Millennium hand and shrimp
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Shocklines is shutting down. It’s stale news by web standards, but I only came across the announcement today. I didn’t use Shocklines often, but they were a frequent choice when I felt a small press retail orgy coming on.
Turns out Alexander really is mind-numbing
Filed Under Movies
Which is okay, because I only demanded it for background noise. The screaming Persians are getting a bit annoying, however, so if Gaugamela doesn’t wrap up soon I might switch to something else.
I also love Google
Filed Under Uncategorized
Because they have content in Klingon. I had a moment this morning when I thought I might be dyslexic, then remembered that I’d left the browser set to Klingon by default. In my defense, I did some non-frivolous language shuffling last night, as a quick way to see if a site had any sort of content negotiation set up. My Klingon is only moderately worse than my German, and perhaps better than any language written using a non-Latin alphabet.
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I love Firefox
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Klingon is in the language choice pull-down. I’m pretty certain that’s new in Firefox, even if the ISO code’s been kicking around for a while. And I suspect more web content is written in Klingon than, say, Esperanto.
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RIP Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble
Filed Under Life
This week I learned that the Barnes & Noble in Bryn Mawr will be closing at the end of the month. This made me quite sad.
Of course, I’m not supposed to feel sad. B&N is a Big Chain and therefore Evil. I’m supposed to feel sad for the embattled independent booksellers. And I do…but I’ve never had one, so my sadness for them is a matter of thought, not emotion.
When I was growing up, Sangertown Square had B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. These were adequate for my reading needs, but not great. There was also the Bookworm, not much farther than the mall, a used bookstore where I loaded up on Michael Crichton one summer and also made higher-quality finds (like Tigana). But the shelves were still populated by easy-to-find books; they were just cheaper. (Which is certainly important when you’re in high school, but mainly from a quantity perspective.)
My freshman year of college, I experienced the Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble, across the street from Staples. (While I’m not as much of an office supply geek as many folks I know, it was still nice to find a whole store dedicated to such products, rather than just an aisle in the grocery store.) Walking into B&N was a bit of a wow moment. It was part and parcel of having a decent metropolitan area within a quick train ride…of said train being a five minute walk from my dorm…of suburban civilization being just a couple minutes beyond that…of pizza and Chinese and various other easily-accessible cuisines, many of which could be delivered to the dorm. You don’t get that where I grew up. You can walk in the fields and the woods, but you can’t walk to civilization. You drive. If you want to drive only a few miles, you can pick up milk and other essentials. If you drive fifteen or twenty minutes, you can get to the mall where the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks are (used to be?). And forget about anybody delivering food to your house.
So, yes, I know I’m supposed to hate Big Chains—and suburbs, for that matter—for reasons that are not unsound. But the Bryn Mawr B&N was my first giant bookstore. How can I hate an entire building full of books? It was the place where I routinely filled my bookshelves for four years (and still close enough that I patronize it). I’d walk there with a walkman and tape, usually recorded from a CD but sometimes an honest-to-god cassette from a music store, and stock up on paperbacks or remaindered hardcovers. I’d go there with packs of other Mawrters, sometimes with a shopping agenda, more often without. I have fond memories of paging through How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy and baby name books. (Remember the days before the web, before baby name sites were ubiquitous and helpful folks like John Kasab and Kate Monk and the Academy of St. Gabriel offered suggestions for names of different periods and cultures?) A couple years ago, the Bryn Mawr B&N was the local store with a copy of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories in stock—and when you’ve heard you’re in the Honorable Mentions, you have a very urgent need to get your hands on the book to confirm the news and see which story was picked.
So farewell, Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble. I never knew the name of an employee, I never recognized or was recognized by any of them, and I never attended any sort of event there. But all the same, it is a place near and dear to my heart, and I will miss it.
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Spam spam spam spam
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The first true artificial intelligence will be born of spam.
In order to fight spam, we have developed helpful tools like Spam Assassin and CAPTCHAs. As the spam gets smarter in response, the anti-spam measures also become more intricate. (I can’t be the only person to misread a CAPTCHA, can I? Or am I in a Philip K. Dick novel?) Inevitably, either the spam or the anti-spam will attain sentience. It’ll be just like Terminator, except with rampant penis enlargement rather than a nuclear holocaust.
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5000 cute
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The term originates at a private school. At the end of the year, the teachers were asked to list out some of their positive memories, and these were read over the course of year end celebrations. One of the notes said that one kid was “sooo cute”—and the person reading it squinted and said “5000 cute” (in his defense, he apparently spoke in questioning tone of voice).
Despite the fact that I wasn’t there, I want to kick off a movement to introduce “5000 cute” into standard parlance. Because it’s cute. And what else is one supposed to do with a blog?
20 things my children won’t understand
Filed Under Uncategorized
1. The opening line of Neuromancer.
2. Please be kind—rewind.
3. AIDS as an imminent death sentence.
4. That Daleks were never meant to fly.
5. The physicality of pulling the lever to vote.
6. Fan-subbed anime.
7. Dinosaurs as cold-blooded reptiles.
8. Dittos.
9. Green-on-black computer monitors.
10. Landlines.
11. Rabbit ear antennas.
12. CB radio.
13. Tape as a storage medium.
14. A and B drives.
15. Enzyme tablets for cleaning contacts.
16. Relying solely on dog tags rather than microchipping.
17. That the Rule of Odds and Evens was once a reasonable predictor of the quality of a Star Trek movie.
18. Cheap gasoline.
19. Why manual transmission is referred to as “standard.”
20. That anyone ever thought Mr. Snuffleupagus was imaginary.
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At least I went to someone’s reunion
Filed Under Life, Swarthmore
Larry’s tenth was this past weekend, and quite a lot of fun. It’s the first of three events where we’re likely to see lots of the same people, so I treated it as a non-incredibly-high-priority opportunity to socialize with the usual suspects. Since it was his tenth a lot of unusual suspects showed up. I have a much easier time being social when I’m not feeling crappy, so I enjoyed the festivities and company. Several Swilfolk remarked that I should’ve used “Lovecraft” as a surname (based upon the presence of both middle initials on my name tag). The odd thing is I can’t recall anyone having said that before, and I could’ve sworn my initials have been publicly displayed in the past. Or maybe I’m just going crazy.
Oh, Dark Horse, you are so cruel
Filed Under Comics
I am myopic. I know I am myopic. I am so myopic that even with corrective lenses I can never really get true 20/20 vision. I am okay with this, because my vision is adequately corrected and if I can’t see small things at a great distance, it’s not going to negatively impact my day to day survival. It’s not like I aspired to be a sharpshooter.
I do not particularly enjoy it, however, when my nose is rubbed in my myopia. Larry—a computer geek who grew up reading after lights out—occasionally complains that he now only has 20/20 vision, because his eyes have gotten worse in the past couple years. I have refrained from scratching out those highly functional eyes.
Thus bringing me to Dark Horse, specifically their edition of Samurai Executioner in the original format. The books are small and thick (no problem there) with black and white interiors (also just dandy). But the writing is so tiny. Not only that, but evidently the Japanese characters took up more space than the English translation, because those tiny, tiny words are surrounded by a ton of white space. White space that could be used to make the letters bigger. They do it just to taunt me.
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