“Your task is to write the first line of an imaginary novel. Your goal is to make it hilariously bad…. Maximum sentence length: 25 words.” (Deadline: 14 April 2003) —Jennifer Stood There, Quietly OvulatingAdam Cadre) Adam Cadre, who started the Lyttle Lytton contest as a reaction against what he sees as the increasingly lengthy and…
“Cool-2B-Real is about real girls like you! Whether you’re in school, playing sports or just having fun, strive to be the best you can be! Real girls are ‘keepin’ it real’ by building strong bodies and strong minds… and they’re feeling great about themselves!” Brought to real girls everywhere by the award-winning experts in girl…
“I want to invent a word which describes the experience of following all those links on the sidebar of someone’s blog. Yeah, I know blogrolling exists. But that’s just for making the links. When I visit DFWblogs or Grumpy Girl , I get hooked on all these fascinating blog names (ethnic lounge, not so girlie,…
“Game importers and Internet cafés remain vulnerable. Police are cracking down on players of Counter-Strike, Age of Empires, and digital backgammon and chess. More than 50 people have been arrested and face up to three months in prison and 5,000-euro fines.” —More Fallout Over Greek Game BanWired) Similar:It is often said that autistic people lack…
“Over the past month, the U.S. military has periodically sent e-mail to Iraqi military and government officials urging them to protect their families by helping U.N. inspectors and turning away from Saddam Hussein.|U.S. government officials won’t comment on the campaign, but according to sources in Iraq and Iraqis living in the United States, each time…
“By the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my children. My optimism and naiveté evaporated within hours…. Raynard had told [his mother] that I had violently shoved him in the chest out the door of my classroom, injuring his head and back. His mother had dialed 911 and summoned…
“In its relentless pursuit of the power curve of Moore’s law, at the expense of the much less interesting price curve, the entire electronics industry may be unknowingly trapping itself in a giant and attenuated version of the dot-com bubble–living years into the technological future, only to be painfully snapped back to the human and…
“We are a powerful race, but we are not a violent one. The wars you wage on your planet are an outdated notion to us, as we prefer more intellectual pursuits. We also enjoy jogging, hiking, basketball, and golf, so we will accept nothing but the best in athletic footwear from Adidas, Reebok, and Converse.…
“When you play a multiplayer FPS video game, like Counter-Strike, you enter a complex social world, a subculture, bringing together all of the problems and possibilities of power relationships dominant in the non-virtual world. Understanding these innovations requires examining player in-game behavior, specifically the types of textual (in-game chats) and nonverbal (logo design, avatar design…
“Remember, too: you’ve just been wounded, and in addition to the adrenaline that’s just been dumped into your system, you’re likely looking at anywhere from a few drops to a steady flow of your own blood – a highly upsetting experience for many. Which means you’re shaking, and most likely trying to do this all…
“Over the next two and a half years, Güntürkün recorded 124 scientifically valid kisses in public places across the United States, Germany and Turkey.” —Most People Kiss the Right WayNature) The story cited above is a puffy little version of an academic article called “Adult persistence of head-turning asymmetry” Similar:What Could Have Been Entering the…
I got an e-mail from Bob Mosley, compiler of the Columbia loss FAQ, which called to my attention the latest updates to the Columbia FAQ resource, which was assembled rapidly by scores of volunteers on the day of the incident, —STS-107 “Columbia” Loss FAQsci.space.*) Similar:Carolyn had fun playing a street urchin this weekend in Stage…
“A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that’s inside the site…. [S]ample sites allocated less than half the screen space to useful pixels.” Jakob Nielsen —Homepage Real Estate AllocationUseIT.com) Similar:Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging PracticesPublic, Private, Political: Social Theor…AcademiaSocial Media…
“MMRPGs are pervasive virtual environments populated by human-controlled digital people from around the globe. | Players develop characters, work towards goals, solve puzzles and engage in social fluttery. They’re the visual marriage of text-based adventures and chat rooms, and women are flocking.” Alex Krotoski —Online Role-Playing Fits the BillGuardian) Interesting… while Slashdot just posted a…
“[T]the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles – one written by a graduate student.” —Britain’s Official Dossier on Saddam Plagiarized?Channel4.com) Similar:Internet Explorer cheated its way to the top, and I won't miss itI started teaching myself HTML in earnes…AcademiaThey Should Have Used Another TypefaceHave you ever noticed that the…
“The computer industry defies the pattern of all previous technological revolutions, making little or no progress toward convenience. It takes much longer to turn on your machine in the morning now than it did 20 years ago. The reaction of the clueless masses is to grumble and crack wise and then meekly accept the commands…
“That people are gravitating from the television to the Internet, especially for information, is, of course, extremely good news–at least for us. But while they are coming more, they are believing less: Last year the UCLA survey indicated that 58% of Internet users believed that most of what they read online was ‘reliable and accurate.’”…
“The social structure of the Network Age is already evident, and we can potentially anticipate a great deal about the next few decades of our lives by examining the essence of the network, both in its literal and figurative manifestations. But understanding the order of the coming age of distributed culture requires us first to…
“[R]esearchers had seen a precipitous drop in the use of books and an equally steep rise in the use of Web sites. Books composed 30 percent of cited sources in 1996, compared with 16 percent in 1999, with continued declines in the following year. Web sites, meanwhile, grew from about 8 percent of cited sources…
“Some see it as part of the same cultural continuum of reality TV programming. Others see a broader trend in which digital technologies are allowing everyone to participate more directly in media experiences. Under this scenario, an era of decentralized media is fast approaching in which the idea of “consumers” of mass-market media will become…