misuba's New Writeups

Orkut (thing)

2004-01-30T21:43:46Z

Orkut is, one hopes, the last of the first generation of social networking services, and the first that is good enough to be criticized. It is named for its developer, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works for Google. Every page of Orkut-the-service bears the legend "in association with Google" at its bottom, the vagueness of which statement is also part of the reason Orkut has drawn so much attention.

When you are invited into Orkut (like the original beta phase of Friendster, Orkut is invitation-only), you see relatively little that doesn't look familiar. Your profile, which you are encouraged immediately to fill out, is a bit more modular than Friendster's, broken up into sections for personal interests and business ones, and there are menus with little key icons next to certain fields - allowing you some control over who sees what information about you, an encouraging sign. There is of course the invitation to…

Pornorchestra (thing)

2003-09-20T21:02:00Z

PornOrchestra is a Bay Area-based improv jazz ensemble, comprising a highly various membership and conducted by a different member at each performance. It's the brainchild of one Shannon Mariemont, although that is of course a porn star name, and various volunteers have assumed it for the purpose of running a (fairly chaotic) show. (PornOrchestra favors the name-of-first-pet variant of the porn name game; I first learned the your-own-middle-name version. The last name of street-you-grew-up-on appears to be a constant.)

As stated on the group's home page, PornOrchestra is "[t]he equivalent of a circus band with its collective eye on the trapeze artist: the PornOrchestra teases out the thrill, amplifying the collective gasp at pornographic triumph — and tragedy — using the most eclectic and creative musical minds working in the Bay Area today." The mission is to re-challenge ears that have tuned porn music out, on both sides of the screen: producers don't see the percentage in…

Moosewood Cookbook (thing)

2003-03-04T08:23:24Z

A 100%-vegetarian cookbook, written and copiously illustrated by Mollie Katzen, and first published by Ten Speed Press in 1974. Katzen was a founding member of the Moosewood Collective, which runs the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca. The Moosewood Cookbook was one of the first entirely vegetarian cookbooks to become popular on a wide scale. The book is handwritten, with Katzen's own whimsical, sometimes mock-Victorian line art.

Some important safety tips for using the Moosewood Cookbook - these were passed on to me by a friend who's been a vegetarian for 10 years and apparently learned these things the hard way. Katzen did a sub-optimal job of adapting the Moosewood's recipes from restaurant use to home use, or perhaps just didn't test these recipes with enough non-foodies. As a result, the original version of the book should be treated with the following two considerations:

1. If the book says to use a…

hard sauce (thing)

2002-11-29T23:45:55Z

It was Harriet's first Thanksgiving dinner. (Names have been changed; imagine the following in an Israeli accent.) "The food was not very good, and there was so much of it. I was practically diagonal. It was embarrassing, I spent twelve minutes in the bathroom not even doing anything, just sitting there in pain. And then I came out - and there were four pies! So, you know, I am trying to be a good guest. So I say I'll have just a little of the pecan pie, because it was the one that wasn't from a store. And I get a medium slice of this, and then I'm asked, 'What would you like on that, whipped cream or hard sauce? And I look at the hard sauce, which is this off-white stuff, it looks like Jello, only it doesn't wiggle or anything, it doesn't move. And I asked for just a little of the whipped cream, please. And all of a sudden my plate was a winter wonderland. I said to myself, 'I should have asked for the hard sauce, but at least I know what whipped cream is.'"

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Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (idea)

2002-11-29T08:33:16Z

No, this is not a book about EverQuest.

When Howard Rheingold wrote his previous book, The Virtual Community, the World Wide Web was in its larval stage and didn't make the text until it got into paperback. Between then and now, Rheingold has been one of the first professional web discussion board hosts, editor of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and the founder of a startup. A couple of years ago, he was still traveling around the world every now and then to give talks at conferences, and he made it to Japan for the first time. In Shibuya Crossing, one of Tokyo's busiest and most oddly fashionable intersections, he noticed something that, to him, was odd even for Japan: "That was when I began to notice people on the streets of Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them."

A few months later, he saw something even more interesting in Finland (home of Nokia):

[...] I

…

Hicksville (thing)

2002-11-29T07:13:23Z

Hicksville is the first long comic book by Dylan Horrocks. It might look like a graphic novel and read like a strange dream, but it says "a comic book" right on the cover so that's what I believe. It's published by Drawn and Quarterly. Hicksville is also the name of the tiny town on the New Zealand coast in which much of the book takes place.

Leonard Batts is a reporter for Comics World magazine, and the author of a book on legendary artist Jack Kirby. When he interviews latter-day comics phenom Dick Burger and asks about his early life in Hicksville, he's told to bring up something else, or the interview's over. Nervous and puzzled, but still considering a book on Burger and his creation Captain Tomorrow, Leonard travels to New Zealand, only to find that buses don't quite get you to Hicksville and maps don't quite point the way. He hitches a ride with a dark-haired woman in a convertible who's headed there. She doesn't much like Americans, though. And when Leonard mentions…