chrisash.com - tumblr version

Found my Halloween costume. *wig sold separately.

Fri, 31 May 2013 12:03:00 -0500

Found my Halloween costume. *wig sold separately.

taekoyasuhiro: friend ?????!? fr iend!! !!! im coming friend im here i love...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:37:58 -0500

friend ?????!?

fr iend!! !!!

im coming friend

im here i love u

“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” - Matt Groening

oryx2046: UWHealth Medflight snapped a photo of Madison from...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 22:09:40 -0600

oryx2046:

UWHealth Medflight snapped a photo of Madison from the air after the blizzard. (via their FB page)

I’m to the left of the Capitol on the narrow strip between the two lakes.

Violence

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:59:00 -0500

From my letter to my best Australian friend:

Thinking a lot about the horrific massacre in the Colorado movie theater last night. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling with it. I know these things happen in modern-day America. I’m thankful it wasn’t worse (bad though it is.) I look for silver linings, and I think these things do generate more discussion. Although we’ve had a few decades of this violence and nothing seems to change. I don’t think it’s merely that we have easy access to guns. One of your countrymen (@indefensible) said on Twitter:

“American society makes sense when you realize they are all fucking terrified of each other.”

I think that’s probably true of most people, actually. It’s rare to find people who aren’t afraid of being alive in society. Sure, there’s a lot of legitimate things to worry about… when you’re actually confronted with them. Most of the time, we don’t see those things at all—and we still suffer the anxiety of them.

The other part is the culture of violence in this country. I suppose it’s understandable in the context of our history. Not acceptable, but understandable. I just don’t know how a culture moves away from it. The willingness of people wanting blood for vengeance is sickening. Today I heard people say, “I’m not really for the death penalty, but this guy who shot up the people in the movie theater deserves to die.” I don’t need to get into all the reasons why I don’t support the death penalty. And I can empathize with the pain people feel that moves them want punishment for the guilty. I just don’t know what good it does. Who are we to judge whether one is deserving of life or death? Do we have any greater moral authority than the extremely disturbed individual who tried to execute dozens of people last night? I know I don’t have that authority. Nor do I feel any great need to perpetuate a violent act as punishment for another violent act. This is perhaps the route by which violence becomes circular. A cycle of violence becomes a culture of violence.

I’m not playing that game.

Photo

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:57:26 -0500

Photo

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:23:15 -0500

"Next up I’m going to mess around with clothing a bit. There are a few obstacles to getting..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:29:36 -0500

“Next up I’m going to mess around with clothing a bit. There are a few obstacles to getting them to pick up clothes, and I’ve fixed the easy one. I stopped people with injuries from obsessing forever over unusable objects, but I want to make that better so that they don’t think about them at all after one initial check. Getting it all to work together with uniforms, current inventory, injuries, available items, modded bodies and layering restrictions is always tricky, but that’s the project. I’m also going to handle owned items that just sit out on the floor forever and deal with damaged clothing.”

- Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress

Study buddy. Cute, right? Except for the heinous cat farts!...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:25:03 -0600

Study buddy. Cute, right? Except for the heinous cat farts! (Taken with instagram)

Hoo Polloi ripping it up with @eldonk and Hue (Taken with...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:20:55 -0600

Hoo Polloi ripping it up with @eldonk and Hue (Taken with Instagram at The Rigby)

Cappuccino with love. (Taken with Instagram at 4 & 20)

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:27:34 -0600

Cappuccino with love. (Taken with Instagram at 4 & 20)

I like orange pens from JetPens. (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:31:05 -0600

I like orange pens from JetPens. (Taken with instagram)

"To keep the possibility alive of making further cuts to state health programs, the Walker..."

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:55:49 -0600

“To keep the possibility alive of making further cuts to state health programs, the Walker administration quietly certified to the federal government on Dec. 29 that the state had a deficit. Federal law allows the state to drop tens of thousands of adults to save money on health care costs if the state can show it has a deficit. Walker has said he wants to cut health care spending in other ways, but hasn’t ruled out dropping those 53,000 adults if the other methods aren’t approved by the federal government”

- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporting that after months of the Walker administration claiming to have balanced the budget, they are now claiming a deficit. (via quickhits)

To which I add: Wisconsin can’t get rid of this clown fast enough. - chrisash

My new second-favorite New Glarus brew! (Taken with Instagram at...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:02:36 -0500

My new second-favorite New Glarus brew! (Taken with Instagram at Courtyard Apartments)

Social Media Wariness

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:05:08 -0500

I like social media. I’ve made good friendships with people I would otherwise never meet. I’ve strengthened relationships with people I never get to see. (And yes, I’ve destroyed at least one perfectly beautiful friendship.) Yet with the advent of Google+, I’m feel like stepping back. I’m not eschewing social connections; I like the connections. I’m bothered by the wholesale commoditization of our lives and interests that takes place behind the scenes.

At some level we’re all aware that our online lives are tracked, analyzed, evaluated, pigeon-holed, and above all: marketed-to. In many cases, we give up a lot of the rights to our own moments (think, photographs) simply by clicking I Agree on some byzantine Terms of Service; terms which might be best summarized as “good luck suing us.”

Even more than those real concerns—tenuous that they may be at the moment—I’m not really interested in giving Facebook a way to monetize my life simply because I value the social connections it facilitates. We have all seen then the ads. Pick any company’s advertising and it’s likely to say “LIKE us on Facebook!” I’m sure Facebook loves the free advertising. It strikes me as odd that so many companies are willing to make Facebook the cornerstone of their marketing and customer outreach efforts. It feels like a foolish dilution of a brand to say “Go to facebook.com/companyx” instead of saying “visit us at companyx.com”. (.com namespace concerns notwithstanding.)

Google is much the same problem. I’ve long been creeped-out by the “relevant” advertising in my “free” gmail account. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ready to abandon gmail. There was a time when we paid for email—I still do, in the form of custom domains—and while we gave up the burden of cost in exchange for our marketing information, I wonder if that wasn’t a fool’s bargain. Interestingly, twitter feels like the least egregious offender in social media so far. I think that’s only because they don’t know how to break it in a way that will make revenue without driving off the userbase. My instincts say it might be only a matter of time until that changes.

The bottom line is, I want to disintermediate huge corporations from those relationships that I choose to maintain. Which is to say, I don’t want some company to make a buck off me simply because I want to say connected with someone. I realize that it’s naive to want something like that. Think about it. The only way I can communicate with you for free is to talk to you in person. Given the relative costs and the might of our technological progress, that’s pretty sad. The flipside is that the cost has never been lower to communicate around the world in an instant.

Based on what I’ve said here, I feel like I’m close to making a decision about how I communicate. If you want to reach me, my preferences are, in order:

In Person
Text/Twitter (608-729-4492 or @chrisash)
Email (@chrisash.com)
Voice (608-729-4492) or HeyTell works great.
Everything else.

Where does Facebook and Google+ fit in there? Frankly, I’m not sure they do.

Posted via email from Chris Ash | Comment »

Every site I use needs to implement this

Wed, 25 May 2011 13:34:41 -0500

Kudos to mlkshk for implementing a feature I’ve always wished to have: an indicator of where I started reading last.

This would make Facebook much more tolerable.

Posted via email from Chris Ash | Comment »

Yay, spring! (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 20 May 2011 11:25:53 -0500

Yay, spring! (Taken with instagram)

Reading list for May 12, 2011

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:07:30 -0500

Here are some interesting and thought-provoking stories for today. They’re presented in ascending order of length and importance. Funny how that works.

SCIENCE // They claim there ought to be things in our universe that pre-date the Big Bang.

POLITICS // Paul Krugman, on what passes for adult conversation in Washington, D.C. It makes me wonder what it would take to elect people who would take their responsibilities seriously.

MOVIES // An interesting look at making the movie “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter”. The book was quite fun.

SPORTS (and also politics) // Why an NFL-less season would be good for America

FRIENDSHIP // “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” A long and important treatise on the modern state of Friendship in the age of Facebook. Give yourself some time to read and digest it. I would love to discuss this with people, because while I agree with much of it, there several ideas I find disagreeable.

Finding time to read is a challenge. Even when I make it a priority I find it difficult to carve out enough time. If you feel the same way, I can’t overemphasize the usefulness of Instapaper, for reading web-based materials either online or on mobile devices.

Posted via email from chrisash’s posterous | Comment »

lefan-o-rama: panoramic view of protests - madison, wi -...

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:52:33 -0600

lefan-o-rama:

panoramic view of protests - madison, wi - february 16, 2011

via @nbc15_madison

(click to enlarge - great photo)

Warning Signs

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:17:52 -0600

A very sure warning sign that you are running with strange company on Amazon:

Hmm… but that IS a pretty good price on WWII Soviet Gas Masks…

Posted via email from chrisash’s posterous | Comment »

Private Party

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:02:58 -0600

El Donk is rarely hired to play private parties, weddings, or bar mitzvahs. Tonight is a rare exception.

Posted via email from chrisash’s posterous | Comment »