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josephdunphy

Last seen: 14 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •







    Continuing my review of the DrakaArts site from above ...



    Draka is a bus. Oh, wow, that sounded exciting. OK, fine. Draka is a bus made, train style, with connecting cars, built in the form of a fire breathing dragon. No, now I just sound like I was partaking of the "refreshments" being given out in the maze a little too much ... at least until one sees that this is an accurate description.























    Just a bus? No, once one boarded, one found oneself inside a "chill space", a sort of lounge inside this very, very long bus. Those who rode Draka in earlier years may remember a more enclosed look than the one we currently see, as I seemed to, as this image on the artist's site taken would seem to suggest. We are, to an extent, looking at a new dragon, the old wood and metal structure having been thoroughly damaged by fire as a result of a welding accident on May 14, 2002 as we see in images at the top of this page. Lisa Nigro, the artist running for the project seems to have opted for a less fireprone design for Draka's "facelift", more than understandable under the circumstances, but still a cause for a little regret.






















    Part of the magic of the old Draka was the fact that it created a space of its own, one open to its surroundings, which one could take in in comfort through broad windows cut into its sides, without the interior one found oneself in losing that feeling of being an interior, and losing its own sense of place. As one entered and saw that there was a small bar present, one wasn't surprised. I seem to recall a soft bluish light coming out from inside the bar, gently illuminating the interior at night, which was a nice touch, drawing attention inward to a place where meeting one's fellow passangers was inevitable, making the experience of interacting with these strangers from elsewhere a less isolating experience than it would otherwise have been. I was surprised at how effectively the sound of the pounding of the wheels on the desert hardpan was muffled, thinking that this would be a nice place to hold a fiction reading event.



    [ continued ]