- With Coffee, the Price of Individualism Can Be High. We have these K-cups at work, with a Keurig machine. And beyond most of the coffee blends not being especially good, I think the convenience for a largeish workplace is definitely worth it. I drink so little coffee I’d feel a little annoyed if I had to help remake a fresh pot regularly. (The Keurig also makes tea and cocoa, so there’s that.) [via]
- One word: Megafishes. [via]
- Breakthrough: The first sound recordings based on reading people’s minds [via]
- ‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine. I think I would like HuffPo more if it wasn’t a huge content farm fronted by unexceptional celebrity essays and stories from other websites, where millions of dollars go to line the pockets of Arianna Huffington but not a cent goes to the writers. Or at least if people on Twitter would stop linking to it as much.
- And finally, the real question: does anyone have sixty-thousand dollars I could borrow? [via]
comics
Tuesday various
- Netflix is pretty sure it has no future in DVDs. You know, I like streaming and on-demand, but the selection is still not that great, relatively speaking. If Netflix could ensure the same level of selection and quality with streaming as with the physical DVDs…well, I’d still occasionally be annoyed they were most often DVDs without special features of any kind, but I’d be more willing to switch over to streaming-only. (If the high cost of having both doesn’t force the issue for me at some near-future point.) But Netflix can’t promise that. Some of it is out of their hands — studios are covetous of their movies and shows, and some (like HBO) see Netflix, maybe rightly, as a direct competitor. So I really do hope Netflix doesn’t continue their push towards streaming-and-only-streaming, that they realize it wasn’t just the Qwiskter name that upset customers. I want a wide and varied selection of movies and shows. I don’t want more of “You can’t watch that, but have you ever tried this…?”)
- Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost [via]
- Want to smell like a superhero? [via]
- “Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.”
- And finally, Basil Fawlty Impersonator Chat:
As Mark Evanier notes, “There are literally more professional impersonators of Basil Fawlty around than there were episodes of Fawlty Towers.”
Saturday
I find it very difficult to believe it snowed only a week ago. You would not have been uncomfortable walking around, even outside, with your sleeves rolled up or at most a light jacket. It’s colder and windier now, but the weather was weirdly pleasant all afternoon.
Not that I did an awful lot with it, beyond watching a few more episodes of Red Dwarf, reading a little Tintin, and helping my father put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting times, no doubt.
Monday various
- Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities In The Marvel Universe [via]
- Sam Worthington now admits he also sucked in Clash of the Titans. Well, it’s something, at least.
- New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin’. Crossword to your mother. [via]
- “Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing.” College professor seeds Internet with fake term paper to catch plagiarists
- And finally, Maureen McHugh on zombies:
Zombies, of course, are the opposite [of vampires]. They lack individuality. They are mindless, ugly, hungry. In a world where everything is ecologically interconnected they are outside nature, and therefore something that we can kill without concern or discrimination. And yet they are us, transformed into trash. Zombies, in one sense, are the ultimate ecological disaster.
Thursday various
- SETI and the problems with searching for alien life [via]
- Grant Morrison Comic Bingo [via]
- Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism:
To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them. [via]
- The darker side of Groupon. Apparently it kind of sucks for small businesses. [via]
- The Myths at the Bar, Debunked
- The harrowing story of What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447. Warning: you almost certainly will not want to fly after reading this. (Also: FAA approves iPads in the cockpit.) [via]
- The AV Club compiles a list of 26 destructive fictional therapists. I keep thinking there’s maybe a book in this, but that’s maybe just my day job talking.
- When William Gibson wrote, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” did he really mean Fox News? Does Newt Gingrich want to make Neuromancer come true? [via]
- Star Trek People Drinking Coffee. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
- And finally, the lovely video for “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis. After, I recommend the making-of video. [via]