where is that dynamo coming from? ?

This is mesmerizing:

Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.

character sets are hard

I get an RSS feed of the craigslist personals, two categories. This is a fine use of technology to help me find future stalking victims.

A lot of the posts on craigslist personals are from prostitutes or something close to it, and those posts get yanked. And there are also the usual Internet weirdos who will use anything as a message board, including one guy who keeps posting about how he doesn’t like fat girls, and people who get trolled by him and post things back at him. And all of these posts come out as individual personal ads too, and then get yanked.

About a week ago, I started seeing dollar amounts in a lot of postings. They’d say things like “Viet girl in irvine looking for LTR – $28”. I wondered what the hell? Were they all prostitutes? And if so, why so cheap? Had Mr. Troll managed to break in somehow and insert prices on all the women to make some more trouble?

I finally clicked through on one today and “Work too much? No time to find a nice lady? (OC) $24” turned out to be “Work too much? No time to find a nice lady? (OC) – 24”. For some reason the feed is prepending a dollar sign to all the ages of the personals posters.

So, yeah, that’s the story of how bad character sets in RSS feeds ruined my dream of cheap sex in Orange County.