A Friday Miscellany

Best paragraph on technology I’ve read today:

I don’t think we’ll ever have the feeling of the one place you have to be ever again…

Increasingly, the name of the game will be software agents that bring the “places” to you and streamline their interfaces together for you, until it feels once again that there is just one place you need to be, and that place is always with you wherever you go. RSS feeds are a slithery amphibian progenitor to whatever will eventually walk erect and engage in tool-using warfare.

That’s from one of the guys who used to make reading Delphi forums fun, and currently makes THE ENGINE more interesting than it would be without him.

divider

Sample panel

EXTERMINUS

Mmmm… pretty pictures by Charity Larrison over a story by Kieron Gillen.

It’s a date movie with Lovecraft and some existential angst. I love that the Internerd brings me stuff like this for free all the time.

divider

I just found out today about The Cultural Gutter (there is a feed link on that page, but it’s kind easy to miss), following up some information from a link about Jim Munroe (he of An Opening Act of Unspeakable Eviland other books, as well as the No Media Kings empire) who writes for it.

Without even really digging into the archives I see reviews of the latest Leguin YA, of Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a piece on Marshall McLuhan and comics, an interview between Munroe & Sean Stewart, etc.

Seems worth some time.

divider

I’m not sure I can summarize this in any way.

George and Jeb Bush are idiots.

(Even if you already agree with that statement, read the link–it’s a new kind of evidence rather than just more incompetence on parade. This is evidence of ignorance of world history, the history of their party, and metaphor.)

divider

700 Hobo Names, read by the author.

An MP3, almost an hour long, of dude reading 700 hobo names. Strangely compelling.

I had lots of favourites, but in the end I’m torn between the hobo calling himself ‘Black Bold, Lord of the Inhumans’ [ref] and the one calling himself “Fatman and the Creature”. (Note: there is no creature.)

If someone would be kind enough to break this up into 70 small files with 10 names in each (roughly, don’t break up any themed runs of names) I would absolutely include these files in my mixes. (That idea stolen from Alex.)

divider

“What do you want to talk about? Politics? Our president is a complete twit. I’ll talk about the death of the novel. I’ll talk about anything you want.”

Kurt Vonnegut, 82 years old and still kicking ass.

divider

My life in Instant Messenger conversations (Part 1)

[12:52] Trish: You have ruined one of my favourite songs for me.

[12:52] Trish: I haven’t listened to Catch the Wind by The Irish Descendants in years, but I love it.

[12:52] Red: How have I ruined it?

[12:52] Trish: I’m listening to it now, and they sing “ah but I may as well try and catch the wind.”

[12:52] Red: try to!

[12:53] Trish: All I can hear in my head is you going “try to”

divider

A monstrous sample-fest that includes Elvis, Negativland, The KLF, Will Smith, Eminem, Grandmaster Flash, William Burroughs, U2, and Whitney Houston(?).

You know you want to hear that.

Not convinced? Read the info page, and check out the detailed list of sample sources.

You can grab it via BitTorrent from here.

divider

Dan Evans (III) is another guy I know from the old Delphi forums days. He occasionally blogs about what it’s like working in television production, and the postings are always deadly funny, in that “wow, that is one fucked-up industry” way.

He had a great post recently about interacting with the network censors on a kid’s television show, that he had to take down. I wish I could link to that, because the memos he quoted from “Broadcast Standards and Practices” were hilarious in their dogmatic stupidity.

However, you can see what he has to say about pitching ideas.

See this, then this, then this.

I almost hate to laugh.

divider

Donkey Monk!

The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library has an image database with around 30,000 images in it.

Wow.

divider

Just for Doug Hern, if he made it down this far:

Hear Dylan Thomas read Do not go gentle into that good night. (You need to be able to handle Flash in your browser for this to work.)

And, did you know that Salon subscribers can download MP3s of all 11 volumes of Thomas reading his own work and that of other poets? (Or actually, if you get a ‘Site Pass’ by watching an ad, then you can pretend to be a premium subscriber long enough to download all 11 albums.)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.