Kevin Kelly (one of the guys behind Long Bets) wrote a really good book, entitled Out of Control, and made it available online. I bumped into it via a link to Chapter 2: Hive Mind. Super cool stuff. The rest of his site looks interesting too.
Category: General
Guilty pleasure: Billy Joel. I suspect this New York Times article is morosely grim even if you’re not a big fan, though. Or maybe it’s just pathetic. The man is certainly whining — but if he was more credible, wouldn’t there be something worthy about a guy who weighs the value of love so high against the rewards of fame? Instead, it’s just the Piano Man, and he’s hard to respect.
The Dialect Survey is about three hundred questions, so don’t start unless you have time, but it’s cool if you do. Perhaps more cool are the maps plotting the results in little color coded dots across the country, confirming that we New Englanders are the only people who say rotary.
Doc Searls makes a really good point about the nature of weblogs, and I think it’s relevant to why I chose to move my daily meanderings off of LiveJournal. (Yes, I know some of you are reading them there. Don’t distract me.) He says, inspired by this comment by Clay Shirky, that weblogs are like radio. Webloggers are broadcasting to the world, rather than having a conversation with their readers. And you know, that’s pretty much true.
LiveJournal is much more oriented towards conversations. The community feature is perhaps the most obvious facet of this, but the friends pages are another one. You create a community with your friends page. I’ve had, on occasion, the experience of being surprised that two people on my friends page don’t know each other — “but they post right next to each other! How odd!” And, of course, since everyone can see who you’re friends with, there’s a tendency for friend groups to overlap like crazed Venn diagrams. It’d be kind of fun to crunch some numbers on that, see if it’s possible to find the friend clusters and how much they overlap, but I don’t really have the techniques.
I’d be curious to hear from any of my LJ readers: does my journal there feel any different than anyone else’s? Do you notice that I’m not really writing for that particular submedium? Do I look odd on your friends list, besides that I have links in all my titles and I ramble on at great length?
I want to see this movie rather badly. Bollywood remakes Reservoir Dogs? Yeah.
Having trouble with Joyce’s Ulysses? There’s hope.
It’s up! Adventure Strips went live today with Mike Barr’s Sorcerer of Fortune — set, of course, in the city of Fortune. What a great title. Also debuting is Ted Stampyak’s Jazz Age. Comics are always free on the day they go up (but subscribe anyhow, cause it’s cheap). Check it out. Athena Voltaire debuts tomorrow. Seriously cool looking stuff.
A California company has been authorized to make the first private moon landing. I have to admit I’m a bit puzzled by this, since the last time I looked it wasn’t illegal to land on the moon. At worst it ought to be necessary to get permits for the launch; why does the U.S. government care where they’re going? And how does the rest of the world feel about the U.S. claiming the right to decide who makes Moon landings?
But I digress; I didn’t mean this as a rant. I just think it’s cool that someone’s going.
It looks like
Mystic River departs from his earlier series work, probably (from his interviews) because he didn’t want to get typecast. I think it was a good choice. Kenzie and Genarro are compelling characters, but at some point they’ll get overused. Their relationship is core to the series; how many changes can he ring before it grows stale?
Clint Eastwood is directing the movie, and the cast includes Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, and Marcia Gay Harden. Brian Helgeland wrote the script. Apparently Sean Penn is playing Jimmy Marcus, and Kevin Bacon will be Sean Devine. That’d mean Tim Robbins plays Dave Boyle. Interesting choice, there, but it works for me.
Oddly, and completely parenthetically, the Amazon listing for the book mentions that 7 people recommended if you liked Mystic River. In His Image appears to be a cheap knockoff of the Left Behind series. I sense an enthusiastic marketing campaign, and I must encourage you all to recommend Mystic River if you liked In His Image. You’ll need the ASIN if you follow the above link; it’s 0380731851.
Warren Zevon has been diagnosed with lung cancer. He’s long been one of my favorite musicians and I am very sad that I never took the chance to see him play before now. It seems unlikely that I will have another chance.