Culture

The rules of The Apprentice got a little clearer this week; the project manager has to choose two people each week to go into the final stage with him, and one of the three gets fired. So, OK, Troy didn’t totally blow it last week. On the other hand, now the team is saddled with a total malcontent in Sam for at least a little while longer; I still think you gotta do a better job of balancing the strategy of picking the bad performers and the management difficulty of staying on everyone’s good side. ...

Bob Mould blogs. All hail Bob Mould. Hello, better late than never, or maybe not - you decide. A lot of my friends have been blogging for a while, and I figured it might be about time for me to join the party.

“Dog! Swine! Come back here with my ray weapon!” (original) From here, via BoingBoing.

Daniel Keys Moran has another story up on his web site. It’s not really all that; it’s just social and technological extrapolation without any plot. It’s firmly in Greg Egan territory without breaking new ground. But, you know, if you still hold out hope that A.I. War will show up at some point this is your bi-yearly fix.

John Clute’s review of the new Heinlein novel is great reading. It makes me want to read the book, which was somewhat unlikely given that I’m not so fond of posthumous literary exhumations. It also takes down Spider Robinson about as nicely as you’ll ever see it done.

The easily amused, and that would be me, will enjoy this translation (original) of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. It is, of course, in blog format. Wait. No, it isn’t, it’s in online journal format. Ah, how the trends change. Via More Like This (original).

This story about getting Darth Vader’s autograph is the best autograph story ever. You have to admire an evil that has such excellent attention to detail. Luke was just darned lucky that Vader turned from the dark side; if he’d stayed true to his path the Rebels wouldn’t have had a chance.

The Google/Amazon convergence continues, as Google adds book search (original) to its repertoire. It’s a step. It looks like only short excerpts of each book are stored, but Google implies full text search. There’s more interesting discussion of this, including the revenue model, over on Metafilter.

This is the big week for Chronicle of Riddick news. Apple has a big fat Quicktime trailer, which I hear also ran in front of Return of the King, and the official site has a semi-nifty Flash animation. Despite the fact that it all looks like a Warhammer 40K knockoff, I’m still drooling. Pitcher Blacker (original) looks like the go-to site for news about the movies.

Today, I’m downloading 10,000 books. Because I can, and because I want to. If anyone local wants a DVD with 10,000 books on it for the holidays, let me know.