January 2010
78 posts
I can’t help feeling a little bad when I see what a shitty year everyone had, while I’ve had one of the best years of my life, where everything just went right (it almost seems graceless to even admit that).
Regardless, I hope everyone has a better 2010. I love you guys.
December 2009
62 posts
“A visual graph of U.S. pop culture might resemble a massive Venn diagram, a...”
– The 10 American Ideas of the Decade
Formative Pleasures
In your childhood, you must’ve seen a particular movie (or three) dozens, if not hundreds, of times. It was your favorite VHS/DVD, or maybe you only had a few and you couldn’t be picky. It is probably true that whatever what movie was, today you have a nearly cellular-level familiarity with it. You recognize its sound right away. Lines of its dialogue pop into your head for no reason. You may not...
“Watching the Bell Helicopter Bowl. And since I’m very susceptible to...”
– badbanana
Not Just Another NYE
One year to the day — darn near to the hour — Heather was sat in a coffee shop in Brighton, waiting for me to call her and meet her, wondering if I was going to stand her up, after having flown all the way from Indianapolis.
First time we met in person. (I decided not to stand her up.) Rest is history, etc.
“You look like an old man that’s trying to get internet sex.”
– Heather, of my avatar. A topic inspired by mutual appreciation of Merlin’s avatar.
The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project →
An ongoing quest to track the Daily Mail’s classification of inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer, and those that cure it.
Seems defunct now, but this is perfect. Found via the equally perfect Daily Mail-o-matic, which generates Daily Mail headlines (“Has rip-off Britain made Cliff Richard impotent?”).
Johnny Flynn - “The Wrote and Wit”
I...
“Hell yeah! They make six-blade razors for bitches now!”
– Guess who.
inteawetrust:
It was interesting to spend my first Christmas in the UK. I’ve been over here (and in Spain) in November in the past, but never through the holiday itself and wasn’t entirely sure how I’d feel about it.
I learned very early on that I have a hard time balancing my american tendency to over-gift people with the british culture of just showing up with a mince pie and a Christmas...
Learn Na'vi →
Nice.
I still haven’t seen Avatar, or anything to do with the Na’vi language Paul Frommer created for the film’s alien species, but it’s awesome that this exists.
HALP
Does anyone with Illustrator CS4 chops and an e-mail address have a moment to answer some stupid questions?
1 tag
Smoking weed with a woman who thinks Kurt Cobain faked his death.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas
I’m feeling seasonal, so I posted a little extra on Give Me Something to Read (which I think I’m actually supposed to refer to as the Instapaper Editor’s Picks now, whatever) today to get you through the awkward family gatherings this Christmas. Enjoy! (It might take about an hour to show up on the website.)
Hand me a PEN so I can make a note of this, am I...
Here’s something: Penne. I cooked a dinner of pasta with pepperoni, peppers, tomato, paprika, and parsley last night. It was incredible. Even Heather liked it, and you know women are when men cook. But we had a brief disagreement about the pronunciation of “Penne” and it turns out we were both wrong. She pronounces it PEN-ay (/ˈpɛneɪ/), the American way, and I’ve always...
Grizzly Bear - “Two Weeks”
She Knows Me
H: Richard... what are you doing?
R: Hm?
H: Are you harassing somebody?
Rage Against the Machine beats X Factor winner in... →
Wow. The campaign worked: for the first time in about five years, the Christmas number 1 single isn’t an X Factor winner. RATM are donating all the royalties from the single sales to a charity, and performing a free concert in 2010, as a result of the campaign, which also can’t be a bad thing.
“I must admit to being a little disappointed that there is no use of algorithms...”
– An update to that article about the Instapaper re-design. Is this guy serious?
I’m not even a programmer, and even I know there almost never a “perfect opportunity” for algorithmically-generated content. I think there might be a bigger point to make here, which is that...
“The homepage has been given a revamp reflecting an almost Economist like layout...”
– Instapaper Redesigns. Turns into a Delicious for “Must Read Content.
Aside from the fact that he’s totally wrong — recommended content is actually powered by GMSTR (and I’m immensely happy that what I do is now right in front of Instapaper’s thousands of users) — it...
What English Sounds Like To Foreigners →
britticisms:
Even though I knew the context of the song, the first thing I thought was, “God! I hate listening to music through my laptop speakers. I can never understand what they’re saying.” And then I leaned in and tried to read his lips, even though I knew it was not English, simply because it sounded so much like English (well, a good early funk track written in English).
(via...
“Of course, “Strunk and White,” as the book is commonly called, has...”
– Oh lord. Here’s an incomplete thought that wine helped me arrive at:
If you take a broad-enough resource, you can apply it to anything. Of course a style guide for writing applies well to programming: the basic tenets and guidelines are more or less the same: be clear and succinct, maintain...
Rage Against the Machine v Joe McElderry →
This is kind of interesting.
Every year, another series of X Factor (the show American Idol takes its format from) ends right before Christmas, and the winner — whose first single is released shortly after being announced as the winner — inevitably ends up being the Christmas number 1 single in the UK. Tired of X Factor’s monopoly over the Christmas charts, a Facebook group has...
A Disappointing Dream
Last night I dreamed that I’d been reading my Twitter follower count wrong all this time, and that there was actually another zero on the end. I don’t think that says anything positive aout my personality.
“A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on...”
– Regret the Error’s excellent annual round-up of the best corrections printed in newspapers around the world includes this one from the NYT. They failed to mention the best part, though — in my opinion, at least — which is that the “reader” in question was actually a...
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it...”
– I’m reading “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and I keep thinking: God damn Oscar Wilde writes good. Fittingly, I read this while enjoying my first cigarette in 8 hours, having sought refuge in a Washington Dulles smoking lounge. It’s the truest thing ever written about smoking.
Playboy Bunny Manual →
Baccarat
Here’s the cryptic answer:
“Car” (vehicle) after (following) “cab” (taxi) reversed (over) and “at” (to). And then “casino game” is the actual definition, obviously.
“At” is apparently common abbreviation of “to,” but I didn’t spot it, having “baccar” was enough. Quite an easy one — people got...
Vehicle following taxi over to casino game (8)
Hey! It’s another crossword clue!
I bought a book of cryptic crosswords to amuse myself with on my flight back home and ended up doing about eleven of them during the 18 hours I spent between countries (thanks to a 5 hour wait between flights). So I’ve got a lot of crossword clues floating around in my head at the moment. This is one of the clues that’s been particularly...
“I was looking through the past tweets of my pals. All golden. So philisophical....”
– “They’re poop jokes”? Is that you, Nick?
langer:
I can’t even begin to tell you how DONE I am with this whole nerd tradition of naming programming languages or frameworks after things the nerds responsible for maintaining them happen to enjoy. Take the examples of Python (so named for its inventor’s love of “Monty Python”), or Django (read: Django Reinhardt), or Hadoop (named for the lead developer’s child’s stuffed elephant), or Go...
Live male creature, a monster (8)
Answer to this, since nobody got it: behemoth.
Pretty vague clue, but here’s what I liked about it: live-male-creature becomes be-he-moth.
Well I thought it was clever.
Live male creature, a monster (8)
This is a clue from today’s Independent cryptic crossword. It’s a relatively easy (and not very good) one, but I liked the word play, so I’m sharing.
Any guesses?
I’ll post the answer later.
“Noise, poop, and wanky little bags of sad don’t deserve a place in your awesome...”
– Merlin proves you don’t need to be eloquent to be right. (That said, I like making fun of the @replying hoi polloi.)