It’s so strange to meet young Americans abroad, and to hear them speak of their future so openly.

A typical American I’ve met traveling. We’ve already exchanged the basics: names, residence, and duration of travels. Around then, it comes:

“So, what keeps you busy in your real life?”

“Oh, you know, the usual.”

“The usual? You mean work or school?”

“Yeah. I run these bars with a couple of friends. I was gonna go to school but first I wanted to see the world.”

“Right, right. So what’re you gonna study?”

“I’m thinking either nuclear physics or music. I play the guitar in a band. I thought it’d be cool if we could start touring.”

“Oh. Nuclear physics� or music? That’s — diverse.”

“Yeah. I was also online looking at this bar tending school in South Africa. I might become a U.K. citizen. DUIs are on the rise in Texas.”

Belinda’s photos of Elexa in Sweden. It sucks that Ofoto makes you grant permissions to each gallery separately.

The University of Helsinki computer sciences department is planning to put together a collection of open source software and other programming material generated by students and researchers. For now there’s only a germ of a list.

I installed Audioscrobbler today. Not sure what to do with it, but still.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of dangerous to write about someone writing a novel? That it’s— well, boring?”

“It’s not boring to me. I can only write what interests me. I don’t know that I could write anything that I could be sure wasn’t boring. Besides, it’s been done before. A guy in Denmark told me Flann O’Brien has a novel about writing a novel.”

Neil Stephenson interview at Slashdot. In his answer to the second question, Stephenson has a great explanation for why “commercial authors” aren’t respected by the literary scene.

I ordered four books and two zines from CrimethInc. today. They ship internationally by global priority mail only, so the cost of shipping four books is the same as two. (The shipping for Days of War, Nights of Love, the book that got me shopping in the first place, would have been the same price as the book.)

Elexa’s been talking about Days of War, Nights of Love for about a year now, but the one she read, she passed on to another friend. I’m looking forward to the zines, too.

On similar lines with CrimethInc.’s agenda is Yomango, a movement advocating shoplifting as civil disobedience. Voima wrote about Yomango in it’s last issue of 2004.

The nice thing about media-savvy counterculture organizations (Adbusters, Yomango) is their ability to use design to their advantage and pull off really neat publicity stunts.

The Prelinger Archives contains over 40 000 “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. One gem: Are You Popular?, “one of the best examples of post-World War II social guidance films, with examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ girls, proper and improper dating etiquette, courtesy to parents, and an analysis of what makes some people popular and others not.”