February 2012
5 posts
Justified Line of the Week
“The next time you set up any operation in this county or anywhere else it better not have my goddamned family name on the deed. Or so help me God I’ll lose this star, and the dance we’ll do subsequent to that will not end with you finding Jesus in a hospital bed.”
January 2012
2 posts
Justified on Marital Relations
Raylan: What do you make of a man who divorces a woman, then gets her pregnant, then wonders if maybe they should move in together?
Boyd: Well, now, Raylan, you’re talkin’ to a man who’s sleeping with his dead brother’s widow and murderess, so if you’re looking for someone to cast stones at you on this matter I think you’ve picked the wrong sinner.
The First Lines of Nine Novels That Do Not Exist
The wind teased its way westward like fingers through hair.
I died yesterday; it was less permanent than one might expect.
The lightning tore out of the sky and for a moment connected Dewey Kimble to the clouds above his head. As he lay stunned and slightly ionized on the damp sidewalk, Kimble was struck again, this time by a revelation. He knew how to save the world.
Learning how to fly is...
December 2011
10 posts
“I protect the word “gamification” by placing quotes around it. The quotes stop...”
How the Internet Gets Inside Us →
That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented. It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with.
“[T]he way I look at it, we’ve only got two options: we can either buckle down...”
– McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Look, We Can Either Study for Our Law School Finals, or We Can Bring About the Violent Dissolution of the American Legal System.
Medical History: Patient BW, DOB 2/16/1971 →
Patient: Wayne, Bruce
DOB: 2/16/1971
Occupation: Industrialist
Insurance: Self-pay
WatchEd Yong said it best: “NEEEEEEEYAAAAAWWWWWWWW”
“All-London drivers - also known as Green Badge drivers - need a detailed...”
– The Knowledge | Transport for London
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses →
Among his many skills, Mark Twain also possessed the ability to critique a work with such poetic savagery that his targets would be rendered illiterate:
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not...
Nanolaw with Daughter (Ftrain.com) →
“You have to think about yourself not as a person but as data.”
“[I]f Emma Sullivan wanted to use her First Amendment right to make fun of Sam...”
– Why Emma Sullivan Is Good for Democracy - Garrett Epps - National - The Atlantic
November 2011
7 posts
Comics vs. The Internet
I’ve been having a fascinating Twitter-based conversation with Brian Clevinger (@bclevinger) and Fred Van Lente (@fredvanlente) about digital comic book distribution and copyright infringement. And while Twitter is wonderful for initiating these sorts of things, it’s remarkably poor for ongoing, complex debate.
First, a bit of background: Fred recently released Comic Book Comics #6,...
Taibbi And Leo
We’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for...
“Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just...”
– A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
“His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel...”
– A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
The Passion of the Penny Arcade →
Thomas Aquinas would be proud.
Mike: So I’m saying that Jesus and Legolas, for you…no difference.
Jerry: Roughly on par. They both have bows.
Mike: Yeah. Legolas, walking right on top of the snow.
Jerry: Same with Jesus.
Mike: What do his elf eyes see?
Jerry: I was gonna say, Jesus, up on the Olyphaunt…cuttin’ down bleep.
“We need to get out of this idea that the act of spending time on a project means...”
– Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work
October 2011
5 posts
Rolling Stone Mobile - Politics - Politics: OWS's... →
(via Instapaper)
Russell-Einstein Manifesto - Wikisource →
(via Instapaper)
Three Charts
Chart #1: Congressional Job Approval
source
Chart #2: Paranormal Belief
source
Chart #3: Reelection Rates Over the Years
source
Summary
More Americans believe in witches than approve of the job Congress is doing. Despite this fact, over 80% of representatives were reelected in the 2010 midterms.
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for...”
– Steve Jobs’s Stanford Commencement Address, 2005
Academic Critiques and Dead Pigs
From my comments on an article that I think makes some…dubious assumptions:
When a Kentucky governor seeks to claim the DNSs of websites run outside the United States to recapture gambling losses, I think it’s safe to say that he’s not trying to secretly censor any information here. He’s trying to use the tool of the law to gather more money for his state. The fact that...
September 2011
4 posts
Comics should be better. We should be better.
Laura Hudson, editor-in-chief of Comics Alliance, is brilliant, correct, and heartbreaking:
Female characters are only insatiable, barely-dressed aliens and strippers because someone decided to make them that way.
Even a casual scroll down my Twitter feed or the front page of this blog should make it pretty clear how much I love comics in general and superheroes in particular. More than...
Things I Don't Understand
What follows are a few unconnected thoughts on the execution of Troy Davis, confirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court.
Here’s a screenshot from my Facebook profile:
That translates into my believing in two things: 1) the power of human reason, and 2) that we must be kind to each other, because we’re all we’ve got.
Historically, Superman’s been defined as standing for...
“The Joker isn’t a criminal. And he isn’t even really a terrorist....”
– David Uzumeri of Comics Alliance, in part 3 of their brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight.
Why yes, I do spend a lot of time thinking about Batman.
“Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The...”
– Richard Dawkins’s savage assault on the forces of anti-science dominating modern American political.
July 2011
1 post
“Why is it so fuckin’ Punk Rock to think it might be okay, that we might not be...”
– From this Grant Morrison interview.
June 2011
3 posts
We Owe Them Hope
I used to joke that it would be awesome if the Large Hadron Collider did somehow create a black hole and destroy the planet. It would be unequivocal proof that I was alive during the single most important moment in human history—its final and irrevocable end.
Maybe that’s the secret behind our race’s continuing obsession with the end-times, or, to use a snootier term, eschatology....
Why does Superman need knee pads?
Imagine that you are a superpowered alien possessed of both invulnerable skin and an equally impervious, though somewhat garish, costume. Further, imagine that you are in the habit of spending a portion of your time gallivanting about in said costume, and that you spend the rest of your time hiding it under civilian clothes.
Why, pray tell, would you make your gallivanting costume bulky and...
“Privacy is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about...”
– The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks
May 2011
4 posts
A Daredevil Kind of World
Paolo Rivera’s cover for Daredevil #1 is amazing. Stare at that picture and let it say the other 980 words.
How to Sell Brian a Book in 20 Words
Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, by Grant Morrison.
The title is 18 words. Grant Morrison is two more.
April 2011
2 posts
Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy →
TED video of the day. Brilliant and true.
As long as we believe that people, our own neighbors, are selfish, stupid, or lazy, then there’s no hope.
Too Many Tools
Nerds1 love elegant solutions to difficult problems. Elegant solutions often involve precision tools that are specifically designed for the task at hand. This is usually a great idea for highly technical projects (like surgery, or building space ships), in which small errors can accumulate rapidly. But when we’re dealing with the real world, and with large populations of potentially...
March 2011
1 post
WatchESPN goes for the gorget when it takes on…FULL CONTACT JOUSTING.
February 2011
2 posts
"Just Another Kind of Knife"
In the wake of the Arizona shooting, we have been flooded with discussions about language’s unique power to harm. About how violent rhetoric can create a climate of violence, and how the wrong kind of words in the wrong place can alchemically transform an otherwise harmless lunatic into a bullet just looking for a target.
This is all almost certainly true. The Buddhists got it right: life...
January 2011
5 posts
Daily Reading: The Blast Shack →
Wikileaks, neo-cypherpunks, and the death of diplomacy. Bruce Sterling deconstructs the whole sordid affair along with the philosophies and personalities behind it. And he gets it—this is about old-school hackers with views on privacy and freedom from 20 years ago (eons in Internet time) trying to hack society as if it were just a baroque, but poorly defended, computer system. And look what...
Ghosts in the Field →
Mapping RFID fields with light and stop-motion photography. Really quite lovely.
“Guard yourself at all times. A lot of people believe that beauty is some kind of...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, August 18, 1981