsewhere. Think of it as a site that spills over several servers.



This link takes you to the main page for that distributed site.

Tags: homepage introduction

Posted by: josephdunphy

In case you were wondering why the same three bookmarks kept popping to the top of my bookmark page and onto your screen - this is why. Discussion on Diigo Community.

Tags: censorship concerned

Posted by: josephdunphy

Returning to one of the rings to which my group on Diigo, named "The Ravine", belongs.



Link made necessary because the Diigo staff did not have the foresight to provide us with a homepage link option for our groups, and Webring insists that all pages on one's site be within two clicks of a ring, with an easy path back to the ring. Therefore, I must create this link, put it into the pool for that group, and then never have another link entered there, ever again, or at least very few, because otherwise the link back to Webring will get buried, and their support staff will not be pleased.



Sigh. What can one do? Staff at Diigo - when you have time, please consider the possibility of a little added functionality in this area.

Tags: navigation

Posted by: josephdunphy

The sticky note I've attached to a bookmark, allegedly posted by me, to the Diigo Community forum in the Diigo community forum, is the reason you're seeing this. We're looking at a bookmark which I have no memory of leaving, and find myself unable to delete - and yes, I tried.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

• I don't remember adding this bookmark, and certainly wouldn't have done so deliberately. What is the point of providing the Diigo community group with a link to itself? I've tried deleting this bookmark, and found that the system would not let me do so. posted by josephdunphy

Tags: annoyance

Posted by: josephdunphy

This, regrettably, is no joke. An official barged in as the cyclist was making arrangements for his son's funeral.



Somebody needs to be fired, not reprimanded or suspended.

Tags: war on drugs abuse of power outrageous insensitive

Posted by: josephdunphy

Men in Black gone wild. Employees of a county department of Homeland Security decide to make their own laws about the viewing of porn.

Tags: abuse of authority censorship

Posted by: josephdunphy

Law that is good in principle, applied without the use of common sense or basic logic.



One of the reasons why underaged teens aren't allowed to consent to model nude - without parental consent, and there are issues enough in that to justify a whole other post - is because children are believed to lack the mental capacity to fully understand the decisions that they are making. Yet now they are to prosecuted for making those very same decisions on their own, as if they were competent adults who had preyed on incompetent children, luring them into decisions their victims might later regret, leaving us with a pick and mix in which the teens are regarded as being both competent and incompetent at same time, the state they are to be viewed as being in depending on the needs of the argument under which they are to be imprisoned at each given point.



Doublethink a la Orwell being used as a basis for Law, as the underaged are put in danger of sent to prison (where they are likely to be raped) using a law designed to protect them from a form of sexual exploitation.

Tags: injustice court law trial imprisonment

Posted by: josephdunphy

Before one laughs too loudly, let's just think of what it means - as the wealth vanishes into the hands of a few, those few are growing fewer.



The smaller the controlling group gets, the more easily it can keep itself closed.

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: josephdunphy

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: josephdunphy

Viral molecular structures, rendered in glass. Prettier than I just made it sound, probably.

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: josephdunphy

If you'd like to be notified of updates to my bloglike (blogish?) homegroup on Diigo, and you have a Yahoo account, you should join this community.



Just sign into Mybloglog with your Yahoo account, if you haven't set up a Mybloglog account already, and you should be ready to run in about a minute. Just remember to click on "my home" and look at your own page before trying to set your nickname in IE, because of a small bug in the system.

Tags: joseph dunphy updates mybloglog

Posted by: josephdunphy

The investigation reported is one of those connected to Burges. Do you notice ...



1. That the authorites are just looking into the members of Burge's crowd, as if they were the only problem on the CPD.



Please. Dealing with these thugs is a nice start, but it's only a start. One is left wondering, though, if this is where it will end.



2. That this wasn't exactly late breaking news or unknown in Chicago - the Reader did a series of articles on these fun, fun people back in the 90s, and word had hit the street long before then.



Why wasn't anybody looking into this, then? That last question being rhetorical, of course, for reasons I'll get to, in a second.



3. That the human rights abuses mentioned took place during the 1980s, meaning that prosecution has been stalled for so long that, even if caught, most of the offenders will escape justice.



4. When, some years back, I and a few other demonstrators were on the street in Chicago, trying to raise a little consciousness about the issues surrounding the death penalty in Illinois, mentioning this very case, there's a reaction to which we became accustomed.



The man on the street seeing absolutely nothing wrong with torturing confessions out of those accused of crimes. This is why, below, you see me suggesting that I was not surprised to see popular acceptance of the Bush administration's lavish use of torture. As a society, we had been there before, and hadn't seemed to be in any great hurry to get anywhere better.

Tags: human rights abuse of power abuse of authority torture

Posted by: josephdunphy

People are paying to drink their own bathwater, in Arcata, California.

Tags: arcata california

Posted by: josephdunphy

See bookmark below. The Bush administration's human rights abuses were not as without precedent in American history as some of us would like to imagine, according to this article.

Tags: human rights alternet sadistic torture

Posted by: josephdunphy

Satire of creationism.

Tags: satire humor

Posted by: josephdunphy

One of the most expensive varieties of coffee in the world, made by ... you probably don't want to know. But if you've tasted this, you paid $5 per mug for the experience.



Maybe a little more than that in the long run, because I'm not sure that you'll want to hold onto the mug after reading this.

Tags: luwak coffee odd bizarre unusual

Posted by: josephdunphy

Humans do have instincts - how else can one explain why so many people, handed that plastic padding stuff, will compulsively spend so much time on an activity that practically nobody claims to enjoy. "Pop! pop! pop!"



Somebody created simulated bubblewrap, and unlike Officemax, has left the addict with an unlimited supply of what he craves. There is no escape.

Tags: flash interactive bubblewrap

Posted by: josephdunphy

A biannual e-journal published by Humboldt State University in Aracata, California, source of some of the articles which I'll be posting about, on my homegroup.

Tags: philosophy journal

Posted by: josephdunphy

Page talks about the restoration of an ecosystem that is far more endangered in the "Prairie State" and its neighbors than many outside of Illinois might suspect.

Tags: nature conservation Midwest prairie

Posted by: josephdunphy

Free, research level articles in a variety of scientific fields. When one remembers that research journals often go for hundreds of dollars per year in hardcopy form, a resource like this is appreciated even more, in this time of widespread long term unemployment in the pure and applied sciences.

Tags: science

Posted by: josephdunphy