One nice thing is that there is apparently a hotel that’s basically on the festival grounds. My room had a window that looked out towards the concert area, and I could actually hear the show from my room. How great is that?

The first night, 10/30/09, is actually in a big gymnasium-type room, not out on the Indio polo grounds like you’d expect. There are a bunch of folding chairs set up in the gym, and unfortunately it’s not very exciting-looking. Chris Kuroda was probably still setting up lights for the Halloween night, because the lights for the Friday night show in the gym were non-existent.

I mean, there were lights, but it was just basic white lights shining down on the stage. That’s it.

Friday night was just a weird show overall. The first set started out with Trey solo, which seemed like an unusually low-energy kick off to the first Phish festival since Coventry—especially combined with the lack of interesting lights—but there you go. I don’t remember what he played, but there were a few songs. Nothing really memorable.

Then Fishman and Page come out. Ok, now we’re talking, we’re really starting. No Mike, though. And Trey decides to hand off his guitar to some random guy from the audience, and he goes backstage again. They bring up another random guy from the audience to sit in on a second drumkit, and bring up a tall blonde woman from the audience to play bass.

The audience members that are up on stage weren’t expecting this, and don’t really know what to play. The guest drummer plays a little on his own, but it’s nothing anyone else can join in on, and it’s not really very good. Festival 8 is shaping up to be disappointing so far.

After a little while, Fishman decides to take control and starts playing Scents and Subtle Sounds. Everyone who’s up on stage slowly manages to join in, even though they don’t really know what they’re doing. The rest probably wasn’t anything interesting, because my dream just skipped over the rest of that night, and on to the 10/31/09 show.

I was in my hotel room when they started playing the Halloween album. Oops, I didn’t realize they were going to start so early; the sun is still out, it’s the middle of the afternoon. I can hear it from my hotel room, and it’s… (drum roll…) The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Yeah, that’s surprising to me also. But my dream says it’s true, so it must be true.

I head out to go in to the actual show grounds, because here I am in my hotel room, only kind of hearing the Halloween album that Phish is playing. I get to the security gate, and realize that the actual concert grounds are really tiny compared to the size of the grounds that they have available at Indio, and the size that’s used for Coachella. They could fit maybe 1,000 people up there, and that’s about it.

Luckily, there are only about 50 people inside. I guess everyone else is showing up later. Odd, since the Halloween album is already underway, but that’s the way it goes. Seeing how few people are there and how close I can get to the stage, I decide to make a quick trip back to my hotel room for my camera.

Unfortunately, things start going downhill here. I had basically checked into my room, heard the album, and headed out. I was in such a rush to head out that I forgot all about my hotel room key card, which is probably still sitting on the desk. I don’t want to take too much time going back to the front desk to handle it, since that was a bit further away, meaning I’d miss a big chunk of the show. I figure I can just head back out without my camera, or figure out some other way in.

I hear two cleaning women talking around the corner, and figure that’s worth a shot. The weirdest part of the dream is that they weren’t speaking Spanish, they were speaking English. I find them and explain how I left my key card in my room and just need to get back in, but even though there’s no language barrier, they’re having a hard time understanding.

I think the whole festival ended right around there, because I don’t remember anything else. But you have my dream predictions: Scents and Subtle Sounds on Friday, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway on Saturday.

I’ll see you all out there, and we’ll see how smart I am! I predict that I’m very smart.

If you search around on Ashley Roberta for a little while, you discover a few things. The first is that she was extremely pretty. Another is her Twitter page, which she used a few times at the beginning of the year and hasn’t updated since April.

But her last Twitter update, from April 26th, is this:

blame it on the a-a-a alcohol. i hate to admit it, but sometimes, i just have to.

Wow. If it turns out that alcohol was a factor in this car crash, and especially if Ashley was driving the car at the time, you can bet people will be all over that Twitter post.

And for those of us who don’t know anything about Ashley, the celebrities that she’s following on Twitter can give you an idea of who she was. She was following Britney Spears, John McCain, and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em (yes, his full name is Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em — his music is even worse than you’d expect from someone with a name like that.)

I offer no judgments of Ms. Roberta based on who she followed on Twitter. I’m just leaving that list there.

Best of wishes to Charlie Davies, his family, and the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team. The reports so far are that his injuries aren’t life-threatening, but it sounds very likely that this accident may end his soccer career.

Let’s start with the past, just because it came first. How about 14 years ago, when Amadeus was released in a special edition laserdisc release. It gave you a commentary track by the director, Milos Forman, a soundtrack on CD, and a one hour documentary about Mozart and the production of the movie. You also got the movie in the original aspect ratio, and a 5.1 AC-3 soundtrack (what you’d call Dolby Digital these days.) Not bad. The list price was $160, though it could be found for $140 if you checked the right stores. In terms of extras, you have about four hours worth: 3 hours of commentary, and the one hour documentary.

For those of you who are having heart attacks right now, that price isn’t ridiculous for laserdiscs with extras. Bare bones movie-only laserdiscs were typically around $40, and adding extras meant they could label it as a “special edition” and charge $100 and up for it. Those of us who skipped laserdisc and started with DVD tend to ignore the term “special edition” since it’s pretty meaningless; we’d just look at the list of extras and come up with an assessment of how special the release is in terms of extras. Laserdisc people have a whole different idea of what a “special edition” is, based on the huge impact it had on their wallet.

Now let’s fast forward to 2009. I recently bought Casino Royale on Blu-ray. First off, of course, the HD image quality from Blu-ray is going to blow away laserdisc. Bare bones analog movie-only Hi-Vision MUSE laserdiscs (which were high def, but didn’t come close to 1080p) were $200 back in those days. This is much higher quality video (MPEG-4 AVC 1080p at 24 mbps.) The audio is provided in lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1, a definite step up from the 384 kbps 5.1 track that laserdisc supported.

Then we have the extras. There are two discs in this set. The first has two commentary tracks, and a trivia game which doesn’t really count as an extra to me — does anyone mess with these silly games? Then there’s disc two, which has five hours of making-of material. Let me repeat that. Five hours of making of material, split over an endless number of featurettes covering every single aspect of the making of the movie. I’m going to ignore the downloadable BD-Live content, because I’ve never seen any BD-Live content or feature that was remotely appealing to me.

The two commentaries add up to five hours of content themselves, which gives you a total of ten hours of extras. If you start with the price of the Amadeus laserdisc, and figure that with twice the amount of extras, and video quality that can easily said to be at least twice as good, you should be able to charge around $300 for the Casino Royale Blu-ray and be in line with 1995 laserdisc pricing.

However, I paid $12.49 for the Casino Royale Blu-ray. That means it has roughly 25 times the value of the Amadeus laserdisc. That’s not a bad increase in your home video value over 14 years.

I thought it would be interesting to look at IMDB’s voting statistics for the new Transformers, just to see how badly skewed the votes were towards teenage boys. You know, because a movie filled with explosions and Megan Fox and little else sure has its target demographic painted on Megan Fox’s breasts for everyone to see, right? Well, it turns out I was completely wrong about that.

Teenagers liked the movie the best, that’s true. Kids under 18 gave it an average of 7.4, and the ratings fall off as age goes up, down to 5.5 for people 45 and over.

But I was absolutely wrong about boys liking it better. Teenage girls liked the movie the best, giving it an average score of 7.9. There were many more teenage boys who rated the movie than teenage girls (2,094 versus 517) but a pretty sizable difference in rating.

And to keep up the surprises, women liked the movie better than men throughout every age group. In the 18-29 group it had a 0.2 improvement among women; between 30 and 44 it was up 0.3; and for 45 and over it was up by 0.4. Overall, across all ages, men gave it a 6.4 average, and women gave it a 6.7. Almost ten times as many men voted on it than women, though.

Looking back at the first movie’s ratings, it has the exact same bias. Across all age groups, women liked the movie more than men. Very weird, I absolutely wouldn’t have predicted that.

That made me check out some other recent releases to see how they matched up between the genders, to see if my stereotyped expectations were met or not.

Bruno: men liked it better, 0.3 difference

Public Enemies: women liked it better, 0.1 difference

The Hangover: women liked it better, 0.2 difference. Didn’t see that coming either. In the age breakdown, women under 45 liked it better than men; over 45, men liked it better than women.

I Love You, Beth Cooper: women liked it better, 0.6 difference. Girls under 18 loved it, giving it a 7.4. Naturally, everyone else hated it.

Up: women liked it better, 0.3 difference. Interestingly, people 45 and over liked it the least, giving it an 8.2 average (8.8 overall). Women over 45 only gave it a 7.3. They were the demographic group who liked it the least.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3: women liked it better, 0.1 difference

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: women liked it better, 0.6 difference. Wow.

Fast & Furious: women liked it better, 0.7 difference. Wha???

Paul Blart: Mall Cop: women liked it better, 0.5 difference

Angels & Demons: women liked it better, 0.5 difference

Knowing: tied

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience: women liked it better (shocked!), 2.5 difference. That’s a 1.1 average from men, and a 3.5 average from women. Even teenage girls only gave it a 5.1. The weirdest thing is that while men 18-29 gave it the lowest average score possible, 1.0, there were 6,000 men in that age group who voted on it. I have a hard time believing 6,000 young men saw the movie, let alone voted for it on IMDB.

I Love You, Man: women liked it better, 0.2 difference

He’s Just Not That Into You: women liked it better, 0.9 difference

Coraline: women liked it better, 0.1 difference

Watchmen: men liked it better, 0.3 difference

Well, I think the lesson to take away from this might not be that Transformers defies gender expectations, but rather that women rate movies higher than men. Bruno and Watchmen were the only recent releases I checked where men rated them higher. I could come up with theories about that — men are less offended by violence (Watchmen) and offensive humor (Bruno)? — but those would just be random, uneducated guesses.

Ok. The end.

Why bother taking away functionality and content from Facebook? If you want to change the homepage layout, that’s one thing. You can expect lots of complaints from people who are used to the old layout and resistant to change (which is going to be most people.) But why would you take away the ability to see various bits of information?

There’s no longer the “Live Feed” option that was automatically updating and let you see everything that was happening. I used to use that all the time. Now you have the “News Feed” which only shows you a tiny bit of what your friends are up to, without the option of seeing everything else. Sure, you can click every filter on the left-hand side to get some more of it, but Facebook is still only showing you a random selection of items each time (e.g., the News Feed is a random collection of status updates, not all of the recent ones.)

And then there’s some information that just isn’t available anywhere, like the Friend X is now friends with Person Y messages. I’ve lost count of how many old friends I’ve reconnected with on Facebook because of seeing messages like those. No more.

And birthday notifications? One of my friend’s birthdays was coming up this weekend, which I knew because I saw it listed on the old Facebook home page this afternoon. Now, with the new Facebook, it’s no longer mentioned.

And then all of the other random notifications from the live feed. So-and-so posted photos, or added some application, or joined a group. I can click through the filters and get some of that (photos and any group that’s made its way to the filter list) but other items (someone joining a group) is just off-limits now.

This is really mind-boggling. Facebook has been growing by ridiculous numbers because of all of the interesting things you can see about your friends, and all of the old friends that you can reconnect with. Why would they think it’s a good idea to limit how much information you can see, and limit the number of old friends you might notice on there? I don’t understand it at all.

And I hate it. It’s unbelievably stupid. I can’t find anyone who likes it. What in the world were they thinking?

All I can do is hope that they listen to the outrage — which they have lots of experience doing — and give us some of our old features back. They’ve gone back on things they’ve done numerous times in the past (Beacon and the privacy policy come to mind) so one more shouldn’t be a big deal. Though you have to wonder why they keep on making boneheaded mistakes like this. Is Facebook’s success just because of luck and being in the right place at the right time, rather than any good decisions by Mark Zuckerberg?

When Facebook first opened up to the public and I joined, I spread the word. I told people it was like Myspace, but done right. But then they pull crap like this, and who knows. If Google can get in the game with less stupidity and a more Open Networking-inspired architecture, I’d be all over that. The tricky part, of course, would be getting a critical mass of users. That’s Facebook’s biggest asset right now, the huge number of people on there. If they keep pissing everyone off with stupid changes like this one, though, that may be a thing of the past.

But then you read the article, and it just sounds like a bunch of kids who’ve never had a real corporate or government job suddenly found themselves in a standard corporate/government IT environment. Much less entertaining that it sounded at first glance.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

Yes, in a real 9-5 job you’re not going to be able to read your Gmail, log in to Facebook, or use instant messaging. These are obvious IT security restrictions that any reasonably sized organization would have in place. That the Obama team was expecting a wide open Internet where they could do anything they wanted just sounds naive and unrealistic.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Because everyone should have an Xbox at work.

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software.

Once again, welcome to a real job. What kind of real office job gives people Macintoshes? And what’s this six-year-old version of Microsoft software? My first was was Windows XP, which would be a good thing — who wants the White House running Vista? Nasty. But XP is a little over seven years old, so that doesn’t sound right.

Maybe it’s Microsoft Office 2003? That sounds reasonable, that’s what I have installed on my work computer, and so far haven’t had any need for anything newer. The only advantage to Office 2007, as far as I can tell, is getting rid of the 65,000 row restriction in Excel. So far I’ve only come close to hitting that at home, I’ve never come close in a work spreadsheet.

Complaining about old operating systems or software in this case seems pointless. These might be kids who just don’t understand that the newest and most expensive software isn’t what you want to be running; you want older, patched, stable software that meets all of your needs. Is there really anything that this “six-year-old Microsoft software” can’t do? I’d be shocked if there was.

UPDATE from the comments:

Wow, the comments on the Washington Post article are just crazy.

What else would we expect after 8 years of the most backwards, technophobic, flat-earth idiots on the planet running the White House?

Now, sure, the Bush/Cheney administration was a mess of backwards, technophobic, flat earth idiots. No complaints. But to think that for some reason they should have wasted tons of taxpayer money on Macintoshes instead of Windows XP, well, that’s just as retarded as Bush was.

And then on the other side you have the right wingers who think that the Washington Post writer complaining is a sign that the Obama White House staffers are all useless 19-year-olds who have probably never even served in the military like a good American:

Idiots! These people want to stroll into the whitehouse with their camera phones and Blackberrys, so they can click, click, click and IM everything over WIRELESS airwaves.

They all want to setup their own Facebook pages. They should be able to e-mail Akmad Osama if they want to, right?

Not a clue about national security. Bunch of sniveling idiots.

were doomed

And then just when you’re laughing at those people for their posts, the Obama supporters just keep coming in and making themselves look like idiots:

What a laugh to see all these old conservative farts on here shaking their canes at the notion of “the Internets.” They haven’t a clue that the Obama campaign wiped the floor with them because of their ignorance. Or, far more importantly, how crucial technology is in the world.

You would think that someone who understood how crucial technology is would understand the importance of a reasonable IT security policy, and how that doesn’t include brand new untested software on everyone’s machine and access to whatever website and protocols they want to access on the White House network.

Some of the commenters wants to stick Macs in the White House while they’re at it. Yeah, not a very good idea either. Why waste taxpayer dollars on boosting Apple’s marketing budget just because people who are used to Macs want to complain about having to use Windows?

Both sides of the discussion in the WaPo comments section piss me off. I hate that I need to stick up for the Bush White House and say there’s nothing in the article indicating they were in the technological dark ages — after all, that was the most corrupt and inept White House in recent history. And I hate feeling like I have to correct all the liberals posting about how backwards this technology is, when it sounds like EVERY FREAKING GOV/CORP IT DEPARTMENT IN THE COUNTRY! Jesus Puppy Juggling Christ people, not everything has to be forced into your narrow black and white/red and blue world view.

And just to end this on the more comfortable note — making fun of the Republicans — one more from the WaPo comments (and trust me, there are far too many to choose from):

…amazement that there are not expresso machines in the staff room at what used to be a serious place of business rather than a video arcade. I worry less about technology for the staffies, and more about whether of not the RED phone still operated, and if the President has the “football” nearby and can enter the “beetledy-beeps” to keep America safe.

I bet Bush is thrilled to escape the fools and do-nothings that know how to manage the world, the nation, the Congress, the social security and banking industry, and the blackberry crop of iphone gameboys better than a Yale graduate with a security briefing from the intel of the world every morning.

I guess now we know who was in that 15% who still thought Bush was doing a good job. That guy.

Let’s stop to think about some of the worst movies of 2008 before we look at Joe’s list. 2008 gave us the second lowest-rated movie of all time on IMDB, Disaster Movie. It has a 1.4 out of 10 on IMDB. Here’s a quote from a review by Peter Sobczynski at eFilmCritic:

…I was witnessing not just one of the worst movies ever made but one of the worst things ever created by human hands—the kind of sexist, racist, homophobic and humor-free craptacular that is so ugly, unpleasant and devoid of laughs that the notion of releasing a film with such a title on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is actually one of the least offensive things about it.

2008 also gave us Paris Hilton in The Hottie and the Nottie. I know everyone was surprised when Paris Hilton was supposed to be the “hottie,” but nobody was surprised when the movie sucked. It has a 1.7 out of 10 on IMDB, and is #17 on their worst movies of all time list (for comparison, Glitter is #40, Manos: Hands of Fate is #27, and From Justin to Kelly is #24, so The Hottie and the Nottie is worse than all of those.) A few choice words from James Berardinelli:

Every February it seems there’s something like The Hottie & the Nottie – a cinematic excursion so horrific that it’s an insult to bad movies to call it a bad movie.

[...]

It’s hard to imagine that professionals with a clue about what they are doing could arrive at such an abortion of a motion picture.

[...]

The Hottie & the Nottie contains several comedic sequences that are about as funny as the anal rape scene in The War Zone.

Richard Roeper says, “It is excruciatingly, painfully, horribly, terribly awful.” So, in conclusion, a bad movie.

2008 had something that I missed completely called Witless Protection, starring Larry The Cable Guy, who’s apparently had several movie by now. Brian Orndof writes:

“Witless Protection” is disgusting, racist, clueless, sexist, charmless, unfunny, infantile, mean-spirited, amateurish, and insulting…. I’m all for silly comedies, but these Larry The Cable Guy movies aren’t just harmless giggles anymore. These are seriously diseased, bottom-feeding motion pictures constructed to reduce intelligence and further this bizarre obsession certain communities of Americans have to proudly display their unwashed idiocy, as though it was a golden badge of honor.

2008 also gave us Beverly Hills Chihuahua (“anyone who goes to a talking-dog movie without being prepared to step in poop deserves to ruin his shoes”) and Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave. And let’s not forget that Uwe Boll’s Postal, which was released in 2007, didn’t make it to American movie screens until 2008, so it should be in the running.

Anyway, that was a long bit of intro, huh? Back to WTOP’s Joe Barber, and what he thought were the three worst movies of 2008:

#3: Cloverfield. “If this didn’t give you motion sickness, the quality of the film should have given you motion sickness.” I know some people didn’t like this, even though I am a fan of it, but the third worst film of the year? Worse than all those movies I listed above? A well-above-average 7.5 on IMDB, and 77% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and you’re picking it as one of the worst of the year? Wow.

#2: Step Brothers. I haven’t seen this, so all I can go on is the critics and the public. IMDB has it at 6.8, which is good. Rotten Tomatoes says 55% of the reviews are positive. Obviously not a ringing endorsement, but with that many positive reviews it’s hard to make the case that it’s worse than The Hottie and the Nottie.

#1: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. “Easily the most forgettable film of this year.” Wow. Just, wow. I thought this was probably the funniest film of 2008. I know I’m not the only one who thought it was excellent, since it has an outstanding 85% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. He can’t really think it’s the most forgettable film of the year, what with the Dracula puppet musicals and all the hilarity, right? Obviously he’s lying to make a forced reference to the films title, much like his claim that Cloverfield is so crappy that it would give you motion sickness even if it didn’t have so much handheld camerawork. But it’s just mind-boggling that Joe Barber really believes that Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the worst film of the year.

And I was so blown away by his horrible taste in movies, I just had to type all this stuff up. Thanks a lot, Joe Barber, you made me wear out my fingertips in useless typing. At least now I’ll know to ignore any movie recommendations he ever makes, ever again.

I would think all of us who play mafia games on there are used to the CPU usage exceeded messages that are pretty common — I can’t even begin to imagine how badly mafiascum’s huge phpBB database is killing what appears to be a shared hosting account; in fact, I’m surprised he’s even allowed to run such a huge forum on shared web hosting. I would have expected that the site would be well beyond the level where you’d need at least a VPS, if not a dedicated server just for the forum.

But now, this is a new message. The domain is disabled. This message has also been up for quite a while, much longer than the typical CPU usage exceeded messages. Any theories? DHS and/or the FBI had enough about all the talk of killings and lynchings and serial killers? The real mafia was tired of the competition? The world may never know…

Or maybe it’ll be back up in a few minutes and nobody will ever remember the great outage of January 2009. If I was a gambling man, I’d bet that he’s being forced to move to a VPS or dedicated box, and it might be down for another 24-48 hours until that gets set up. You’d think somebody, somewhere would know, but various searches aren’t turning up anything related.

UPDATE (thanks Phate): mith posted on The Grey Labyrinth with an update, that shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone…

Bad news: bluehost has suspended us again because we’re hitting the server too hard.

The not so bad news: It is likely just a result of them being crap and us needing to move to a better host, and having just sent my thesis to my supervisors last night for a final review before I submit, I will have some free time this week to move us. Hopefully, we’ll be back up and running before too long.

I really think Mafia Scum is too big of a forum to be on shared hosting, but I wish him luck. Oh, and vote mith. So there.

Update 2:

Ok, step 1 done, I have purchased an account on KnownHost’s VPS XL plan. Waiting for them to set things up (shouldn’t be long), and then I’ll work on getting something up there for people to post on.

Still working on getting bluehost to reactivate the account so that people can see the dontpanic page.

Oh good, not shared hosting. I hope they didn’t have a VPS before that Bluehost kept giving them crap about, although now that I think about it, the CPU usage exceeded message that was so common does sound more VPSish than shared.

Update 3: Here’s an alternate link to the new site while DNS changes are propagating.

However, you can also see what everyone else has done, which seems to be a huge mess in the making. The blog post announcing it came at 4:36 PM yesterday, presumably PST. That means it’s been in production for just under 12 hours. In that time, there’s already a ton of public comments on some sites.

My first search was for [seo], assuming that those people would have been the first to jump on the SearchWiki bandwagon and bump up their sites while getting rid of their competitor’s — in the hope that Google may eventually try to rely on the votes of the masses to influence the public search engine placement results. Sure enough, every SEO site on the first page already had votes to push up or eliminate. And, sure enough, one annoyed SEO guy commenting on Google’s SEO page:

While the information can be useful for some people, I don’t see Google as a reference in SEO so why this result for such a specific term? Seems like an “inside push” to me.

Right. Conspiracy theories!

A few more searches and you find that Something Awful already has 20 comments on it, featuring such gems as “golden manbabies,” “ARSE,” and GAY BEARS repeated 40 times. And something that looks like an obvious troll…

Horrible site. The $80/month forum fees are outrageous, especially considering that they openly steal most of the humor from 4chan.

Youtube has 19 comments, again with many gems:

“What is it ?”

“harhar”

“The official YouTube website! (Is this the first comment?) InteractiveBUD!”

You also get a few people dumping their URLs in the comments, hoping for some stray copy and paste traffic. I guess at least Google isn’t making them active links.

But 20 comments in 12 hours? At that pace you’ll have over 200 comments in a week. After SearchWiki is up for a year, you’ll have 10,000 comments. There’s no way this can be remotely useful. Sure, the comments may taper off after the newness wears off. Or, it may ramp up, as more and more people realize that you can now leave public comments on Google for any website you want.

And since the average level of intelligence of the people commenting seems to be hovering just slightly above YouTube level, it looks like Google might be working on compiling the largest collection of incomprehensible, spammy comments in the history of mankind. Yay!

Does anyone think this is actually a decent idea?

So I did the research and will try to explain it all without spamming the crap out of you.

Wolfram’s rules are a bunch of rules for cellular automata. Hopefully you’re all familiar with Conway’s Game of Life. If not, why are you reading xkcd? The Game of Life is a cellular automaton system with a specific set of rules to describe how each cell reacts based on its neighbors.

Stephen Wolfram (the guy who created Mathematica) established a large set of cellular automata rules, each of which gives you different results based on different neighboring cells. He said that Rule 30 was his favorite (or, at least, so sayeth Wikipedia.)

But, for xkcd’s purposes, rule 34 of the Internet (if it exists, there is porn of it) matched up nicely with the fact that Wolfram had a rule 34 for cellular automata. Now, of course, the challenge falls to the readers: someone must come up with porn involving cellular automata that follow Wolfram’s Rule 34. In other words, rule 35: if there isn’t porn of it, it must be created (see also xkcd’s women in the shower with guitars meme and subsequent website.)

Off with you! To the cellular automaton porn set! Naked cells everywhere! Hide the children!