- I’m not sure I love this idea enough to actually follow them, but Matthew Baldwin did a neat thing: he created two Twitter bots, one playing Zork, and the other responding as the game. I’m actually more interested in replaying the game itself, but still, it’s pretty neat.
- Why Nigerian e-mail scams are so crude and obvious? Turns out, it may be on purpose. [via]
- So the hitchhiker who said he was writing a book about human kindness only to be shot by a driver…actually shot himself. So, um, I guess that’s one for humanity then…? [via]
- I’m not convinced any of these sounds are necessarily worth preserving, but the Museum of Endangered Sounds is an intriguing idea. [via]
- And finally, Three Simple Tips to Writing Your Own Aaron Sorkin Character Name. He must have hated writing a character named Mark Zuckerberg.
See also:
What can you say? The man has a formula.
games
Scavengers assemble!
Today was our company’s second annual New York City scavenger hunt. Like last year, it was a lot of running around midtown Manhattan for charity, teamed up with employees from other subdivisions of our parent company, and all of us clad in very bright yellow shirts with cartoon bananas on them. It was also a lot of fun. It’s ten bucks to charity and you get to leave the office at two o’clock on a sunny afternoon, and if you win the scavenger hunt, the company buys your team a round of drinks.
My team didn’t win — and in fact, I didn’t contribute a whole lot beyond running after the other five guys — but it was, like I said, all in good fun, and for a good cause. This year’s hunt was a lot harder, taking us back and forth — from Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to Rockefeller Center to Grand Central to Times Square to Bryant Park — and less open to interpretation and creativity than last year. This year’s was less scavenger hunt and more Amazing Race. (Or so I assume. I’ve never actually seen it.)
Anyway, it was fun, even if I had to buy my own drink at the end. The cold and rainy weather that moved in yesterday moved out well before we went outside. Which is great, because otherwise I might not have had a chance to wear that stylish T-shirt you see up above.
Friday various
- An Outtake from Word Freak: The Enigmatic Nigel Richards. Possibly the world’s greatest Scrabble player…though he doesn’t take much enjoyment from the game. [via]
- Israeli Man Changes Name to Mark Zuckerberg to goad the company into suing him. I have no love for Facebook, but his company seems like a pretty clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service, and the man himself seems like an ass.
- Jon Scalzi on the “flying snowman”:
This is not to say that, when encountering fantasy work, one has to abandon all criticism. But if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.
- Zach Handlen on the TV adaptation of Bag of Bones:
A good genre story is designed in such a way as to distract you from its inner machinations. Intellectually, you can go back and say, yes, this was a scene of rising action, this was a character development moment, this was a piece of information that will become crucial later on, this was was a resolution of an earlier mystery. Everyone quotes Chekhov’s comment on a gun in act one going off in act two, and at heart, that’s all stories really are: First you load the pistol, then you aim it, then someone pulls the trigger. It’s a method of delivery for a series of stimuli designed to provoke audience response, and the better the book, movie, or TV show, the less time you spend thinking about the mechanics of the process, and the more time you spend luxuriating in the response.
I have to admit, I kind of want to see it now.
- I noted this on Twitter, but it bears repeating: if you’re offended just by the idea that some Americans are not Christian…then you are a bigot.
- Terry Gilliam continues to dream the impossible dream.
- As much as I think I’d love any movie where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do nothing but talk to one another, I kind of hope they don’t make another Before Sunrise movie. The two, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset work so well together, and I feel like revisiting the characters would be going to the well one too many times. (They also appear in Waking Life together.) Still, I’m willing to be proven wrong.
- A gorgeous photo of the Milky Way from the top of the world [via]
- Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers. I think that sound you’re hearing is the echo along the Uncanny Valley. [via]
- And finally, some wonderful bedtime stories from Doctor Who cast members:
Monday various
- I don’t think I’m actually going to be using this, and not least of all because I almost never use Chrome or its extensions, but this is interesting: Jailbreak the Patriarchy, an extension that gender-swaps all the pronouns. [via]
- The YA Paranormal Drinking Game [via]
- “It has come to our attention that Ayn Rand was in fact a self-serving sociopath. We regret the error.” Copies of the Atlas Shrugged DVD pulled because they (very mistakenly) called it a “timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice” [via]
- Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home will be a musical. That’s…interesting.
- And finally, these Paranormal United States [via]
Tuesday various
- “They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan / When they discovered a slave cemetary there” 19th-c. African-American village unearthed in what is now NYC’s Central Park
- Drug Dealers May Have Wiped Out “Uncontacted” Amazon Tribe [via]
- Where’s WALL-E? [via]
- If the Kindle is $0 next August, I’m totally buying one. Otherwise, not so much.
- And finally, A tear jerking story about Animal Crossing [via]
