What a total Konte

I found this card on the windscreen of my car one day and have kept it on me ever since, for no apparent reason.



Is it the karmic implication of throwing away a card from a man who can tell me what my problems are without me even telling him?

Is it the fact that my problems may involve black magic or voodoo, and I didn't even know that I could ever be affected by anything so exotic as black magic or voodoo?

Is it the lingering suspicion that maybe I DO in fact have unknown diseases, and that only this man will be able to tell me?

Nope. It's because I like mispronouncing his name.

The great big Konte.

Teh internets: virtual compulsive hoarding?

Something occurred to me. Turns out the internet is not a huge repository for the sum of all human knowledge. It is in fact the final frontier for a world that has been taken over by compulsive hoarders.

From Wikipedia (which may be the ultimate compulsive hoarder):

While there is no definition of compulsive hoarding in accepted diagnostic criteria... Frost and Hartl (1996) provide the following defining features:

the acquisition of, and failure to discard, a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value. [Ed's note: see everything on the internet ever]

living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to preclude activities for which those spaces were designed. [Ed's note: see every web page ever]

significant distress or impairment in functioning caused by the hoarding. [Ed's note: see flame wars]

Reluctance or inability to return borrowed items. As boundaries blur, impulsive acquisitiveness could sometimes lead to kleptomania or stealing. [Ed's note: see all discussions relating to "copyfighting", pace Cory Doctorow]

The hoarder may mistakenly believe that the hoarded items are very valuable, or the hoarder may know that they are useless. A hoarder of the first kind may show off a cutlery set claiming it to be made of silver and mother-of-pearl, disregarding the fact that the packaging clearly states the cutlery is made of steel and plastic. A hoarder of the second type may have a fridge filled with food items that expired months ago without ever eating them, but would vehemently resist any attempts from relatives to dispose of the unusable food items.

So, basically, that covers more or less everything from blogs to rickrolling.

Does it matter? Not really. But if anyone finds a copy of Fantastic Four #48 (March 1966) where the Silver Surfer first appears, it's totally mine dude.







The pic with the blue bag is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 - License; the one with the chartreuse phone is from http://www.messiemother.com/ via Wikimedia Commons and is by Thomas Haemmerli; the top one is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The human condition as metaphor: "Desire Lines"

"A desire path, or desire line, is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts in places where constructed pathways take a circuitous route."
- Wikipedia


A desire line is a path that's been created by people who want to get from one place to another and don't want to waste time with things like convention, rules, boundaries etc. Which is both the best and the worst thing about people.