Strange Bundle

My Anonymous Interview

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:10:32 GMT

The website Formspring.Me allows you to pose anonymous (or account-linked) questions to people participating. You submit a question (or comment) within a certain character limit, and then the person responds, if they choose to. I imagine this opens things up to all kinds of abusive behavior, but the brilliant part of this, is it's a comment page that's UNDER CONTROL. The user gets to choose which gets put out there, and the commenter/questioner gets to see the response. It's not a place to blow your own horn, but to genuinely connect with that other person in ways that Twitter promises to do, but is way too anarchic to accomplish. It's too bad more people aren't participating in this, because I think I found my new favorite internet doodad.

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Vote [in abstentia] with Your Dollars

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:59:54 GMT

I was reminded recently of the latest string of boycotts that had rippled through video game consumers in reaction to video game producers doing questionable things or allying themselves with questionable people. Folks decided not to buy Shadow Complex because the author behind the multimedia push for that game is an demagogue, others didn't like that Modern Warfare 2 was breaking precedent by going with a specific, dedicated server system rather than allowing users to create their own hubs, others regarded a sequel of the zombie shooter Left 4 Dead came too early and was heralding the end of promised support for a game that had only been around a year, and the recent revelations about poor working conditions for the team behind the upcoming Western game Red Dead Redemption had some ready to withhold their bucks for that already beleaguered game.

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The Northernmost TIFF: Apology

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:56:40 GMT

As in, explanation; I have no regrets.

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The Northernmost TIFF: Optical Illusions

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:52:47 GMT

The Chilean film Optical Illusions begins with brilliant absurdity, paying direct service to its title:

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The Many Voices of Earl Hammond

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:58:25 GMT

Mumm-Ra

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The Magician Lies at the Top of the Mountain

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:56:59 GMT

Reading Alastair Reynolds' blog, I saw the section for appearances. Since I admire his work, my imagination immediately thought "oh, what if I could make it all the way to Helsinki for his appearance there, and show up and..." What, exactly? What would I do? I've read 1 and a half of his books, and although I like them a lot, what would I say? How would I connect with the guy?

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The Whack-a-mole Vlogging Epidemic

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:55:42 GMT

Youtube keeps changing, but it doesn't seem to have the smart design of its parent company. There are a lot of silly things that could be done away with, like converting everyone's followed channel list into a friend list without letting us choose whose comments we want to listen to.

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Math (for the Problem Solver Who Can't Memorize Equations)

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:51:42 GMT

When growing up, I was given the impression that figuring out a math problem meant that you understood how the machinery of an equation worked. Once you understood the machinery you could apply it anywhere and its results were always true for the given number set. I was given the impression that charting things out and figuring out the problem by hand meant that you didn't understand the nature of the problem, and thus you were doing it wrong.

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I AM NOT YELLING; or: Turn Your Damned Caps Lock Off Already

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:25:04 GMT

In college one of my political science professors was one of the first in my experience to use email regularly. He would announce changes in the schedule through email, and would respond to students' messages readily and thoughtfully. If you ignored his insistence on using all capital letters in his emails, he was one of the better correspondents I'd had at the time. But his capital letters were impossible to ignore, and eventually student pressure forced him to change. I looked at it as an idiosyncrasy, but after being told not to use all-caps myself, I started to see what people were talking about.

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Depends on What You Mean by Renaissance, Really

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:49:30 GMT

Just posted the below as a response to an interesting essay about the demographics of game players and the state of the entertainment media industries.

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To Fellow Prisoners: All You Can Do Is Keep Trying to Break Free

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:19:12 GMT

My eyes won't focus properly. I think of ideas and they never quite swim out of me. Easily distracted, my mind wanders through all my unkept promises as I refuse even the remotest pleasure for myself because, after all, someone who breaks so many promises doesn't deserve much pleasure.

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My Metal Autobiography

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:20:37 GMT

I keep wanting to write about Metal, I guess because I've sorta learned a lot about it researching it as a little hobby for the past few years. This sort of renewed when I saw the track list for Brutal Legend (with or without umlaut, I don't care. Many people who will play this game wouldn't know how to pronounce the umlaut properly, anyway. I only happen to know because my old Chinese teacher told me one of the sounds we had to practice sounded a lot like the German one).

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Twitter is disappointing in ways I hadn't anticpated + Universal Protocols, RIP

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:18:08 GMT

I've had quite a few ideas for this blog, but being a bit of a procrastinator it has to be something that really motivates me to write before I'm willing to sit here and type it out. I've got this idea for profiling some of the trends in offensive food packaging, stuff about language, sociology, whatever...

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Giving Your Ears Some Exercise...

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:15:42 GMT

I sat down to write this entry and noticed that Roger Ebert had said he liked my "Kindle" entry. Being an admirer of his work for a long time, and even more of an admirer of his recent blogging habit, I was cheered up quite a bit to see he'd mentioned my essay in his own blog, in his entry playfully discussing reincarnation from a relatively more scientific perspective. Read it yourself and you'll get what I mean (he's a fun essayist anyway, so check his work out even if that particular subject matter sounds unappealing to you). Thanks, Roger!

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Treating Your Computer Like a Non-Portable Kindle

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:30:18 GMT

In case you hadn't heard, George Orwell's 1984 and several other books were confiscated from people's Amazon Kindles after the copyright holders reported that the various publishers didn't have the right to publish through Amazon, though the folks who lost the books were compensated. I might go into that whole thing some other time (more than talking about the irony of snatching 1984 away from people), but as I sit here trying to figure out my display format for Strange Bundle, I wanted to talk about how to make your plain old computer screen less of a pain to read from, at least for as long as it takes for us to get a portable text reader with no strings attached.

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Wikipedia versus the National Portrait Gallery

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:59:31 GMT

Perhaps you've heard about the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery is at odds with Wikipedia over the latter's appropriation of thousands of finely-detailed digital photographs from the NPG's own website. NPG argues that the portraits are theirs to control, and that they lose potential revenue from the loss of exclusive control of their collection. Wikipedia argues that their being a nonprofit service allows them to appropriate public content with lapsed copyright for the educational benefit of everyone.

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