Month: August 2011

Wednesday various

  • I liked Ryan McGee’s review of the new show Take the Money and Run, which he describes as “LARP&Order.” I don’t think I would remotely enjoy the show.
  • The Stanford Prison Experiment 40 years later. [via]
  • The headline reads: North Dakota is not a state and never has been. I’m reminded of TV Nation’s visit to the so-called state. [via]
  • You know, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about schools no longer teaching cursive, but I think I’m pretty much okay with it. [via]
  • And finally, John Hodgman on acting:

    [W]hat I kind of began to understand about acting is that it’s similar to writing. You warm up for a while, you hate it, you don’t know what you’re doing, you feel totally fake and phony, you feel like you’re mechanically imitating what you did before and you’ll never be able to get any inspiration again, and then suddenly this voice starts coming out of you. And whatever it is you’re working on, if you’re writing, you realize there’s a story that you’re trying to tell that you didn’t know that you were trying to tell. And I think acting is the same way. There’s this period where you’re just pretending to be a human, and then, all of a sudden, some kind of human really emerges from you.

Tuesday’s child

This morning it seemed like the Long Island Railroad hadn’t quite recovered from yesterday’s weather-related madness, with a super-crowded train all the way to Jamaica and some confusing announcements once we got there. But after that, everything seemed to run as smoothly as it ever does, and I got to work around the usual time.

Which is good, because today’s sales meetings were a lot more specific and targeted to our individual books. And I worked extensively on at least two of the books we were presenting to the reps, so I was glad to be there to add my little bit of input.

And we got another free lunch out of it, so there’s that.

Then in the afternoon, we had a fire drill. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to working again in a building where “fire drill” doesn’t translate into “testing the alarms 24/7.” Then again, as a co-worker remarked, he’d willingly trade that now for the constant drilling that’s going on around us all day. (Until the end of August, we were told. At times it’s really tough to concentrate.)

And then? A quick birthday celebration for another co-worker, with a card and some cookies.

And that’s really it for Tuesday. A decent enough day, as far as those things go.

Tuesday links

  • I’m with xkcd on this: fuck cancer.
  • The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes. I can’t say I agree with everything here, but it’s an interesting article, particularly the argument against having Thor and Captain America both do double-duty by setting their characters up for The Avengers.

    That said, I enjoyed both of them just fine as summer entertainment, and while I enjoyed X-Men: First Class no small amount either, I think it’s ultimately the least successful film of the three. (I haven’t seen Green Lantern.) Matthew Vaughn’s “auteur vision” seems cribbed from a few other places (like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, and like Mad Men), and there’s some pretty iffy racial and gender issues at work in the film as well. But maybe that just underlines Pappademas’ main argument: at least the movie has some distinctive stamp to it, however flawed. [via]

  • NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law [via]
  • Soap operas moving online. This will bear further watching. The news, not the shows. (God no.) [via]
  • And finally, Who owns the copyright on a photo taken by a monkey? [via]