Amusing: March 2008 Archive Page

Just watch it. You'll get it.

Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words.

In any case, ! ? * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I have no idea about why = is out of the game.]

I've been playing Rogue, so I want to translate that as "potion, scroll, gold, Rogue, corridor, stairway..."

BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community).

11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren't worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint's still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

Of course I don't know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional.(I'd never heard of this site before... at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random assortment of clips.)

Satire from The Onion.

While it's difficult to imagine what compelled Meyer to read more than just the back cover of To Kill a Mockingbird, friends and family members claim the strange behavior goes all the way back to his childhood.

"I remember when Phil was a little kid, instead of picking up a book, getting bored, and then throwing it at his sister, he'd actually sit down and read the whole thing," said mother Susan Meyer, who declared she has long given up trying to explain her son's unusual hobby. "At the time, we thought it was just a phase he was going through. I guess we were wrong."

Over the years, Meyer has read dozens of books from beginning to end, regardless of whether he was forced to do so by a professor in school or whether a film version of the reading material already existed. According to girlfriend Jessica Kohler, he even uses a special cardboard marking device so that he can keep track of where he has stopped reading and later return to that exact same place.

Great satire from The Onion.

[W]hat kind of pathetic loser would actually enjoy something that's so incredibly not among my personal preferences? Not me, that's for sure.

Maybe my standards are too high, but if you like any of the hundreds upon hundreds of things that are too multifaceted for my attention span, you should have your head examined, weirdo.

And don't even get me started on complex and sophisticated notions I can't possibly wrap my head around. That stuff makes me want to puke. Just knowing there are people out there who like--actually like--interacting with concepts that overwhelm my feeble consciousness makes me embarrassed to be an American. I don't like it in our homes, I don't like it in our schools, I don't like it outside of my comfort zone--well, I just plain don't like it. And if that makes me closed-minded, well, then I guess I'll have to dismiss that accusation outright in order to avoid being introspective even for a moment.