Limited Liability

Ben Hyde’s recent post about “Communities of Limited Liability” I think goes a long way toward explaining why I tend to avoid in-person gatherings of members of various online communities that I participate in. Such meetings seem uncomfortably to change the terms of my involvement with the people that I might interact with in, say, a web bulletin board or IRC channel. There have always been a rare few people that interacting with online gets me interested in a face-to-face meeting, and I have pursued opportunities to follow through on arranging such meetings in a couple of cases, with generally pleasant results. But there seems to be a widespread supposition that because a certain board is, like, so much fun to hang out on online, that one should automatically want to hang out with any and all participants in real life. I’ve never made that connection, and in fact tend to suppose rather that most of the enjoyment in any given online community comes from the preservation of limits to personal contact. I’m even a little shy of threads where the topic calls for going into too much personal detail, whether it’s real names or something more innocuous like clothing style or occupation. (I’m not against picture threads though, for some reason.) I just prefer to see those limits maintained.

I suppose I’m the same way about real-life CLLs. Like in the example that Mr. Hyde gives of urban space - I get weirded out in exactly the same way by an apartment-building neighbor who has too many questions about my life as I do by a scary bulletin board person who presumes I’d like to meet when I really wouldn’t.

No Error

Incidently, my post from yesterday just got me thinking: in case anybody was wondering, I tend to find out about things like corewatch and other cool demoscene-related music stuffs courtesy of noerror, the “scene music news” site. It’s worth checking out once in awhile. They’ve always got links to new music, most of which is pretty interesting, some of which can turn out to be cheesy. But quite a lot of it is very good.

Tunage du jour

Recommended: Anticheese - Nocheesetoday EP three free mp3 downloads via corewatch “net label”. I like this more than anything I’ve heard since Mosaik’s “Rubik”. It’s nice that so much of the very best music is free to download without even stealing.

meso

meso labs has turned out a lot of cool video over the years, including a brilliant clip for Oval’s “Do While”. What I really like about meso’s stuff is that most of it is realtime video rendering. So in a certain way just like the demoscene, only with high-end SGI hardware, instead of c64s. Keen, eh?

Bola de las gomitas milestone

So, the RBB flew right past golf ball size a couple of days ago. Lately I’ve been telling myself that I’ll stop adding rubber bands when it gets roughly baseball-sized. At the moment, however, I’m trying to pause to admire and play with it the way it is, which is still rather smaller than a baseball. It’s about a couple inches in diameter - call it something like raquetball-sized. Somewhere just after the golf ball stage, it started to get noticeably more bouncey. At its present size it feels really good in my hand, as is fun as anything to chuck around and bounce off stuff.

So I’m thinking I’ll go back to adding more rubber bands after awhile, but I’d like to hang out with it like it is for about a week or so. The thing is, it’s surprisingly difficult to curb the impulse to add more rubber bands. I tried to limit myself yesterday by not bringing any rubber bands with me (I have a 1# bag from Staples at home), but ended up swiping a dozen or so from the office supply room and adding them to the ball. It’s weirdly addictive.

UPDATE: Sad to report, the RBB is experiencing some band snappage around the outside; I fear the last several bands added may have been stretched overly tight. I’ve had about three separate breakage incidents so far. The really irritating part is that each break has been to a band that’s still exposed to the surface, but partly covered over by other bands, making it very very difficult to remove the snapped band (especially without risking damage to other outer bands in the process. And I certainly can’t consider just leaving them in, not with their icky dangling loose ends. Oh, no.

RBB Status

Rubber Band Ball Progress Report: diameter of RBB now slightly exceeds that of golf ball—;call the difference oh, about 4mm (based on eyeball guess, and allowing for inexact sphericity of the RBB (and of the golf ball, for that matter)).