I have to admit that finding out that corneal tattooing is one of the oldest and perhaps even safest forms of tattooing really has gotten me (and a few others) quite interested. A person's eyes say so much about them… being able to alter them as we see fit really would be wonderful in allowing us to define ourselves and our “automatic introductions” even farther.
What would you tattoo on your eyeball?
Well, nothing major seems to have broken while the year advanced. Newsfeed submissions were offline for about half the day, but that's patched now. The encyclopedia is ticking along nicely under public load and I'll probably do some tweaking on that today. However, as you can see below, I've got some other commitments as well.
I'm just doing a new build of the search engine, and then later tonight I'll get to uploading. It's a big update, but not crazy (4,347 images and 342 experiences).
Anyway, when Eudora (the email client I use) finds messages that it thinks it downloaded in the future, it has a little freakout (since it thinks it's a corrupted index) — this happened to me when I tried to delete some spam that had been downloaded while I had my clock set to 2004/01/01 for the bots:
But, because this was a mailbox with nothing but spam in it, I decided to click the wrong button just to see what would happen. I was faced with the following message:
OK, this morning I'm wrapping up the big update and then it should be uploaded this evening unless something goes wrong…
I did want to mention one very important news story:
The US has brought back the draft. Now, that's not entirely true, so let me explain. What the army is doing is using “stop loss” orders to keep their numbers up. Basically what a stop-loss order does is block someone from leaving the military, even if they are up for retirement or their contract is up. To be very clear — these are people who have not signed up to still be in the army and are people who want to go back to civilian life and, other than these orders, should be allowed to do so.
But they're not — they're slaves now.
Click here for the Washington Post article on the issue. It's something you should be very concerned about, and is a very dangerous indicator of things to come… The article claims that as many as 25% of the army are on stop loss right now. That means that at least a quarter of the army wants to leave (and has finished their contracts) but isn't allowed and has been converted into slave labor.
Given that many of these slaves are being ordered to their deaths, having their families torn apart, and having their arms and legs blown off, that's not right at all. I understand that when you join the army you have an obligation to serve your X number of years — but when those are up, you should have the legal right to go back to a civilian life… shouldn't you?
While they had been all but extinct for obvious ethical reasons, as soon as 9-11 gave him the excuse, Bush ordered the military to start using stop-loss orders again… the only exception of course is if you're gay. Why do I think there will be a lot of gay military “conversions”?
There's nothing on it right now — literally just a splash page and a press release — but the new (final I hope) movie domain is up and running. You can expect the stills very, very soon, and a full public-release trailer coming by the end of January.
