If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that’s fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there’ll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair…
A great introduction to some of the reasons why I love studying the English language. From John McIntyre’s You Don’t Say. The malapropism: This venerable category of errors derives from the delicious and eponymous Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals of 1775. Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal a propos) pretentiously and unknowingly…
Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign’s tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what’s unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is…
If the following line doesn’t get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will: I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.
From the New York Times blog, The Lede: In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse) Latest update at…
This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there. I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. The Phillips screw and…
Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis: I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre…
GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.) Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled “Limbo of the Lost.” At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point…
Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore: Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they’ve made screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft, where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy worthy of…
This morning in my mail I found an attractive printing of the proceedings from a January summit on journalism. All in all, this is a good print document that suffered when it was shoveled online. I have no idea what kind of time constraints or “it came to the boss in a dream so do…
Chronicle Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution.
An amusing bit of neo-folklore. Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as…
Thanks for the suggestion, Matt.
The open-source 3D design too, Blender, has just been updated. I was up until well past midnight last night checking the website every half hour or so, waiting for this release… now I notice it’s up just as I’m on my way out the door. Oh well, I can look forward to using it tonight…
Thank you, Rosemary, for sending me this interesting visual essay on the persistence of digital memory, from Instructables.com: Want to make a flash drive that nobody in a modern office would even think about taking? Hide it in a pink eraser and it’s secure in this digital age. Install windows 7 from USB
A good example of new media journalism, in which narration and animation weave short video clips into a coherent analysis. Via the Washington Post. Our partners at Slate.com created a seven-minute satirical depiction of the Democratic primary season thus far. It covers Sen. Hillary Clinton’s “cackle,” Sen. Mike Gravel scowling at the camera, debates, former…
According to Metafilter, “Nothing signals the death of a trend like an article in the NY Times Style section.” Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an…
Tomorrow is the last day of classes, but it’s not too late to bring up a new topic. Many of my students in “Intro to Literary Study” were fascinated by Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, so I thought they might appreciate hearing about Card’s dismissal of J.K. Rowling’s suit against a fan-created reference work devoted…
Not the best spoof I’ve ever seen, but if you really want to see a spoof of a trailer of a documentary about text adventure games, you might be somewhat amused. (Here’s the original.) I’m mocked in this, if that’s any incentive to anyone…
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…