- What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?. Well, questions like this are used for making people like me feel old. (See, also, this video of French children playing with vintage technology.) [via]
- Nuclear bomb photo archives. Exactly what it says on the (likely radioactive) tin. [via]
- The Meaning of Dog Barks. Take the interactive quiz! [via]
- There’s something utterly charming about the idea of fifteen-year-old John Updike writing a fan letter to the creator of Little Orphan Annie.
- And finally, Choose your own Night of the Living Dead adventure
photos
Tuesday various
- No more Caps Lock? FAREWELL, OLD FRIEND. [via]
- I bet you didn’t know Inception and Sex & the City 2 are essentially the same movie, did you?
- The day Niagara Falls ran dry. [via]
- One man was responsible for one-third of the world’s spam. Then again, I haven’t actually noticed a drop-off in my own spam since his arrest. [via]
- And finally, the bar for wedding proposals has been lifted:
Tuesday various
- Behind the Scenes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Exactly what it says on the tin.
- Earth from Above: a collection of aerial photography. There are some stunning shots here. [via]
- Jeff VanderMeer on best-of-year lists:
…when I see a book title or author I don’t recognize on a year’s best list, my immediate reaction isn’t usually “WTFâ€, but instead, “Excellent! A chance to find some new, shiny thing that I might love.â€
- Hate captchas? Maybe simple logic questions are the better solution. [via]
- And finally, a history of Soft Skull Press. It’s nice to know something good has come out of a Kinko’s. Maybe that’s why the people behind the counter have almost never been of any help to me: they’re too busy building their independent press empires. [via]
Wednesday various
- Number 9, number 9… I’m in there somewhere.
- Dear god, it’s a pig on wheels!
- Noel Murray:
It doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a great idea for a TV series into something ridiculous. Want to make a show about a diverse cross-section of humanity forging a new society? Or about race relations in Manhattan? Or the dangers of humanizing automatons? Slant it the wrong way, and you may end up with Gilligan’s Island, Diff’rent Strokes, or Small Wonder.
His whole review of the latter’s 1st season DVD set is interesting — though it will come as no surprise to anyone who saw the show growing up (or who has been forced to cap it regularly on HCC) that it’s pretty terrible.
- Is it just me or does the Authors Guild’s argument here seem to be: “we could lose, so we won’t fight, because even if we won, we’d have to keep fighting, so we’ll just give up”? Frankly, I think I may be with Ursula K. Le Guin on this one.
- And finally, you wouldn’t think an episode of the ’90s Hollywood Squares would be particularly funny, but I think this one’s definitely worth it, just for Gilbert Gottfried [via]:
Tuesday various
- These landscapes made with small materials — steel-wool tornado, paprika Mars, etc. — are really impressive. But, as with earlier tilt-shift photographs, I am left in the very weird position of thinking, if these were real, I think they would be less impressive. It’s the work that goes into these, into tricking the eye, that I find much more intriguing than the shots themselves. [via]
- Lost characters explain how to make a sandwich. Funny and only somewhat spoilerish. [via]
- Some people might say a monkey could do this job. I don’t need scientists proving them right. [via]
- Christa Faust on how crime fiction treats women:
Female characters in classic noir fiction tend to fall into one of three categories: the murderous femme fatale; the long-suffering wife who keeps asking the hero, “Why can’t you just let this case go?â€; and, of course, the beautiful victim. [via]
- And finally, now I kind of wish I’d been watching Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show. Frankly, I believe him about the hair.