January 2009
20 posts
Brent Simmons has built a new weblog CMS which exists entirely on his client computer, and outputs hard-coded HTML files to his webserver.
I’m trying to think of an analogy for non-programmers… this is like… building a space shuttle with polished, hand-carved rainforest hardwood. No, it’s nothing like that. But it’s just as elegant and crazy.
A dirty secret of web...
iPhone firmware 2.2.1
I spend a lot of time on iPhone Safari (at least an hour a night and sometimes more, thanks to insomnia). The latest firmware update has fixed shit up for seriously. Haven’t had a single crash since upgrading.
Persuasive Gaming
Gamasutra is running a column by Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games, a firm that specializes in games that run the gamut from eduction to sociopolitical commentary.
There is a collective mental block in the games community if it can’t abide any alternative to fun other than boredom, an alternative to infatuation other than suckiness. Is this a culture worth defending?
What if, instead of trying to...
Tragicomic
Kos left a post today regarding newspapers dropping cartoonists as a cost-cutting measure.
Here’s a funny secret: newspaper editors and publishers hate comics. There was always a tremendous amount of ambivalence about the comics page, and no interest in adding new talent or culling strips that had gone stale. (The latter might even explain the occasional antipathy: comics attract rabid...
“I spoke to someone from Microsoft about this very thing, and they said it was...”
– Tycho Brahe
About four years ago someone swiped and squatted one of my domains. This week, against all odds, I somehow managed to successfully get it back. Welcome back Consumer Whore dot biz! (and a tip of the hat to those tacky dorks @ godaddy)
If you’re not from Portland, well, we’ve got a scandal. It’s like the whole Lewinski thing, except he’s only a mayor, and he’s gay, but the bimbo is still jailbait. It’s put a damper on the whole Obama-fueled euphoria, which I think a lot of this city feels somewhat entitled to.
The episode is causing Carrie Brownstein to examine Portland’s...
There was some chatter last month regarding the best Mac ever, and I’m dismayed by the consensus pick: the Mac SE/30. Granted, it was a fine, state-of-the-art computer in its day (I used one on the newspaper staff at my junior high school); it also cost $4369. That’s $7,484.56 adjusted for inflation.
Under what sort of criteria do you describe a computer like this as the “best...
What the hell does it take to turn off Amazon browsing history? I’ve been trying to disable this goddamned thing for years.
I look up a ton of random crap on Amazon for all kinds of reasons. I looked up Yanni earlier today because I was trying to make a point about shitty New Age music album art. I am not interested in Yanni.
One of these days my someone is going to visit Amazon.com on...
Trope Floats
While skimming this first segment in a chapter-by-chapter review of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books (there’s monsters called trollocs???), I came upon this link to TV Tropes, an incredible collection of storytelling clichés. A few highlights:
All Myths Are True In fantasy settings, the idea that all myths, folk tales and prophecies are either accurate descriptions of past events...
ANTI- is donating $5 to the Best Friends Animal...
Thanks the gods BSG is back on the air… quick thought: In the Galactica universe, habitable planets seem to be in moderate-to-low supply (hence the willingness to settle on a shithole like New Caprica). What’s preventing them from going back to Kobol? Fear of discovery by the Cylons, or the “curse”?
Even to a highly religious society (and that only appears to be about half...
Add NewsGator bookmarklet to iPhone
For years I’d try to “get into” RSS, but it never really stuck. I couldn’t let go of the habit of compulsively loading my most-read blogs and websites; by the time I would review my RSS it was all old news.
The iPhone finally turned me into a regular RSS reader. Feeds — stripped of superfluous graphics, and quickly downloaded en masse — make for great reading material on...
I don’t really know anything about Graham Joyce, but: he seems to be an actual fantasy/sci-fi writer, his reviews are decent, and he got hired by Id to write the script for Doom 4. Yes, a videogame company hired an actual writer to do their writing, instead of handing it off to the network admin guy or the janitor. Not completely unheard of, but anyway, bravo.
the war against cliche goes digital
The phrase that got me was like a stone in my shoe - noticeable at first, then irritating, then prompting outbursts. It was “his heart in his mouth.” This is how Follett described a character who was nervous or anxious or frightened. It’s not the most refined metaphor to begin with, but there it was - and then a few pages later, someone else’s heart was in his mouth - and...
After all my anti-suburban rants, this news is a little chastening.
Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.
Grand Pre
Poor Palm, they had to go and announce their new handheld platform during the media blitzkrieg that heralds the Book Cover Archive. Well, I’m sure someone will think to read Gizmodo today.
So apparently it’s a “web OS.” This is a fancy way of saying that the operating system is simply a web browser, and (with the exception of some piddly stuff like making “phone...
“Link’s stories defy structure in satisfying ways – they’re structured, they satisfy that reader need … but not entirely… And humour is dependent on structure, it has a grammar – a bad joke is a joke that hasn’t been told in the right way, in the right order. So the way things are revealed matters.”
A roundtable on one of my favorite writers, Kelly Link.