Day: December 23, 2011

Fridayed

A quiet day, not least of all because I somehow managed to sleep until 11. I went to the cleaners, got some pizza for lunch, worked a little on the Kaleidotrope website. (Any fears that going online would mean the end of tedious layout and formatting were, I am pleased to report, ill-founded.)

And now I’m settling in to watch My Name Is Bruce before calling it a night.

Friday various

  • An Outtake from Word Freak: The Enigmatic Nigel Richards. Possibly the world’s greatest Scrabble player…though he doesn’t take much enjoyment from the game. [via]
  • Israeli Man Changes Name to Mark Zuckerberg to goad the company into suing him. I have no love for Facebook, but his company seems like a pretty clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service, and the man himself seems like an ass.
  • Jon Scalzi on the “flying snowman”:

    This is not to say that, when encountering fantasy work, one has to abandon all criticism. But if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.

  • Zach Handlen on the TV adaptation of Bag of Bones:

    A good genre story is designed in such a way as to distract you from its inner machinations. Intellectually, you can go back and say, yes, this was a scene of rising action, this was a character development moment, this was a piece of information that will become crucial later on, this was was a resolution of an earlier mystery. Everyone quotes Chekhov’s comment on a gun in act one going off in act two, and at heart, that’s all stories really are: First you load the pistol, then you aim it, then someone pulls the trigger. It’s a method of delivery for a series of stimuli designed to provoke audience response, and the better the book, movie, or TV show, the less time you spend thinking about the mechanics of the process, and the more time you spend luxuriating in the response.

    I have to admit, I kind of want to see it now.

  • I noted this on Twitter, but it bears repeating: if you’re offended just by the idea that some Americans are not Christian…then you are a bigot.
  • Terry Gilliam continues to dream the impossible dream.
  • As much as I think I’d love any movie where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do nothing but talk to one another, I kind of hope they don’t make another Before Sunrise movie. The two, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset work so well together, and I feel like revisiting the characters would be going to the well one too many times. (They also appear in Waking Life together.) Still, I’m willing to be proven wrong.
  • A gorgeous photo of the Milky Way from the top of the world [via]
  • Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers. I think that sound you’re hearing is the echo along the Uncanny Valley. [via]
  • And finally, some wonderful bedtime stories from Doctor Who cast members:

Random 10 12-23-11

Last week went like this. This week goes like:

  1. “Stay Hungry” by Talking Heads
    Ooh girl, you can initiate an impulse of love
  2. “She’s Long Gone” by the Black Keys
    She was made to pour you away
  3. “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” by They Might Be Giants, guessed by Betty
    Something unpleasant has spilled on his brain
  4. “Donna the Prima Donna” by Dion & the Belmonts
    Then she tried to make a fool out of me
  5. “The Worst” by the Rolling Stones
    You shouldn’t stick with me
  6. “Sneaky Feelings” by Elvis Costello
    I’d like to get right through the way I feel for you
  7. “Share a Little Joke” by Jefferson Airplane
    Sounded like he’d make a halo
  8. “You Were Always on My Mind” by Elvis Presley, guessed by Betty
    I just never took the time
  9. “In the Crates on the Moon” by the Mountain Goats
    And the shark’s gonna come
  10. “Post-War” by M. Ward
    Put a dollar into the machine and you’ll remember when

Good luck!