Conspiracy (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season One, Episode 25) Parasitic Bug Doppelgängers on Earth
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation This episode piles on the cloak-and-dagger tropes such as secret messages, clandestine meetings, imposters, and, of course, conspiracy. “Don’t trust anyone,” warns an old friend of Picard’s who, no surprise, doesn’t make it to the end of the next act. The story ambitiously builds upon suspicions that Admiral Quinn…
In February, 2001, I was blogging about computer nostalgia, Napster, a horror typing game, usability, and web blurbs.
In February, 2001, I was blogging about Computer nostalgia and text adventure games.“Walking into a room rendered in the Q3 engine can be lovely and impressive, but when you’ve only 16K to tell a story, you have to rely on the gamer’s imagination to provide the details. Just the words ‘you are on a beach’…
I can’t believe I’m fact-checking a viral story about the gender of a plastic potato with detachable body parts.
I can’t believe I’m fact-checking a viral story about a plastic potato, but Hasbro is removing the “Mr.” from its “Potato Head” logo, and offering a new mix-and-match package that includes two potato bodies, one baby potato, and a bunch of loose parts that will let kids put them together however they want. That…
Details on the disappearance of the Utah monolith
Mr. Bernards, 34, of Edwards, Colo., was visiting the monolith on Friday night when, he said, four men arrived as if out of nowhere to dismantle the sculpture. Mr. Bernards had driven six hours for the chance to ogle the sculpture and to take dramatic photographs of it. Using upscale Lume Cube lights attached to…
In November 2000, I was blogging about the US Presidential election, mirrors, Arts & Letters Daily, and more
In November 2000, I was blogging about Ursula K. Le Guin Why we perceive mirrors reversing things left/right but not up/down Pioneering blog Arts & Letters Daily (just a year older than my own blog) Nick Montfort’s constrained poem “Upper Typewriter Row“ The 2000 US Presidential Election controversy (ballot design, hanging chads, recounts, political cartoons)…
This is Ralph. Ralph is a concept, created by you while reading this.
And to think… I had just decided to retire this meme because the last time I used in class, the students didn’t get it.
Book geyser. My latest #Blender3D practice.
In a peaceful grassy setting, a geyser of books spews into the air. Hundreds of books with steampunk-themed titles like “Modern Manners Errata for the Educated Officer” and “Advanced Elocution and Honor” tumble back to the ground, bounce, and settle. Made for no particular reason, with Blender3D.
Booby Trap (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Three Episode 6) When LaForge gets absurd with a hologram nerd, he’s a-creeper
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. To escape a thousand-year-old booby trap, LaForge interacts with a holodeck simulation of the designer of the Enterprise’s engines… and gets waaay too attached. The teaser shows LaForge on a date — a failure that he later talks over with Guinan. Meanwhile, Picard, thrilled to explore an old warship, is…
MoonBot (from the family steampunk bedtime RPG 2007-2013) vs. a crate and lamps.
The dress we ordered for the “girl next door” role in The Fantasticks… vs the dress that we received!
Love This Headline: “He took a date to the park where he was gored by a bison, figuring it wouldn’t happen again. He was wrong.”
If You Ever Find a Link to ThoughtCatalog, I’m Begging You Not to Click It
Here’s a thought… nothing you can write can possibly encourage me to click through 40 separate chunks of text. Bye.
A slave who works in a junk shop naturally builds a protocol droid. Right.
He could have built, you know, a junkyard mechanic droid, or a general manual labor droid, or a Bitcoin-mining droid, or a freedom-fighter droid? No, he builds a fussy butler. The silliness of this just hit me.
Friend I hadn’t seen for about 20 years delivers a vintage nerdy gift.
During the original run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, my college roommate and I invited our friends over to our duplex for Star Trek parties. Our local TV station ran the show at midnight Sunday, which was a terrible time, but we sometimes had 30 people over. Though we kept in touch virtually, I…
Five myths about daylight saving time
No, Daylight Saving Time was not created to help farmers (actually, they hate it) and no, it doesn’t save energy (running the air conditioner longer in the evenings costs more than we save by turning on fewer lights in the morning). And why are we on “Daylight Standard Time” just four months out of the…
Legos and M&M’s Bulge Illusion
These are straight vertical and horizontal lines. It’s your mind that’s twisted. Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute made a Lego checkerboard and placed white and purple M&Ms on the squares in a way that makes the board appear to bulge. Illusion Chasers, Scientific American Blog Network.
About that Cough, Rough, Pony, Bologna Meme
Do the spellings of cough & rough, pony & bologna bug you, too? English evolves organically, without our permission. Words that look similar but are pronounced differently generally came to the language from different sources and/or at different times, by an organic process that is not controlled by people in smoky board rooms. In our day,…
I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax
Hoaxes roam the Information Superhighway, camouflaged as factoids. Consider this one: “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon.” The “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon” factoid had been cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor. It was cited in a book about Jews and Jesus. It was cited in innumerable blog posts and…