Yeah, it’s quick-link morning. But Kodi’s investigation of the relative evil of Arnold Schwarzenegger versus the villains he’s fought in his movies is really good. Arius might have been in favor of some limited separation of powers in the government of lovely Latin American Country, perhaps a parliament he could dissolve at will or something, but nothing on the order of the limitations applied to the office of Governor of California. ...
Cory Doctorow’s written a short story, “Truncat”, set in the same world as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s on Salon so you’ll need to wander through their day pass thing. But hey, it’s a good day for it. You get Kaufman agreeing with me on Pedro (original), a nifty article on Bollywood, and some Al Franken miscellanea. Where was I? Ah, yeah; it’s not a bad story. It’s more transfictionalist stuff, which is all good, but there’s still a tendency to neglect the characters in service of the cool technological concept. Campbell would love Doctorow, which is not a bad thing. Worth reading.
In the fine tradition of Deb’s big list of historical links, here’s another quick link to another fairly comprehensive link collection. It’s everything you wanted to know about underground tunnels (original), more or less. There’s even a Mormon Church subcategory. Thanks to Chris T. for the heads up. Today is a very special day, by the by, for reasons which will become apparent tomorrow.
Actually, Dan (original), Pedro is not “the neediest 10-game winner in baseball history.” He’s the guy who’s giving the Boston Red Sox a chance to win a World Series. It’ll take Manny and Nomar and Varitek to get us to the playoffs, but if the Sox get there, it’s going to be Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe who take the team the rest of the way. This team — this city — needs Pedro. ...
As a rule, I really like Bruce R’s blog Flit. However, I am starting to wonder about his choice of blog partners. T. M. Lutas is not the sharpest crayon in the shed. This in the way of introduction to this exciting new theory of American’s Iraq reconstruction plan. Salam Pax said: I guess you’ve been hearing news about Mosul? Well it’s worse. The security situation isn’t too bad (they don’t rely on Americans in these parts- if they did it wouldn’t be any better than Baghdad). Electricity is more or less sorted out (although we do have problems)- and no, it wasn’t the Amreeeekan who got things running, thank you very much. ...
The BBC just announced that it was going to put its archives online, for free. Danny O’Brien has the best post yet (original) on the announcement, with thoughts on what that might mean, and what the problems could be. I like the theory that it could be a Creative Commons project.
Perhaps reaching new depths of geekiness here, but I added a relationship mapping feature (original) to my local gaming Wiki. It shows how nodes link to one another; here’s Reese Beulay (original) as a collection of boxes and lines. This is actually pretty useful for visualizing how characters relate to one another. I’m going to play around with using it to do relationship maps for new campaigns, too. There’s probably some clever way to use this to visualize blog connections, but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t just degrade into a black hole. Maybe I’ll play with it sometime.
Morning quick-links, morning quick-links… possibly I should get a sidebar. Dunno. Anyhow, Asian Historical Architecture is 6500 pictures of, well, Asian historical architecture arranged in an easy to browse format. Check out, for example, the Patuxai in Laos.
Quote from myself: “Either the Democrats or the Republicans are going to come together behind one candidate. The winning candidate is going to have upwards of 35% of the vote.” Advantage: me! (Yeah, I spent too much time reading self-absorbed blogs while doing research on the previous post. I admit it.)
You probably aren’t going to be able to see Masked and Anonymous — it’s not playing in Boston or San Francisco anymore, so unless you live in New York or Los Angeles you may be out of luck. (Seattle’s got it, though.) The critics really savaged it (original). Me, I thought it was brilliant. _I’m lost, sleeping in an alley _ _I’m lost, I had some family _ I’m lost, I’m here, I’m lost. ...