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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.


  • Youtube / Draka

    Created Dec 14 2008 •








    Having recently watched a video clip of an old Burning Man favorite I mentioned in an earlier review, which I posted recently, I find that I'm feeling a little ambivalent about it for a few reasons.

    Here's one of them: As I fairly laboriously put together about a page worth of posts about the Draka site, I suspect that few readers will doubt that I like the subject of this video, but I'm not completely fond of the style. One has that whole booming base sound in the background, and an "extreme travel" style of presentation that practically leaves one waiting to see the part where Larry Harry jumps a motorcycle over Center Camp. "YEAH! Whoo! Hey, Larry, do it again, naked and on fire this time, carrying a chain saw!"

    No, it's not like that. Burning Man has its reckless moments, but the more commonly prevailing spirit at the event, at least at the time this video was made, seemed to be one of free spirited, creative, eccentric mellowness, and the filmmaker doesn't seem to capture that or even really try, maybe because "we're wild! WHOOOO!!!" is an easier message to sell to an audience and build up ratings with than that of a collective creative happening, especially when the producer only has one minute and forty seconds of expensive airtime in which to portray an experience that builds up over a week, at a minimum? Which I understand in the context this clip arose in - it's footage from the Discovery Channel and the economics of Cable Television are a given, albeit not as harsh a given as those of Network Television were a generation ago, given how many more channels cable can carry. However, we're not on Cable right now, we're on the Internet, where a producer has all of the time he or she wishes. Why import the weaknesses of an old medium into a new medium?

    What would have been better than a possibly copyright violating reposting on YouTube of network footage would have been an original video made by a participant who took the time to tell the story he felt, instead of feeling the need to race to tell a story that would sell. The talent is definitely present in the Burning Man community to tell it honestly and with a little flair and in the case of YouTube and Metacafe, maybe to be part of the solution instead of what might be seen as a growing problem.



    [ continued ]