Amusing: April 2008 Archive Page

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media.

My brain still hasn't fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem... different.  Here's my favorite.

Check out the others at Mightygodking.

For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion.

According to Mead's website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them "infinitely more practical" for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided for dates and headers will be halved, and the left-hand margin will be eliminated entirely.

"Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."

"When you're in grad school, every millimeter counts," he added.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It's the kind of place where someone can say, "That reminds me of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric... inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio, and... uh.. .what's the other one?"  and it's likely that the others will get the joke.

While walking around the city after the conference was over, I had a vision of a future 4Cs conference that made me giddy. I'll tell you about it in a little bit. First, let me talk about the conference.