NPR interviewed Denise Paolucci, one of the founders of the new journal/blog site Dreamwidth, last week. She’s skeptical about advertising-supported social networking sites, and wrote a multipart essay last year walking through the problems with it (the essay was originally posted to her Live Journal account, but has been moved to Dreamwidth.) The primary problem [...]
Jonathan McIntosh remixed Buffy the Vampire Slayer with current pop-culture darling Twilight to show how Buffy Summers would respond to Edward Cullen’s creepy stalker overtures, resulting in the Best. Fanvid. Ever. [Via Cleolinda.]
Miroslav Satan, the NHL player with the funniest URL on Yahoo!, http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/players/666, got to hoist the Stanley Cup tonight. Congratulations to you and the rest of Penguins. Of course, dammit, I want to see the Sharks hold that trophy, and soon.
My partner Cynthia has a piece in a new collection of essays inspired by WisCon. We ran into Timmi Duchamp, the publisher, at the Minneapolis airport. We were all on the same connecting flight to Madison for WisCon 33. So we got to see the finished book. Forgive the crappy iPhone picture here. I’ll replace [...]
In 2001 nearly everyone hated Microsoft’s Smart Tags. You may recall that Smart Tags were a failed IE feature for adding annotations to websites. Eight years later, why is everyone now fascinated by Blerp, which sounds like Smart Tags with a cuter, Web 2.0 name? I did send an email to Blerp pointing out the [...]
When J.G. Ballard died last month, the New York Times, in their obituary, could not deal with the fact that Ballard wrote science fiction, and infamously wrote: But that’s like calling Brave New World science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin, who also writes science fiction (while literary critics go into denial), has had enough of [...]
The Tiptree Award, for the best science fiction exploring gender published in 2008, goes to Patrick Ness for The Knife of Never Letting Go and Nisi Shawl for her short story collection Filter House. Shawl is also co-author, with Cynthia Ward, of Writing the Other: A Practical Guide, a handbook on writing characters from different [...]
Well, looks like we’re good part of the way to Beggars in Spain.I was amused to read that students are taking Adderall not to be top of their class, but to be able to manage a full course load, and a full night life.Meanwhile, as a greying post-boomer,…
Leonard Cohen at The Paramount TheaterI don’t know if there will be evenings like this again.Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Several folks have asked, if Amazon’s deranking of GLBT, disabled, and other books was the fault of an improper mapping, then why did it affect some titles as far back as February?
The Ja(y)nes at Dear Author have pointed out that Amazon started pullin…
If you want to try a multi-camera shoot of an event, like a TEDx talk, David Pouge found the Flip HD camcorders useful for static shots to augment the close ups, except for a couple of glitches (AV sync in long shots, and different color temperatures o…
A simple, step-by-step guide to derailing awkward conversations by dismissing and trivializing your opposition’s perspective and experience. [ via abostick59 ]
First, damned_colonial has a nifty how-to on getting a read-only Dreamwidth account using your Live Journal identity as an OpenID provider.
Note well that if you have an AOL, Wordpress.com, or Yahoo! account, you can use that as an OpenID as well.
Seco…