He aquí los pensamientos aleatorios de un epistemólogo andante.

I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

피할수 없는 고통이라면 차라리 즐겨라

As of June, 2013, I have assumed a new identity: I am a cancer survivor. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

"A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that." - Justin E. H. Smith

재미없으면 보상해드립니다!

"All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love." - Nietzsche (really!)

Leviticus 19:33-34

Donc, si Dieu existait, il n’y aurait pour lui qu’un seul moyen de servir la liberté humaine, ce serait de cesser d’exister. - Mikhail Bakunin

Solvitur ambulando.

"Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to soliloquize. Where was I?" - the villain Heinz Doofenshmirtz, in the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.

Is seer periculeus voor de onbekende, om aan te doen. - Hendrick Hamel

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." - Linus Pauling

Blogging online since 1965

Recent Posts

Who Is Jared?

  • My name is Jared Way. I was born in rural Far Northern California, and became an "adoptive" Minnesotan. I have lived in many other places: Mexico City, Philadelphia, Valdivia (Chile), Los Angeles. And for 11 years, I was an expatriate living in South Korea. In the summer of 2018, I made another huge change, and relocated to Southeast Alaska, which is my uncle's home.
  • For many years I was a database programmer, with a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature. In Korea, worked as an EFL teacher.
  • In June, 2013, while I was in Ilsan in South Korea, I was diagnosed with cancer, and underwent successful treatment. That changed my life pretty radically.
  • Currently, you could say I'm "between jobs," somewhat caretaking my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that) and getting adapted to life in rural Alaska after so many years as an urban dweller.
  • These bloggings, then, have been my random jottings on the subject of my mostly pleasant life among the Quasi-Confucian Cyber-Industrial Paleolithic Peninsulites of Lower Far Siberia.
  • I started this blog before I even had the idea of going to Korea (first entry: Caveat: And lo...). So this is not meant to be a blog about Korea, by any stretch of the imagination. But life in Korea, and Korean language and culture, inevitably have come to play a central role in this blog's current incarnation.
  • Basically, this blog is a newsletter for the voices in my head. It keeps everyone on the same page: it has become a sort of aide-mémoire.
  • For a more detailed reflection on why I'm blogging, you can look at this old post: What this blog is, and isn't.
  • If you're curious about me, there is a great deal of me here. I believe in what I call "opaque transparency" - you can learn almost everything about me if you want, but it's not immediately easy to find.
  • A distillation of my personal philosophy (at least on good days):
    I have made the realization that happiness is not a mental state. It is not something that is given to you, or that you find, or that you can lose, or that can be taken from you. Happiness is something that you do. And like most things that you do, it is volitional. You can choose to do happiness, or not. You have complete freedom with respect to the matter.
  • "Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation." - Gilles Deleuze (writing about Spinoza).

Categories

My Life Online

  • Like most people, I spend a lot of time online, although I try to limit it somewhat. Here is a somewhat-annotated list of the "places" where I spend time online.
    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  • Knowledge and News
  • "Social Media"
    • I don't really "do" social media. I have a membership at Facebookland but I never log in there. I don't like it.
    • I have a membership at The Youtubes but I mostly use it for work. I also listen to music on youtube, frequently - I prefer it to typical streaming services, for example.
  • Humor and Cat Videos
  • A Diversity of Blogs - I read these a lot.
  • Blogs of people I actually know
  • Geofiction - this has evolved into a significant "hobby" for me. I like to draw imaginary maps, and there is a website that has enabled this vice.
    • I worked as a volunteer administrator for the site OpenGeofiction on and off for a few years. I created (but no longer maintain) the site's main wiki page: OGF Wiki. I am not currently working as administrator but I remain active on the site.
    • The above work has required my becoming an expert in the Openstreetmap system. Openstreetmap is an attempt do for online maps what wikipedia has done for encyclopedias. I have considered becoming an openstreetmap contributor, but I feel that my current location in Korea hinders that, since I don't have a good grasp Korean cartographic naming conventions.
    • Starting in April, 2018, I decided somewhat capriciously to build my own "OGF stack" on my own server. This was not because I intended to abandon the OGF site, but rather because I wanted to better understand the whole architecture and all its parts. I built a wiki on the Mediawiki platform (the same as wikipedia). This wiki has no content. I built a map tileserver and geospatial database, which contains a very low resolution upload of an imaginary planet called Rahet. And I built a wordpress blog, which is a separate, low-frequency blog intended to focus on my geofictional pursuits rather than this more personalized, general purpose blog. All of these things can be found integrated together on my rent-a-server, here: geofictician.net
  • TEFL - my "profession," such as it is.

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2013.03.20

Caveat: A Wikinfestation of Squeakinge Lisards

I long ago lost any interest whatsoever in writing or editing for wikipedia. There was a time, in the early aughts, when I was making a concerted effort to author bits in wikipedia. Mostly, I wrote and edited articles related to Mexican and US geography.

I gave up - mostly because I so frequently found my efforts rejected or altered beyond recognition by the wikipowers-that-be. Perhaps it was laziness on my part, or a certain vanity, but I didn't feel I could meet the requirements. So I quit.

But I still spend an inordinate amount of my online time with the vast wikithing, and I feel grateful to the many people who have stuck with content-creation, there, surpassing my own level of commitment and patience. I have even supported the wikimedia foundation with donations. I say this, proudly, while still acknowledging its faults.

The wikithing most definitely has faults.

Sometimes, if I stumble across an article with an egregious or blatent mistake or bias, I will "watch" it. I won't edit it - as I said, I don't do that anymore - but I will watch it, curious to see when someone gets around to noticing it.

Lisard 001About a month ago, I stumbled across this weird little stub about something called a Squeakinge Lisard. It struck me as a kind of hoax - either an outright fiction or some kind of clever, indirect effort at book promotion (via a link to a "source" which was a novel by some guy - but it turns out the link is dead, so in that case, um, not working so well as a book promotion).

I decided to draw a Squeakinge Lisard (shown at right).

I rather like this phrase, Squeakinge Lisard (especially with the archaic spelling). I would like to propose the phrase Squeakinge Lisard as a generic name for bits of information found in wikipedia that are not, in fact, true, but that have somehow managed to evade the editorial police for an unexpectedly long period of time.

I actually find the idea of bits of absurdist fiction embedded in encyclopedias to be a charming and appealing notion (e.g. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Borges). But I am shocked that the wikithingers have let this Squeakinge Lisard survive so long, unedited and unobserved.

I once had a quixotic fantasy of starting my own wikithing, from the bottom up, with a single requirement: that all the content be untrue. There are people who are making various efforts at this kind of thing: there's uncyclopedia in the Onionesque satire category and there's sorolpedia in the completely fictional orbistertiesque category. I wish them the best of luck.

Meanwhile, how long will it take for the Jimmywalesites to do something about their Squeaking Lisard infestation? Let's watch together, and see...

What I'm listening to right now.

A Tribe Called Quest, "Award Tour."

Posted at 16:15 in Background Noise, Banalities & Journaling, Internet & Blogging, My Drawings & Paintings |

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Comments

Lol... I wrote that article back in like 2006. It's legit tho. I got most of my information from "Swords Ships & Sugar - History of Nevis" by Vincent K. Hubbard. I'm flattered that my trivial article warranted this article! I don't think 12-year-old-me realized this wasn't worth an article.

Posted by: Hunter Stetz | 2013.05.09 at 20:20

Also just looked at a cached version of the page and it looks like it had been vandalized a little.. whatever that broken link source was

Posted by: Hunter Stetz | 2013.05.09 at 20:21

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