The recording industry blamed cassette tapes for killing disco in the 70s. Along came MTV, which found a brand new way to make money off of music. The recording industry is blaming file-sharing for the slumping sales in teen pop. Sound familiar? Mark Jenkins —Hit Charade: The music industry’s self-inflicted woundsSlate)
“One by one, the [waste-bearing] casks smack into the Moon. The soft deep lunar regolith in the impact area should ensure proper waste burial. Plowing into the lunar surface at high speed, the waste would be buried under several feet of glassified regolith…” —Moon Seen as Nuclear Waste Repository (Space.com) Space:1999. Moonbase Alpha… Nuclear Waste…
“Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput. IE4 had a great design that let users easily change font sizes; let’s get this design back in the next generation of browsers.” Jakob Nielsen —Let Users Control Font SizeUseIT.com) This apparently the Week of Cute Headlines. Why not “Tiny text type terribly trashes task throughput”?…
“What happens to friendship when everything goes wrong all the time? Laurel and Hardy perpetually get in each other’s way, they get on each other’s nerves, and while the general battle is against humiliation, they are always busy with the effort to extricate themselves from the fine mess they bring about in one another’s lives.…
“They wanted to have an intelligent discussion, to avoid sensationalism, to give me a chance to make my arguments. They would have some representatives of the games industry and someone from one of the media reform groups. One producer almost convinced me that “Donahue” was a serious news discussion program.” Henry Jenkins —Ambushed on “Donahue” (Salon)
“What is a hoax, exactly? When does a good deal become too good to be true, and where does belief end and credulity begin?” Thomas Hayden —The Art of the HoaxUS News)
“We asked police why we were being arrested, and they said, `Everybody is receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police Department tonight.’ It didn’t matter what you were doing; they arrested you.” —450 peaceful teens arrested in K-Mart raid (Houston Chronicle)
“Welcome to the world of a half million (and counting) Weblogs, where anyone can instantly publish his passions and favorite Weblinks. And the fun’s just begun.” Steven Levy —Living in the Blog-osphereNewsweek) Levy is a computer historian and insightful observer of geek culture.
Latest weapon against junk e-mail: poetry. —Haiku’da Been a Spam Filter (Wired) The title of the article wins the prize for “Most Obscure Reference to Marlon Brando.”
“The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.” Theodore Dalrymple —The Rage of Virginia Woolf (City Journal) Dalrymple is…
"Before the Internet, the only opportunity most students had to speak with their professors was during scheduled class sessions or office hours. Now, more professors can be in touch with students at any time — morning, noon, and night, seven days a week." [The article focuses mostly on courses that meet only online, but this article…
"First released in 1989, HyperCard still has a fiercely dedicated following despite no meaningful update in about 15 years." —HyperCard Forgotten, Not Gone (Wired)
The second issue of Game Studies is out.
“D[ungeons]&D[ragons] sort of came about after a monster marathon week of reading Conan novels, eating popcorn until it was coming out of my ears-no I was not on drugs-and we got the idea to do something in a dungeon.” —Dave Arneson Interview (GameSpy) A “monster marathon”… ha, ha.
“Once upon a time, in a part of the house where grownups rarely visited, there was the Land of the Stuffed Animals… But Professor Blue Smush DinoBaby’s warning came too late. First a slight tremor came from within the box.” Jon Hansen —Tales of the Plush Cthulu
"The true link between technology and art, regarded in modern times as something shameful, is becoming increasingly apparent, and the evidence suggests that artists’ dependence on machines has been not only extensive but long-lived…" Charles Paul Freund —Traces of Genius: Is Art Sullied by Technology? (Reason)
"Debate has raged in recent years whether it was even fair to call Pluto a planet, given its newfound status as one object among many in the Kuiper Belt — which actually contains more mass than the better-known asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter." Steve Kettman —Pluto: Too Hip to Be Out…
“Instead of a library, the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual materials and a few paper magazines — but no books.” Katie Dean —Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College (Wired)
Is this for real? "The controversial suicide device will be promoted under the name "Aussie Bags" and will be shipped with the warning ‘DO NOT put this bag over your head. It could kill you.’" —Aussie Suicide Bags Delayedb> (AAP)
"Mr. Storch has found that the ease, speed and accuracy of writing with a computer keyboard have vastly reduced the occasions on which he might turn to a pen or pencil. As a result, he and many others who spend hours a day using computers say that the penmanship they learned in school is deteriorating…