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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 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 •





    Re: Futurama Point. I thought about this one, and decided to give it a thumbs up - with a disclaimer. While it's not the sort of site I'd personally spend a lot of time browsing, for what it tries to be, it's almost perfect. I think. If you're into that sort of thing. If the owner cleaned up a few dead links, it would be perfect in its own, probably hygiene challenged kind of way.

    This is a fan site for a cartoon series by Matt Groening (Simpsons, Life in Hell) about a clueless pizza delivery boy ("Fry") from the 20th century who is accidentally frozen, awakening a thousand years later in a world where ... and that's about where I'd leave you, with only a little more comment, because I wouldn't want to ruin the pleasantly odd surprise. Losing that would take one right out of the show, which would sort of have us viewing this odd and unknowable universe Fry finds himself in from his point of view, if we didn't almost all seem to have a minimum of fifty IQ points on the guy, even when drunk. A little bit of an acquired taste, it's certainly not the average cartoon. How many shows do you know of that have jokes about wave function collapses? (looking forward to that episode). One quickly sees why Fry is a little lost in this future he has stumbled into.

    This may be a reason to hold off a little on visiting the site if one was planning to view the show, especially the "graphic guide", where there are a lot of plot spoilers (entire plot descriptions, in fact) - but very nicely layed out and written in a way that captures the feel of the show - which is one reason I gave a thumbs up: this was nicely done work.



    The site has an unusually extensive collection of fan art, maybe taking the fandom a bit further than I would, but it seems to have been done with love, so I guess if somebody enjoyed collecting comic books, maybe he would enjoy this? If you look at some of the ascii pieces, like this picture of Gunther (a character from one of the episodes), there is a kind of modern folk art thing happening, which became a second reason why, however grudgingly, I had to give this site a thumbs up - not my favorite subject matter, but done with love and skill, and I couldn't pretend that I didn't respect that. Having written this, I wonder if I'll ever have a date, again?