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| Monday Nov 21, 2005 | Mammon be praised! Some of the best in humorous free Internet stuff is finally available in convenient not-free physical form, just in time to score you originality points in the gift-giving wars. Scope Strongbad DVDs, posters from electric sheep, bendy toys from T. Farnon's photocomic Leisure Town, plus swanky trade paperbacks of the After Kelly eNovel (illustrated by multiple Eisner-nominee Justine Shaw) and Australia's #1 comic, Platinum Grit. to Entertainment by cricket |
| Tuesday Aug 2, 2005 | In 1977 Archie Goodwin and Jim Mooney launched a female Spider-Man named Spider-Woman. Marv Wolfman added his signature huge superheroine hair and christened her Jessica Drew, namesake of Nancy Drew and his daughter Jessica. Her striking, fetish-worthy spandex costume and tendency to get tied up a lot drew accolades from photo-manipulation artists, cosplayers, transvestites and a skit on Saturday Night Live. She peaked with her own cartoon TV show, but then faded from the Marvel Universe as she lost some abilities in 1984 and the rest in 1999. Happily creator Brian Michael Bendis has resurrected her for his New Avengers. Celebrate with a Jessica Drew Quake mod, icons, Underoos, complete list of appearances, yahoo group, MiniMate, aptly-named bust, and new Heroclix figure. Best of all, she is captivatingly captured in paint by Michael Dashow, Greg Horn Judge, and Andrea Di Vito (B&W). to Comics by cricket |
| Saturday Jun 11, 2005 | In 1951(ish), Tolkien wrote a letter to Milton Waldman expressing his motivations for writing The Lord of the Rings: "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." He longed to create a living myth; one which continued to flower under the care of many gardeners. When George Lucas created Star Wars, did he imagine such skillfully-crafted, entertaining fanfilms about Storm Troopers, Boba Fett, Mara Jade, a Valley-girl Jedi, or fun, way-cool tales of the Jedi Knights, with moments that rival the prequels? Did Gene Roddenberry picture Starship Exeter, the U.S.S. Intrepid, or Hidden Frontier? Photoshop and cosplay empower even the impecunious to roll your own version of your favorite stories. As the "official" versions of the most influential stories of the 20th century wind down, they begin their evolution into living myth. to Literature by cricket |
| Friday Apr 8, 2005 | Don'tcha hate it when fun, high production-value scifi films have their U.S. release delayed for years while the Trade Federation argue domestic gross points? Rumor has it Saint Peter looks the other way if you bittorrent now, spread positive word-of-mouth about the good stuff, then buy the DVD when it hits US stores. Japan offers the gorgeous Casshern (homepage, trailer, purchase region-free DVD), plus the live-action version of Go Nagai's Cutie Honey, directed by Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame (official site, purchase region-free DVD), and finally the stunning CGI Appleseed (homepage, trailer, purchase region-free DVD). France gives us the live-action/CGI hybrid Immortel (Ad Vitam), written and directed by Enki Bilal and starring Linda Hardy as Jill Bioskop, the insanely hot blue-haired space chick from Bilal's comics La Foire aux immortels and La Femme piège (homepage, trailers, purchase region 2 DVD). Finally, Turkey makes her first-ever respectable scifi flick, G.O.R.A. - A Space Movie (homepage, trailer, mixed reviews, purchase region 2 DVD). And keep an eye out for Hinokio, Japan's upcoming robotic spin on "Pinocchio." to Movies by cricket |
| Monday Apr 19, 2004 | What's up with gay marriages? On February 12 Mayor Gavin Newsom directed San Francisco City Hall to issue gender-neutral marriage licenses, allowing same-sex marriages. 4,161 gay weddings were performed until the conservative Christian lobbying groups Alliance Defense Fund and Campaign for California Families successfully petitioned the California Supreme Court to block the marriages beginning March 11th. On February 24 President Bush declared support for an amendment to the Constitution that would ban gay marriage, though passing such an amendment would require a lengthy approval process: two-thirds of the House and Senate, then passage in at least three-fourths of all state legislatures. There's a lot of debate about how things will eventually fall, but in the meantime the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that Massachusetts must recognize same-sex marriage beginning May 17. America has heard from the lobbyists, pundits, reporters, lawyers and politicians, but what about the people actually getting married? Recording artists Green and Root have released a gorgeous, touching music video for the song "Marrying You" with footage from their actual City Hall wedding on February 13th, 2004. to Society by cricket |
| Wednesday Nov 27, 2002 | Settling down for a good creep-out courtesy of H.P. Lovecraft, but lacking sufficiently haunting and bizarre avant-garde chamber music to properly set the mood? Check out Yuggoth Records, which boasts darkly malevolent and unthinkably alien song samples and paintings. Also featuring the ten-year Yuggoth Set Project, which has to date worked its way to Azathoth. to Music by cricket |
| Tuesday Nov 26, 2002 | Whatever happened to comic books? In the 1940s millions of Americans read comics not only for Superhero stories, but Romance, Cowboys, War, History, Literary Adaptations and more. Readers were lured away whenever another medium provided their "fix" cheaper, easier or better, beginning with television in the '50s. By the early '80s the only genre still dominated by comics was Superheroes, and 1989's hugely profitable Batman signaled the beginning of the superheroic exodus from comics to film. Since then comicbook sales have plummeted, from $850 million in 1993 to $275 million in 2000 and still falling fast. Leading publishers Marvel and DC Comics both now treat comics solely as Research and Development: they lose millions printing the comics, but earn far more selling licenses for movies, cartoons and toys. Comics' core audience, traditionally pre-teens, is now 18-30 and getting older every year. Is this the death of comics? Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, plays Gandalf to an unofficial fellowship out to save comics by migrating to the Internet! Join the revolution with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town, Derek Kirk's Small Stories, Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox, Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell and more!
to Comics by cricket |
| Monday Oct 7, 2002 | In 1040 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng invented the earliest printing press. In 1436 Johann Gutenberg rediscovered the idea, hoping to get rich by automating the creation of indulgences, expensive documents of divine forgiveness the Roman Catholic Church sold to wealthy sinners from about 1050 to 1562. Gutenberg's subsequent get-rich-quick scheme, a mass-produced Bible, revolutionized the world by democratizing the written word. Today the supremacy of the written word has been dethroned by movies and television. Enter the home computer, which is on the cusp of making film-making available even to people without wealth or political connections. For a glimpse of the coming revolution, check out opening credits from Rustboy, Rocketmen vs. Robots, Pica Towers and the fan-trailer for Star Wars Episode III: Rise of the Empire. Go, humanity! to Media by cricket |
| Sunday Sep 22, 2002 | Hankerin' for a fantasy world as imagination-stretching as Middle Earth, even if it's rough around the edges and maybe even slightly odd? Jennifer Diane Reitz's Unicorn Jelly comicstrip is cuter than Hello Kitty, more Wicca-friendly than Buffy, as wonderfully manga-inspired as Adam Warren, and better scifi than you-know-who. And how's this for endless stuff to geek out over? The Unicorn Jelly world codex, custom card game, a self-zooming animated map, forum, an .mp3 guide to UJ's language, fonts, stunning fan art, fanfic, alternate universe strips, Dungeons and Dragons stats for all the characters (though you'll doubtless prefer the Unicorn Jelly Role Playing Game system), and an original chess-like board game complete with a downloadable version for Windows. Confused? Scope the handy guide to understanding the strip on different levels grouped by fruit type. to Literature by cricket |
| Thursday Feb 28, 2002 | The Enron scandal has become the world's most famous cautionary tale of what can happen when well-meaning CEOs like Kenneth Lay (Bush's leading financial patron and, completely coincidentally, co-author of Bush's energy policy (which regulates Enron)) are "duped" into doing horribly evil things without realizing it by just about everyone they've ever hired, done business with or met for the past sixteen years. ("Aw... Lay issums a poor wittle bumblingly-innocent bunny!") Happily there's a silver lining: the sudden widespread approval of corporate whistle-blowing is blossoming into one of the healthiest political trends in twenty years (law offices are reportedly swamped). And even non the non-Internet-savvy are catching on that it's an imprudent and needless gamble to invest in, partner with or accept a position at a company without first peeking through their dirty laundry. to Society by cricket |
| Tuesday Feb 12, 2002 | Newsflash for geeks: J.R.R. Tolkien didn't invent Modern Fantasy! He consciously followed in the footsteps of the genre's trailblazers: E.R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, William Morris and George MacDonald. None of which answers the juiciest mystery raised by Lord of the Rings, namely "Is Frodo gay?" to Literature by cricket |
| Sunday Nov 25, 2001 | Remember the little rush of pleasure the first time your brain was forced to question itself by the tessellations, optical deceptions and serene beauty of M.C. Escher? Relive that sense of wonder with a few of his artistic heirs: Kelly Houle and István Orosz specialize in "catoptric anamorphosis" (the art of distorting an image such that you need a mirror to correct it). Their visions include the unexpected, poetic, and flat-out impossible. to Art by cricket |
| Friday Nov 16, 2001 | As of today, all three trailers for the breathlessly awaited Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones are available for download. Unfortunately Breathing requires that you register to receive electronic junk mail, Mystery requires that you purchase the Phantom Menace DVD ($30), and the large version of Forbidden Love requires that you purchase the full version of QuickTime Pro ($30). Fans who feel that their affection for the series is being exploited to rip them off are simply circumventing the official system and downloading the trailers from the Gnutella file sharing network (usually with free clients like Bearshare for Windows or Mactella for the Macintosh). Gnutella's legality is dubious (and downloading the unlock codes for QuickTime Pro is without question illegal), but it's quicker, easier and cheaper to use than the official Star Wars website, and it sends the Lucasfilm empire a message of... well, rebellion. to Movies by cricket |
| Wednesday Oct 17, 2001 | Online comics come of age with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, a poignant, unflinching and hauntingly beautiful story of alienation. The lushly painted artwork is stunning, something like Love and Rockets crossed with The Breakfast Club, with a soundtrack by Morrissey, The Smiths and Elastica (and titled after the B-Movie single). NG has already scored props from big-time comix pundit Scott McCloud. When's the last time a comicbook made you cry? to Comics by cricket |
| Wednesday Oct 3, 2001 | Comicbook magus Alan
Moore wrote From
Hell partly as a reaction to most Jack the Ripper stories, which pay
lip-service to denouncing serial murder while transparently pornographing
it: "The lushness of the bosom, the glint of the knife, the exciting
music..." Alas, to judge by the trailer, the upcoming
From Hell movie is everything
the novel was written to oppose.
to Movies by cricket |
| Friday Sep 14, 2001 | Universal Studio's Josie And The Pussycats features brand logos in nearly every shot. The director's commentary includes a long claim that this isn't product placement, because they didn't receive a penny. Universal has big-money promotion deals with most of the companies featured in the film. The theme of the film is "deceiving and manipulating teenagers is morally wrong." ...inside joke? to Movies by cricket |
| Enterprise, Star Trek series V, debuts September 26th. So get your geek on: download the tv promos, scope the latest crotch candy and check out the theme song from the commercial (Wherever You Go by The Calling). Paramount has been getting a lot of mileage out of their "new" design for the Enterprise, but Hello! I think we know an
Akira Class when we see one! (Akira Class designed by Alex Jaeger for the film 'First Contact' (1996) and appeared in episodes of Voyager and Deep Space Nine.)
to Television by cricket |
| Friday May 25, 2001 | Wanna climb walls like Spiderman? Get yourself a Gekkomat, a German wall-climbing invention which apparently really works.
to Gadgets by cricket |
| Tuesday Apr 24, 2001 | Geek Hard!! Fans of Star Trek, Forbidden Planet and the Alien films should check out A.E. Van Vogt's 1950 novel The Voyage of The Space Beagle, almost certainly the primary inspiration for all three and still a great read. Van Vogt's 1940 novel Slan created the basic format for almost all mutant stories that followed, in particular the idea of super-powered mutants banding together against human oppression. This led to Henry Kuttner's 1953 Mutant, which even without the bald telepaths would be the obvious source for the X-Men, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963. to Literature by cricket |
| Friday Feb 9, 2001 | Hardcore comic geeks "best ever" lists nearly always include Watchmen, Love and Rockets, Eightball, Nausicaa and Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn. Conspicuous in its absence is Platinum Grit, the best comic you've never heard of. PG has almost never been distributed outside of Australia, yet has managed to inspire fan sites, a fan forum and rabid worldwide readership. Rumor has it they're negotiating with an American publisher - in the meantime check out swanky, free shockwave versions of Issue 8 and Issue 11.
to Comics by cricket |
| Wednesday Jan 31, 2001 | As if you needed another reason to put off finding a girlfriend: Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 are finally being released on DVD, in the States, in their entirety. Anderson's model studio developed the techniques and trained the artists who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, James Bond, Batman, Krull, Alien, Aliens, and Dragonheart. to Television by cricket |
| Russia's Salyut 1 was
the first space station put into orbit, on April 19, 1971, losing a few cosmonauts
before deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean in October. Skylab lasted from
1973 to 1979, raining debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia when
it crashed to Earth. Hanging over our heads these days is Mir, expected to crash on March 6th, 2001 and the
much-touted third brightest object in the night sky (after the Moon and Venus), the $100
billion
International
Space Station. The
ISS has a little-publicized projected lifespan of 15 to 20
years, after which the orbit will decay and it will hopefully not land on
anyone you know. [sigh] The future's not what it used to be.
to Science by cricket |
| Sunday Dec 24, 2000 | Ghost Dog is an entertaining, sometimes poetic movie about an inner-city Mafia hitman who follows the Samurai code, as he understands it from Yamamoto Tsunetomo's 1716 book Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. But Bushido (the way of the warrior) was an idealization, not a reality, and even scholars in Tsunetomo's time questioned the worth of warrior advice from someone who had never personally seen combat. So why has this collection of hypothetical advice become so popular with the influential? Could it be because Tsunetomo joins the ranks of Confucius, Plato and countless other upper-class writers who propose that the most noble act a lower-class person can perform is to obey superiors without question, even if it means death? to History by cricket |
| Thursday Oct 26, 2000 | Wait 10:13 minutes after the last official song on the X-Files Film Soundtrack to hear the "secret" track - Chris Carter explaining the whole shebang (listen to the mp3 or read the transcript). Turns out the X-Files conspiracy is based on the 1940 collaboration between France's Vichy régime and the Nazis: aliens are the Nazis, the world governments are the Vichy and the world population is the betrayed French people. But if everything is explained, why is the show still on? [ distant cash register noise ]
to Television by cricket |
| Strangers With Candy is like The Simpsons turned up to 11 - so intelligent, shocking and hilarious you won't believe it got on TV. I even dig the faux Crystal Method techno song that's been circulating on Napster. For extra creep-out factor, check out humorous nonfiction by Strangers star Amy Sedaris' brother, David Sedaris. He'll sometimes reveal the Sedaris household origins of something you'd assume too disquieting to be true - like feces mysteriously appearing on the bathroom towels... to Television by cricket |
| Friday Aug 25, 2000 | Scifi Channel has released two promising trailers for the their upcoming miniseries of Frank Herbert's staggeringly imaginative Dune. Those disappointed by the studio-gutted 1984 David Lynch film might be surprised to learn that Alexandro Jodorowski organized some amazing pre-production before his '70s attempt was scuttled, including Harkonnen visualizations by H.R. Giger (the famous "Giger Chair" was designed to be a "Harkonnen Chair"), costumes by Moebius (Bladerunner, The Abyss, Tron, The Fifth Element), effects by Dan O'Bannon (who later wrote Alien), ships by Chris Foss, music by Pink Floyd and even an appearance by Salvador Dali as Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV! to Movies by cricket |
| Saturday Jul 29, 2000 | David Fincher's Fight Club is the first movie that does more than equal the novel it's based on, supplanting it entirely. Not a single idea is lost in the translation, and we are treated to new wrinkles (homosexual subtext) and juicy visual metaphors (insomniac flashes of Tyler as the only warm color against a sea of cool). And hey, have you noticed Act I is reminiscent of Harold & Maude, Act II of The Chocolate War? And both films star Bud Cort? Which I'm sure is coincidence. I mean, even if I'm too afraid to watch another Cort film rumored to have disquieting similarities to Fight Club's Act III, that wouldn't, you know, reveal a flaw in my comforting self-delusions, right? [nervous laughter] When I asked Tyler about it he made a disparaging remark about my cleverness and artfully changed the subject by punching me in the face. to Movies by cricket |
| Friday Jul 21, 2000 | The reviews are in: X-Men is the first well-done superhero movie! Countingdown.com provides some remarkably long downloadable clips of some of the best scenes in the film. You can also see all three trailers and behind-the-scenes clips at the official site. to Movies by cricket |
| Saturday Jul 8, 2000 | Showgirls, Basic Instinct, Sliver, Jade, Flashdance... For years Joe Eszterhas has proven the naysayers wrong - you can be the least imaginative screenwriter in Hollywood and also the highest-paid, provided you use the secret formula that all women (all women worth mentioning, anyway) are hot, young, frequently evil and even more frequently naked. (Favorite moment from Basic Instinct, for which Eszterhas was paid $3 million: Sharon Stone's character writes a novel under a pen name to hide her identity, then thoughtfully includes her photo on the back cover.) Burn Hollywood Burn proves Eszterhas can write humor every bit as well as thrillers; the I was an hour in before I realized it was intended to be a comedy. (Also, not enough screen time for the hot young evil naked chick!) to Movies by cricket |
| Monday Jun 26, 2000 | A beautiful, photo-realistic robot is assembled with visual echoes of Japanese anime (like Ghost in The Shell). The robot has Bjork's features (again, photo realistic), which begin singing. Another Bjork-faced gynoid (female android) joins in the duet, they fall in love and tonsil hockey to the instrumental fade-out. Kinky, cybery, beautiful, all wrapped up in the All Is Love video. to Music by cricket |
| Saturday Jun 24, 2000 | Proving once again that the psychochemical cocktail labeled 'sainthood' in ye olden days and 'psychological disorder' today is the 'computer genius' of the future, Brenda's Game Page includes such meticulous, commercial-quality game levels as this Nike Airforce base in Connecticut for Quake 2. Check out the pix comparing the game screens with photographs of the real thing and be ye impressed. to Games by cricket |
| Thursday Jun 22, 2000 | MySap.com's massive new ad campaign: "You can. It does." promises everything and commits to nothing. Has it occurred to their execs that making brazenly empty promises is tantamount to announcing they can't be trusted? to Commerce by cricket |
| Tuesday Jun 20, 2000 | Mono Crafts in Tokyo features the most humblingly slick Flash website I've ever seen. to Web by cricket |
| Friday May 26, 2000 | Geek trivia department: MP3 was invented by Karlheinz Brandenburg, of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. The compression algorithm was modeled on Suzanne Vega singing "Tom's Diner", which is of course readily available as an illegal MP3. Ah, irony...
to Music by cricket |
| Sunday May 21, 2000 | Were lightsabres inspired by Far Out Space Nuts? Were Imperial Walkers invented by Ralph McQuarrie while George Lucas was still in high school? Star Wars Origins reveals the little-known forerunners for images and ideas in Star Wars. The most interesting feature may be the chart comparing Joseph Campbell's universal myth with both Star Wars and The Matrix, which suggests a Judeo-Christian bias that flawed Campbell's otherwise brilliant reverse-engineering of mythic structure. to Movies by cricket |
| Syndicated comics strips are generally so awful I'd begun to despair. Turns out it's the syndication system, not the medium, that's poisoned. People are publishing online in droves, including some of the best comics the world has ever seen. For instance, Christopher Baldwin's Bruno is a joyful, beautifully-drawn and skillfully executed labor of love... basically the embodiment of why I liked comics in the first place (also art in general. and life itself, really). Plus, it gets beaucoup bonus points for being copublished in French. Treat yourself and fulfill your hazy ambitions to make lifekind a teensy bit better at the same time: bolster the quotient of good mojo in the world by ordering Bruno stuff. Magnifique!! to Comics by cricket |
| Monday May 15, 2000 | A nice side-effect of the sudden explosion in short films on the Internet is access to imaginative, watchable science fiction. Christian Volckman's Maaz and Meher Gourjian's Plug are both lyrically reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's moody masterpiece Brazil. Gillian Ashurst's Venus Blue gives us an excuse to watch a stunning blond woman in requisite "space babe" outfit as she spreads the contagion of true happiness. Check out Sci-fi.com's well-done short film section for more treats, including Mark Osborne's brilliant claymation More. to Movies by cricket |
| Sunday May 14, 2000 | Alan Moore wrote Watchmen and Swamp Thing and is generally considered the most bitchin' writer in Western comics. Stephen Camper has created the definitive Alan Moore fan site. And in case you'd become disenchanted with Moore for more-or-less openly milking the Image phenomenon to get rich as quickly as possible before the comics industry collapses completely, check out the finally-released From Hell compilation or the recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both utter gems.
to Comics by cricket |
| Why is listening to audiobooks on your Rio player so painful? Partially it's the user-hostile Audible.com website (e.g., you need to wade through several pages of "I agree to receive spam" before they'll even relinquish a sample). But mostly it's because Usability and Avoiding Legal Accountability are contradictory goals. See, Diamond Multimedia created Rioport.com in early '99 as the dedicated support site for the Rio players. Enter lots of lawsuits involving the illegal distribution of MP3s, for which Diamond made the leading portable player and operated an MP3 distribution website - any copyright lawyer would advise them to split their concerns into separate legal entities, each of which could claim that piracy is someone else's fault. Not surprisingly, Diamond (now a division of S3) spun off RioPort, Inc. in October. The downside for the user is that although they theoretically have a new support site (RioHome.com, which still clumsily refers to itself as Rioport), people visiting RioPort seeking the support promised in the software and manual are left in the cold.
to Music by cricket |
| Monday May 8, 2000 | Chad Frick's YukYuk.com is a consistently bright spot for the difficult-to-define, short-attention-span entertainment for at which the web excels. The "interactive cartoons" of Mr. Furd are particularly inventive, recycling the same bleeps over and over into a cute alien language. And the dancers are good examples of Frick's trademark: Graphical User Interfaces which manage to be exotic without being irritating.
to Internet by cricket |
| If you've never completely overcome the mysterious pre-pubescent stirrings in the nether regions of your crime-fighting outfit elicited by Julie Newmar as Catwoman (and who among us has, really?), what better way to while away your ostensible adulthood than downloading images of cheesecake photos with superhero outfits airbrushed over them? The first and best "digital manipulation artist" is Rik van Koert from 4F Creations. Most of his numerous imitators are predictably terrible, though there are a few talented up-and-comers.
to Art by cricket |
| Wednesday May 3, 2000 | Ideo's Palm V has long made Star Trek's tricorders look like Fred Flinstone technology. Think Outside just began shipping a Portable Palm Keyboard, which elicits gasps even among Silicon Valley technerds. This baby has a full-sized keyboard, ingeniously collapses down to the size of a Palm III, and is utterly James Bond. Combine it with Cutting Edge Software's SmartDoc and leave your laptop at home. And as long as you're hotsyncing, check out my favorite Palm games: Galax (fantastic greyscale Galaxian clone), Trek (cloned from the classic mainframe game), Go (the Japanese boardgame) and the great nerd puzzle Netwalk. to Gadgets by cricket |
| Gerry Anderson has created more than his share of excellent geeklarvae TV, including Thunderbirds, UFO and my beloved Space 1999. Rodney Matthews, though sometimes dismissed as a Roger Dean wannabe (he's also done Yes covers and, okay, his fonts are too baroque to be legible), is a gifted, idiosyncratic artist who sold millions of his insectile sci-fi posters in the '70s and has since designed numerous record covers, book jackets and recently the (unfortunately crappy) Playstation/PC game Shadow Master. The two recently collaborated on a British TV show called Lavender Castle, which combines puppets, computer graphics and poetically beautiful design to bring to life a lushly illustrated children's fantasy. to Television by cricket |
| Tuesday May 2, 2000 | Despite the best intentions of your parents, teachers and school administrators, school often amounts to a cross between a prison and a wage-slave indoctrination center. Even those who perform well in school are saddled with a lifelong, toxic addiction to external validation. Don't surrender your childhood so easily! If you find school limiting, I urge you to explore the "unschooling" (or "homeschooling") movement. An excellent starting place is The Teenage Liberation Handbook; How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, by Grace Llewellyn. (Yes, there are tips on how to sell your parents on the idea...)
to Education by cricket |
| Sunday Apr 16, 2000 | In 1949 David Bourland responded to the perennial problems of the verb "to be" by suggesting that we remove it completely from the language. Although it sounds like a moronically simple change, E-Prime (English without the being verb) results in dramatically improved clarity of communication, making the agent-hiding passive voice almost impossible, reducing hidden assumptions, and removing illusions of immutability. The massive unpopularity of E-Prime suggests that the true, unspoken purpose of language is usually not to inform but manipulate. to Linguistics by cricket |
| Monday Feb 28, 2000 | Send digital voodoo curses to friends and enemies alike. Pinstruck is a modestly beautiful webtoy created by Steem.com (who's corporate site is a work of art). to Internet by cricket |
| Thursday Jan 20, 2000 | Noodle is a free software toy which provides a visual metaphor for music-making that's so simple to use a non-musician will take to it instantly, so play-friendly and sophisticated experienced musicians will love it. It was built by the uberbrains from Realworld (who Peter Gabriel has tapped several times for CDRoms and stuff). Noodle is one of those oddities that reminds me software can be so good it makes you weep or laugh or call old friends to proselytize. to Music by cricket |
| Tuesday Jan 18, 2000 | GlobZ bills itself as "interactive games, stories & toys." Open a window/toy. Move it around. Resize it. Golly. It's a minor Flash masterpiece. to Computing by cricket |
| Tuesday Nov 16, 1999 | Nine out of ten arrested adolescents agree: the new Star Wars movie sucked, but the lightsabre duel was "hella cool." Why not eliminate the middleman and watch Duel, one minute thirty-six seconds of original, surprisingly satisfying Jedi butt-kick? (The entire Mars Violet site is pretty swank). to Art by cricket |
| Saturday Nov 6, 1999 | "It's a technological solution to the nonexistence of God; It makes us feel like our calendars are counting something." Y2k, the song. to Music by cricket |
| Wednesday Sep 15, 1999 | Tribal societies like the Hopi Indians avoided the inherent problems of a law-enforcement class because accountability was built-in to their social structure; you interacted with the same hundred or so people your entire life, so you knew there would be consequences for inappropriate behavior. The Dick List from the fabulous Disgruntled Housewife.com may be a harbinger of this model scaled for the global village. to Culture by cricket |
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