September 2005
36 posts
3 tags
Standards for Vampires - Even the undead ought to... →
My kind of essay.
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DCist: A Year's Worth of Baseball Politics →
DCist looks back at the Nationals’ first year and its political mess.
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WOMMA's Word of Mouth vs. Advertising: Your $1.2... →
Advertising has almost no impact on army recruiting numbers. Why not give the money as a signing bonus?
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NY Times Op Ed on Author's Guild Suit Against... →
Good summary of the pro-Google argument here (i. e. the correct side of the issue).
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TIME.com: Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon... →
Make sure you stick around for Neil’s final anecdote.
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Music Video Downloads
I ran across this link today, featuring a PHP script that lets you download music videos from the iTunes Music Store. Cool. Apple’s put a lot of music videos up, and now I can download them onto my machine and watch them whenever I want.
But wait? Why the hell do I need to hack together a script to do this? It’s always bothered me with their Quicktime Movie Trailer repository. Here’s a page full...
4 tags
Would You Play The Bait Shop? →
Responses of a bunch of bands when asked if they’d play on The OC if asked.
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NEWSARAMA - DUNST: VENOM & SANDMAN IN SPIDEY 3 →
Oh man Venom. Could be great, unlike how he actually is in most of the actual comics.
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The CulturePulp Q&A: Joss Whedon →
Long interview about Serenity and such.
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My dad discovered that I apparently played the part of an intern on this week’s Lost. I’m guessing it’s this guy.
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Make Your Own Kind of Music
I could probably come up with lots to say about the season premier of Lost, but I’ll hold off for a few episodes before going crazy about it. Watching it both allayed and heightened my fear that they aren’t going to be able to keep the quality of the show up. It’s a fallacy to assume that the longer something doesn’t happen, the more likely it is to happen, but I can’t see how they’re going to...
10 tags
'Bride' Stripped Bare →
Neat. Corpse Bride was shot on Canon Digital SLRs and editing in Final Cut Pro.
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Backpack: NEW FEATURE: Recurring reminders →
Fantastic. Think I’ll set a reminder to put in birthday reminders…
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Project Comet →
If this is going to work like I think, I’ve been looking for it for a long time. Seems like a LJ-style “friends page” for non-LJ pages.
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Revolution Teaser Video →
I think I’m buying the hype about their new controller. A good game-maker could do some clever things with this.
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Harry Potter and the double helix →
Scientists suggest that wizard family trees make a good way to teach genetics.
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Dead Man's Float →
Why are bodies in the water always facedown?
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Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on... →
Good observations here. Nintendo seems very willing to take risks, and I agree that’s important to keep gaming fresh.
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The Plague
So apparently in World of Warcraft there’s a plague spell that Hakkar, the boss of the new dungeon Zul’Gurub, casts on players. It does a reasonable amount of damage every 2 seconds, and spreads to nearby allies. Though it was obviously intended to just be a part to make the fight against Hakkar more challenging, a player managed to get our of the dungeon and inside a city while infected, and now...
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Revolution Controller Finally Revealed →
Interesting.
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"Separate but Equal" Education for Katrina...
I can see this creating horrible ghettos full of evacuees who aren’t getting good education and can’t make money to move away:
The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings will ask Congress to waive a federal law
that bans educational segregation for homeless children.
The Bush administration is arguing, along with states like
Utah and Texas, that...
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The Greatest Games of All Time: Final Fantasy II →
They’re right about the storytelling. This was one of the first games to do it right.
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TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks... →
Is calling this “heartbreaking” over the top? It really upsets me that they’re caving like this.
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UVA Computer Science: The Oracle of Bacon at... →
Kottke linked to this today. Guess I heard about it years ago in Charlottesville because I was connected by a small number of degrees to the programmer.
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How my life became a game →
Kevin Bacon on the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game.
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On redesigning icons, Superman and politics...... →
See also all the links in this article.
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The Ten Stupidest Utopias →
It’s like they wrote an article just for me to enjoy.
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DHTML Lemmings →
Play Lemmings in your web browser.
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Katherine and I got chinese food last night (the usual: chicken lo-mein and hunan bean curd). Our cookies both had the same fortune in it. I’m not sure quite what to make of that.
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iTunes 5 look-and-feel: what do you think? →
Discussion about the new look of iTunes on Inessential. It may grow on me, but my first impression is a negative one.
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Sleepy Dexterity
I always put two pillowcases on my pillows, one facing one way, the other the other way, so that the zipper is never exposed, nor is any part of the real pillow. Having two cases on there makes me feel like the pillow is protected enough that the fact you can’t wash pillows isn’t a problem.
Saturday morning I woke up and my pillow only had one case on it. Somehow, during my sleep, I managed to...
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New Orleans / 2005 Hurricane Katrina →
Before and after satellite images of New Orleans.
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Rubik's Cube Solver →
Enter in your cube’s current setup and get the solution.
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Gmail Notifier for Macs →
gCount stopped working recently. Good to see this out.
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What We Can Learn From George Romero About...
It’s as if the AP has never seen a zombie movie. (Here’s one of those news pieces from a source of the fifth kind.) Convention cleary has it that, in a disaster, you’re specifically allowed to break into:
Grocery stores, to get food,
Gun stores, to get weapons,
General stores, for other supplies and weapons,
Gas stations, to gas up your (possibly stolen) vehicle and get sweets to eat if you...
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Salon.com News | "Looting" or "finding"? →
Salon does a little bit of research on the issue.