Barrett Brown Busted
Well, it had to happen. Everybody’s favorite/least favorite Anon/talking head/fameball Barrett Brown once again drew the attention of law enforcement. Being a very 21st Century character, he was half-naked, seemingly baked, and on video when it all went down.
Here is that video.
Full report will be up tomorrow on the Daily Dot. You’re welcome.
EDIT: it’s up now. Barrett Brown Anonymous hacker, arested.
Spock is logical awesome. He runs a digital media marketing agency in Soho. The internet, on the other hand, is Illogical Awesome.
You can’t tell me kids can’t tell quality when they see it. They may not know why they’re reacting, but they can’t help themselves.
Same as you.
“I don’t think they’ve added the word to the dictionary to describe this.”
Actually, maybe they have, kid. Could be this one,
“Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. ”
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
— Robert M. Pirsig
or maybe this one,
The precise value of the Golden Ratio is expressed mathematically as the never-ending and never-repeating number 1.6180339887…., a number that can go on indefinitely. Because of its infinite capacity, the Golden Ratio cannot be expressed as a whole number or as a fraction; it is therefore considered an irrational number. Greek mathematician Hippasus of Metapontum has been credited with the distinction of discovering this irrational basis of the Divine Proportion.
According to tradition, his discovery shocked the Pythagoreans whose world view is based on the integrity of whole numbers and their ratios, an integrity that has been extended beyond numbers to the harmonic progression of notes in musical scales and the cosmic harmony of the spheres.
or maybe it’s something else. But it’s something.
Also: what is it with the boys in the red shirts? They sure don’t last long as ensigns on Star Trek, but they obviously have their heads screwed on right; they’re the smartest ones on the video. And someone needs to switch that little girl in the splashy dress to decaf, stat!
Care for a flashback, Interwebs? The Original Numa Numa, with an estimated 700,000, 000 hits and counting.
Also, the next time some agency drone says, “We can make you a viral video” think about this. Think about the randomness, thing about the abandonment, the Gonzo, think about the passion that existed just in that one moment, just in that one take, and to which nearly three-quarters of a billion people have responded. And then ask yourself why this agency drone thinks they can do that for you, and then realize that he is knowingly lying to you.
Virality happens, and it happens for certain reasons, but some of those reasons are not adequately explained in a course on digital marketing, are they?
And it appears this dude does not:
Yes, it’s very, very mean of Patrick to pretend to pass out at the controls of a small airplane, leaving his obviously non-pilot friend to freak out in close proximity to a video camera.
Very, very mean. Also very, very funny.
Which reminds me of the time, and stop me if you’ve heard this one although you really can’t stop me because this is my blog, dammit, and we’ve already established that I do not take requests, so here I go, blogging it anyway and if you really want to be stopping something, that thing? Should be reading.
There, glad we could clear that up.
Now that we have cleared it up, here’s the damn story:
Georgian Bay, if you don’t know, is rather wide; in fact, I believe the technical designation for a body of water that size is “ginormous.” And off this ginormous body of water is a smaller, yet still substantial inlet called Colpoy’s Bay. This Colpoy’s Bay leads to the picturesque town of Wiarton, of which we have spoken elsewhere, and which plays no part in this story except that it is from whence we took off that day in the plane, and was the town to which we hoped to return alive (I was raised to have low expectations, which makes total sense if you’ve ever seen Wiarton).
One of the things we had to achieve, in order to achieve the latter, that is return alive, is cross Colpoy’s Bay, for lo, we had been up in Buttfuck Nowhere, which is pretty much anything near Wiarton that cannot even be described as “as big and important as Wiarton.” And, as we were crossing the bay (I should explain we were not crossing in a boat, nor even a raft, nor by swimming nor walking on the water, for it is far too pretentious for the likes of us to be showing off in that particular way and besides, we save it for Sundays; no, we were crossing in a Cessna 172, a fine, sturdy little aircraft that seats two: in this case, me and my father. My father and I.
Whatever.
And then the engine stopped.
Let me repeat: there we were, halfway across a significantly-sized body of water in a tiny single-engine plane when the single engine decided to take the day off.
What happened then: my father became quite a different person entirely; why, you could hardly call him chatty at all! and he began flipping many switches, toggling many toggles, and dialing many dials. The plane, of course, began to free-fall towards the surface of the water, which is never a comfortable position for a thing like an airplane to be in, much less an airline passengers such as, in this case, myself.
Now, my father had trained both my sister and me (I? Us. We.) to fly planes before we were 10, but he had neglected to teach us how to restart the engine in mid-air while plunging towards a watery grave. So after a moment of thinking “can I be useful here? Nope. Maybe I can hold in my farts and help float us a bit?” I sat back and let him handle it, while I watched with very big eyes and kept my hands folded quietly in my lap.
After about ninety seconds or it could have been five lifetimes, the engine restarted and we toodled the rest of the way across the bay quite normally and proceeded on our route. About ten minutes after that, I tapped my father on the shoulder and asked, “Dad, was that supposed to happen?”
Dear Patrick’s Friend:
THIS is how you handle a problem if you’re a small Canadian girl.
Contrast and compare.
Wordcamp Whistler is indeed live! See the stream at http://livecast.mobilemuse.ca/mobile/live/?FearlessCity. Whoops, looks like we’ve run out of storage again, we’ll be back live as soon as we register yet another user account. UPDATE: We’ve got our third account today on Livecast: http://livecast.mobilemuse.ca/mobile/live/?Fearless
(image courtesy Miss604)
April, Peter and I are up at the beautiful (no, really it is) Fairmont Chateau Whistler, preparing to livestream the presentations. You can see pictures from the unconference here on Flickr.
WordCamp Whistler is a full day of workshops about WordPress, a leading blog platform. We’re here courtesy of the organizers, Duane and Rebecca, who’ve kindly waived the registration fee. And we got some excellent swag: WordCamp Whistler toques FTW!
Tris Hussey has loaned us his flipcam, for regular video, and we’ve got an HTC Touch phone to do livestreaming, once the presentations begin.
Livestreamed video is available once now at http://livecast.mobilemuse.ca/live/?w1662 thanks to our Whistler partners, who left the phone signed in to their account!
UPDATE: our second livestream is up, here:
http://livecast.mobilemuse.ca/mobile/live/?FearlessCity
Since the internet wasn’t working for the conference room until a few minutes ago, this saved us enormous amounts of time.
If you’ve got a question for one of the WordCamp speakers, put it in the comments here:
We’ve brought a bit of the Downtown Eastside improv style with us, as you can see. Also, April used Scotch tape to connect the HTC Touch to the tripod; Lorelle complimented us on “keeping it real.”
We will be adding pictures and more video as the day goes on, so keep checking this post for updates. See you in about an hour?
Here is Rebecca’s post about our workshops today.
Right now, Lorelle is doing her presentation on power tools for WordPress. Good stuff! I wish some of this stuff worked in Drupal, too!
Lorelle’s presentation has finished, and we’re setting up for Dale’s preso next, so the livestream is interrupted because, well, nothing is going on live right now.
Oops, here we go again. Check the above link for more livestreaming.
We got a little livestream vid of Dave Olson over lunch, just as he requested. Follow the discussion live on Twitter: FearlessCity on Twitter.
Now Tris Hussey is teaching us how to build a WordPress blog in a day or less.
Now on our third user account at Livecast, we’re livestreaming a presentaton from 6s Marketing on SEO, talking about plugins and optimization.
Our own April won the WordPress tattoo contest for Most Creative Placement of a Free WordPress Tattoo. Egged on by Lorelle, who ruled out only pastie-placement, April left the competition in the dust with the triad of back of the neck, cleavage, and boobies. Yes, boobies. If there’d been three prizes, I think she would have won all three.
This is, without question, the roughest striptease action you’ll see all day, and that’s even IF you have those Carmen Electra workout videos.
From that cavalcade of Schadenfreude, the Failblog
raincoaster 