Japan’s Weekender publishes that rarest of sports journalism pieces, a critical feature on a pro league. It’s amusing and informative. Sports journalism is the parent of entertainment journalism and both genres are access-based, a pernicious thing.

“Eyeworks” in Blade Runner.

My day began with a call from old compadre John Terrill, back in Bloomington. We talked on the phone for about an hour and it was totally delightful to talk to the guy. I haven’t seen him since late 2001. Sounded like he was doing good.

Dumpstered home theater debut: success!

Here is a post with some “idiot n00b” instructions regarding fixing an abandonware opensore Justin.tv plugin for XBMC on the jailbroken ATV2.

UPDATE: iOS spellfix (hateful tool of Newspeak that it is) “corrected” the word plugin, above, to pluckins. Implying, therefore, that jailbreaking iOS devices opens you as a consumer to scams.

This is incorrect and disrespectful, since as everyone knows, it is the purchase of any iOS device that provides the pluckins, both immediate and incipient.

In my childhood bedroom of a night I could hear the northbound freights rumble and chime by. I was far enough away that the noise wasn’t a subway or elevated hassle but close enough it made the ground shake.

I definitely miss it.

Jean Giraud is dead.

Chadwick: Burn. Sidebar: couldn’t figure out how to get the audio on my iPad. Tut tut.

Gatekept on Mefi!

taz, seriously, I love you. But I guess I will post here instead, if I want to take well intended and reasonable editorial guidance. Or even if I don’t.

The Tohoku quake, tsunami, and the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were fundamentally catalytic events in my relationship to the internet. The threads at Metafilter about the nuclear plant were revelatory to me both in the power of crowd-sourced research online and the inadequacy of contemporary international journalism.

In the end, I came away with what is apparently an unflagging interest in Japanese baseball (an outcome which mystifies me no less than others) and a profoundly negative long term view of the likely outcome of more internet and fewer reporters.

In those threads, well before the first hydrogen explosion at the plants, we identified the potential hazard of a waste-fuel fire based on evaporation of coolant and the total potential fuel load on the four plants. The possibility of an uncontrolled release of radioactivity that in some ways could have exceeded Chernobyl was very real. We also learned that the utility had a track record of releasing inaccurate information in the past. All of this was developed from independent and reputable nuclear industry sources and TEPCO’s own pre-tsunami reporting in combination with the thin and misleading data the utility released during the events.

None of this crowd sourced analysis was picked up, which surprised me, as MetaFilter has a deserved rep as a story idea mine. Of course the threads were several thousand posts deep and I recall they taxed my browser mightily. But still. We were clearly on track to identify the hydrogen explosion problem but the chemicals got there first.

Anyway, after that terrifying month I decided I needed to spend less time on MetaFilter. After that, Google destroyed Reader’s sharing function and then I decided that leaving Facebook and Twitter were good ideas too. Eventually I reactivated Facebook, but I drop in pretty rarely, like once a month.

So Tohoku’s long term effects, for me, include the midlife development of an appreciation for baseball and a much less socially interactive experience of the internet. Which, all in all, is fine. I suppose I should make more of an effort to engage in non-Internet social activity, but DAMN I like not being around people.