Prophet Motive (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 16) The Nagus’s eccentricities annoy, alarm Quark
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark is enjoying an ear massage from a humanoid woman who is clearly more interested in a business deal when they are interrupted by the arrival of Grand Nagus Zek. In the B story, Bashir is nominated for a prestigious Federation medical award, yet he seems aggressively unenthusiastic. (Some good character bits, and…
Eco-critical Code Studies: Reconfigurations of nature in the born-digital artifact “Colossal Cave Adventure” from text to VR
Video game history is colliding: Sierra founders are bringing a seminal text adventure game to VR (The Verge) Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 1976; Crowther and Woods 1977) (photo credit) Photo of Ken and Roberta Williams; Wikipedia photo of Adventure on a CRT Sierra On-Line (Sierra Entertainment, Inc.); King’s Quest, Space Quest, Phantasmagoria; original publisher of…
The White House’s plan to colonize the moon, briefly explained: Putting humans on the moon is more political than you might think.
Political tensions alone could be a major source of conflict, according to Michelle Hanlon, the co-director of the Air and Space Law Center at the University of Mississippi law school. For one, there still isn’t a globally shared vision for what the future of the moon should entail. Just over 20 countries have signed the US-led Artemis…
CBS News Suspends Twitter Posting ‘In Light of the Uncertainty’ About Musk-Owned Social Platform
CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company. “In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan…
Adobe steals your color
What a horrible situation. The Adobe monthly leases are way too expensive for a student paper that only prints a few magazines a term. The software costs more than the printing process, and about the same as the web hosting service. Just not worth the expense. We are making do with free alternatives. For people…
Really, WCCC?
No, this pie chart does not mean that anyone at CNBC believes the typical 25 year old earns a salary of $100k/y and spends $825/mo on rent
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link. I don’t watch any TV news and CNBC plays no role in my life, but come on. This post has gotten thousands of likes and generated hundreds of comments, many of them suggesting that CNBC is out of touch for…
Shutting the Door on the Hard-Knock Life
In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them…
Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average…
Tales from the Antiquities Theft Task Force
A shot of Kim Kardashian leaning against an Egyptian coffin at the 2018 Met Gala by Landon Nordeman exposes his subject in a flash of light—though perhaps not the subject anyone expected. Out of the thousands upon thousands who saw the shot, one happened to be more interested in the gold coffin than Kim’s (heavenly) body in…
Scat “boop oop a doop” and variations (Esther Lee Jones, Helen Kane, Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe); hippie “coo coo ca choo”; Beatles “goo goo ga joob”
A few years ago I was working regularly with a director who filled any conversation pause with a descending musical vocalization “doo de-doo de-doo.” While the similar “dum de-dum de-dum” means “I’m just sitting here minding my own business,” the brighter, more cheerful “doo de-doo de-do” was a cross between a satisfied sigh and a…
Google worker says he was fired for blowing whistle on cult
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit. The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for “religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action.” It alleges Peter…
Farewell Internet Explorer: You Weren’t All Bad
The main reason I still dislike Internet Explorer was because its popularity often meant you had to create one version of a website that was compatible with emerging and established industrywide standards, and another version that worked in Internet Explorer. So I still cringe when I see that dizzy “e” icon — except in this…
No, you’re not going crazy – package sizes are shrinking
It’s the inflation you’re not supposed to see. From toilet paper to yogurt and coffee to corn chips, manufacturers are quietly shrinking package sizes without lowering prices. It’s dubbed “shrinkflation,” and it’s accelerating worldwide. […] Bags of Fritos Scoops marked “Party Size” used to be 18 ounces; some are still on sale at a grocery…
The Storyteller (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 14) A Bajoran village mystic names O’Brien his successor; Jake and Nog try to impress a teenaged faction leader
Rewatching ST:DS9 O’Brien tries to weasel his way out of an assignment to ferry Bashir to a Bajoran village that sent a vague (apparently medical?) distress call. The cheerfully oblivious Bashir asks O’Brien to call him “Julien” instead of “sir.” (O’Brien: “Is that an order?”) The landing party is led to Sirah, an old man who…
How a billionaires boys’ club came to dominate the public square
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, attacked a publication owned by the world’s third-richest man, Jeff Bezos, last month for reprinting a column published by the world’s 13th-richest man, Mike Bloomberg. The Bloomberg opinion article, posted by The Washington Post, asked whether Musk’s recent investment in Twitter would endanger freedom of speech. “WaPo always good…
Mobile is a “really punishing format” for indies, says inkle’s Jon Ingold
Mobile is a really punishing format for independent developers. It used to be that the App Stores drove users to find games in viable quantities – 80 Days certainly benefitted enormously from Apple’s Editorial featuring – but that process has largely stopped. To be big – which is to say, to be viable – on…
As a plucky grad student, I walked in the door ready to negotiate with a department that needed my labor.
I think enough time has passed that I can tell this story. When I was a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the mid 1990s, the department asked me to sit through a week of undergrad presentations and proctor a final exam for my advisor, who needed to take a brief medical leave.…
