johnke.meCome to the Edge
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
And he pushed,
And they flew.– Christopher Logue
Quotes
Liberals dot dot dot
We believe, wait… I thought… fast food joints, meh, don’t you guys think they’re like of the devil or something, that’s what, liberals…
Sarah Palin tries her hand at political satire. I’d say Jon Stewart is shitting himself.
An Interview with Bill Watterson
Owing to spite or just a foul mood, have you ever peeled one of those stupid Calvin stickers off of a pickup truck?
I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.
Mental Floss has done the impossible and snagged an interview with Bill Watterson. And he seems just as charming as I’d imagined he would be.
Cesspool of Negativity
Solitary play can feel especially shameful, and we gamers have internalized that vaguely masturbatory shame, even those of us who’ve decided that solitary play can be profoundly meaningful. Niko, I’ve thought about this a lot, and internalized residual shame is the best explanation I have to account for the cesspool of negativity that sits stagnating at the center of video-game culture, which right now seems worse than it’s ever been.
– I might not have loved his book, but Tom Bissell’s take on GTA V is spot on, in so many ways.
Hilarious, terrifying or depressing
Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.
US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet - guardian.co.uk
Visionaries
All due respect to Don Mattrick and his Prada-clad team of VPs, but it’s just a bunch of dudes trying to sell us a box. Bring out the product guys, the visionaries, and then have them explain why they made the decisions they made that will affect us all, and there’ll be a noticeable change in attitude from the gamer crowd.
Xbox One was revealed yesterday and received a lukewarm reaction from the “core” gamer crowd. John Davison nails the reason why
What would DFW make of Netflix?
An optimally adapted parasite takes as much from its host as possible without damaging the viability of the host. In order for us to stay viable hosts for the media parasite, we need only enough waking hours away from media to make money and to spend that money on advertisers’ offerings and/or media’s costs (and of course to feed ourselves and, like, stay alive). Media will gladly take all our other hours.
I'll Dance Again
Hell, yeah, I’ve had plenty [of dark moments]. I’ve thrown my walker across the room and haven’t used it yet. But I realized you have to be selfish about the things that matter the most. My husband. The job I love. Dancing is my life. Yeah, having my foot blown off, that really sucks. But I can’t wallow in woe is me.
I can’t let some (expletive) come along and steal my whole life. So, I’ll dance again. And next year, though I’ve never been a runner, yes, I plan to run the marathon.
Cary Grant on Style
I’m reminded of a piece of advice my father gave me regarding shoes: it has stood me in good stead whenever my own finances were low. He said it’s better to buy one good pair of shoes than four cheap ones. One pair made of fine leather could outlast four inferior pairs, and, if well cared for, would continue to proclaim your good judgment and taste no matter how old they become.
Sorry
In addition, let me take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who’s ever been offended by anything at any point throughout time. To be challenged in any way, or made to feel an emotion that is not immediately recognizable, is the worst thing in the world, and something for which the incredible human gift of language should never, ever be used. We are sorry if your feelings were ever hurt about anything.
ThingX’s mocking of The Onion’s Quvenzhané Wallis apology is spot on.
How To See The Future
Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.
This is because we look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
I have become bro
Where does that leave me? I just spent 40 hours playing Far Cry 3. I have become bro, destroyer of worlds.
James Deen x Lindsay Lohan
She said, “When Julia Roberts does topless scenes, she makes the whole crew shoot in their boxers! I want that!” And the whole crew just rolled their eyes and was like, “We’re not doing that. We’ll do that for fuckin’ Julia Roberts, but not you. Go find another crew; we’ll just leave.”
– Porn Star James Deen on His ‘Canyons’ Experience With Lindsay Lohan
Vigil
But isn’t a language that deletes code crazy?
No, wanting to keep code that demonstrably has bugs according to its own specifications is crazy. What good could it possibly serve? It is corrupted and must be cleansed from your codebase.
Vigil will do this for you automatically.
Vigil deleted a function. Won’t that cause the functions that call it to fail?
It would seem that those functions appear to be corrupted as well. Run Vigil again and it will take care of that for you. Several invocations may be required to fully excise all bugs from your code.
Battery Movies
hat’s the benefit here? I’m not sure I buy the argument that long-form storytelling gives the material room to breathe, or even shows particular fidelity to the writings of Tolkien, Rowling, etc. I fear the real motivation is more cynical than that. It’s the movie equivalent of pumping chickens full of water – bulking out the produce to maximise revenue.
pulchritude
pulchritude
A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.
– David Foster Wallace, word notes in the Apple dictionary for “Beauty”
Two Things (Gibson TTS and Fictional Memory Palaces) | booktwo.org
If you play a lot of video games, or a lot of a video game, you slowly learn the map, it stays in your head. It doesn’t exist, it’s an imaginary place, but you can find your way around in it, even give directions within it.
A shared fiction is like a shared map, a space we can inhabit, a shared memory palace, even for a brief period.
Ashamed
To her family, I want to say: I am ashamed, I am culpable, and I am sorry. For every letter to my local politician I didn’t write, for every protest I didn’t join, for keeping quiet about abortion rights in the company of conservative relations and friends, for becoming complacent, for thinking that Ireland was changing, for not working hard enough to secure that change, for failing to create a society in which your wife, your daughter, your sister was able to access the care that she needed: I am sorry. You must think that we are barbarians.
– I am ashamed that Ireland’s medieval abortion law still stands - Emer O’Toole - guardian.com
Let's start the foodie backlash
Let’s start the foodie backlash
The OED's very first citation of "foodie" is from 1980, an oozing New York Times magazine celebration of the mistress of a Parisian restaurant and her "devotees, serious foodies". "Foodie" has now pretty much everywhere replaced "gourmet", perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination – even though those qualities are rampant among the "foodies" themselves. The word "foodie", it is true, lays claim to a kind of cloying, infantile cuteness which is in a way appropriate to its subject; but one should not allow them the rhetorical claim of harmless innocence implied.
Running
While more than a million humans run marathons voluntarily each year, most animals we consider excellent runners — antelopes and cheetahs, for example — are built for speed, not endurance. Even nature’s best animal distance runners — such as horses and dogs — will run similar distances only if forced to do so, and the startling evidence is that humans are better at it, Lieberman said.
Modern humans and their immediate ancestors such as Homo erectus sport several adaptations that make humans, instead of some ferocious, furry, or fleet creature, the animal world’s best distance runners.
Sex in San Andreas
Unfortunately, here is the situation,” Donovan wrote in an e-mail to Sam on Aug. 16, 2004, and proceeded to list the necessary changes.
“Hooker in car blow job — we need to show much less of the critical mouth to penis area.
“Hooker Stand Up Blow Job — this needs to be removed or implied.
“Sex with girlfriend — essentially this is all beyond the bounds of M and 18 ratings, and needs to be removed or implied.
“Sex shop workers need to have slightly more nipple coverage particularly for the States.
“Key to her heart spanking date scene needs to be removed, as it constitutes sexualized violence which is a huge problem.
“Blow job in back room of dealer’s house is cool however.
The Bureaucracy of Videogames: Why San Andreas Had to Tone Down the Sex - wired.com
Writing Portal 2
For Portal 2 the script was written mainly in Word. The Left 4 Deads have so many lines that need to fire under certain conditions; we track it all in database software - Visual FoxPro 6. This results in my often being lazy and writing directly into the tables and then writing a script to output a Word document to take to the recording studio. I think it is safe to say, L4D2 is the only game written in Visual Foxpro. I don’t really recommend it.
35-Year Old Retakes the SAT
If you’re 35 years old and you’re thinking about retaking the SAT as a kind of blog stunt, I would highly recommend you avoid it. In fact, I would recommend that no one take the SAT ever. It’s a sternly worded dinosaur of a test, graded in an arbitrary manner with outdated equipment, and it blows. The only reason people take it is because they have to. It exists only so that preppy dipshits can brag about their scores well into adulthood if they did well. I hate it. I hope the Princeton Review gets fucked by a cattle prod.
Banksy on Advertising
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Hey Hey
They quit before it became too embarrassing, and almost immediately their short run of hit singles, plus the TV theme, became oldies radio regulars. Dig deeper, though, because the Monkees’ catalogue is full of gems. Their influence is gentle but pervasive; it’s hard to think of any other group who could have released a song that would be covered by both the Sex Pistols and PJ & Duncan. “Whenever I think of the Monkees,” said the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster in 1986, “it’s a sunny morning, the brightest colours, and David Jones’s eyes. Their music is perfect, as perfect as pop could ever be. Last Train to Clarksville has been written, and we are left with our own imperfection.
For anyone who dismisses the Monkees as an entirely manufactured pop group, I point them at Head and its impressive subversion of their image. At least Peter Stanley gets it.
Time Spent
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.
Gamification
The problem with Gamification is that it tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist. We already have a universal points system, across all aspects of life, that represents status and is redeemable for real world prizes. **It's called "money."**
intersection of ambition and incompetence
Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.
Metafilter
How to describe Metafilter to a novice?
Well, say there’s a video with a guy doing high speed rapping about pancakes: Metafilter is great place to discuss….the spatula.
Metafilter user not_that_epiphanius explains exactly why I love Metafilter
From a Vauxhall Velox
Her mother read her mailAnd her Dad was a Policeman
Which I must say worried me
But some things have just got to be
So we passed very fast like ships in the night
Or cars in a contraflow system
– Billy Bragg, From a Vauxhall Velox
Not only is this a perfect simile, it’s goddamned ballsy to drop a term like “contraflow system” into a pop song.
Future of Literature
Saying that 3D movies are the future of cinema is like saying that Magic Eye books were the future of literature.
Fussy
Thus at the next cocktail hour, I reached for the bottle of Poland’s finest in my freezer. (Of course I keep vodka in the freezer. As Jack Donaghy would say, “What am I, a farmer?”) Staring at the frosty bottle, however, caused flashbacks to Unpleasant Speculums I Have Known. Instead, I rooted around in a kitchen cupboard for some cheap (but warm) vodka left over from a party. There it was, in a jug. Not even my kids would sneak sips of this stuff. And I didn’t think that that particular area of my body would be especially fussy about brands.
Skeptical of the story going around the internet about teenagers using booze-soaked tampons to get drunk, HuffPo writer Danielle Crittenden decides to try it for herself.
Quentin Tarantino is our Woodie Guthrie
What I’m saying, basically, is that Quentin Tarantino is our Woody Guthrie; he is the Woody Guthrie of mondo and the midnight movie.
Regardless of how you feel about Tarantino and his movies, I recommend that everyone reads Christian Thorne’s amazing essay “Tarantino, Nazis, and Movies That Can Kill You” (part 1, part 2).
Britta'd it
NBC is pulling Community from its mid-season schedule to make room in January for the return of 30 Rock and a new comedy based on the life of Chelsea Handler.
Really? As Donald Glover put it: Britta’d it. Community Benched in NBC Mid-Season Shuffle
Just wearing a funny hat
I was trying to prove something to myself, too. It was like, "Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?
It's just what it is
A waltz called “Last Leaf” — with Mr. Richards joining on vocals — celebrates the image of a lone leaf clinging to a tree: “The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” Mr. Waits sings. It’s tempting to hear it as a manifesto of stubborn persistence, but Mr. Waits shrugged that off.
“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ ” he said. “I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”
No YOU'RE crying
“It was really strange, they were holding hands, and dad stopped breathing but I couldn’t figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going,” said Dennis Yeager. “But we were like, he isn’t breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that’s because they were holding hands and it’s going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up.”
“They were still getting her heartbeat through him,” said Donna Sheets. …
“They just loved being together,” said Dennis Yeager.
No. Just no.
I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape.
There are a few, horrible cases where this sentence would be justified. Sorry, Nicholas Lezard, but watching Tintin is not one of them.
Postmodern Warfare
First Level
The first level is a flashback level where you are a old man retelling the events of the last level of the game to your grandson. Only your grandson doesn’t exist yet and it’s really you in the present day imagining what it’ll be like to be an old man retelling the last level of the game to your grandson. Then your grandson (who doesn’t exist) kills you.
Levels in Call of Duty: Postmodern Warfare via McSweeney’s
The internet is not your savior
I just think that the internet has been sold to us as our savior. As a means to create a new economy, as our spiritual salvation, whatever. Everything is supposed to be bigger and better online. But what I think people have lost sight of — and I don’t think the internet has done a good job of self-evaluation in this respect — is the massive shift between the brave new internet world of the late ’90s and now. Its early philosophy seemed to be one where everyone was an individual whose opinions were respected. A decade later, everything is corporate-owned, advertising is incessant, and the diverse opinions of internet commentary are often shouted down. Now there’s much more online groupthink.
Che Guevara of Power Eating
In person, Kobayashi is sweet, like a curious kid — unfailingly polite, charming and humble, with no brashness or other signs of rampaging ego. But he is hard on himself. He locks himself away performing dangerous feats because it is all he knows to do. He was the milk-drinking champ in school, the stew-eating champ in college, the winner of the biggest eating contest in Japan, then the Nathan’s champ. Until he wasn’t.
“Are you the Che Guevara of gurgitation or the Kenny Powers of power eating?” I asked him.
He paused, then laughed: “I am both!”
Go the F**k to sleep
Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos
Facebook on Friendship
Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.
– Time.com profile of Mark Zuckerberg, their person of the year 2010
Thinking Different
This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC. More intuitive.
Amazing Life
Here we have the man who invented the personal computer, then the laptop. He’s now destroying them. That is an amazing life.
Pixar has us right where they want us
Pixar is bulletproof, assholes. We can put out any old piece of shit that perfectly examines universal themes of love and friendship and just walk away with record box-office numbers. In fact, I think I’ll have my award-winning design team get cracking on an anthropomorphic piece of shit right now. Yes. Shit. I’m talking actual human feces here, folks. We’ll give it eyes and limbs, and—I don’t know—call it Danny Caca. Brad Bird can make a story about how it got lost on its way to the sewage treatment facility. Its best friends are a used sewage-logged tampon and a hypodermic needle. Then we’ll just sit back and watch the receipts come in.
Yeah, it’ll have heart and depth, but still, it’s going to be a talking piece of shit. Kids won’t flush for years because of it.
John Lasseter - I’ve Got You Dumb Motherfuckers Eating Right Out Of My Hand
Perfect Analogy
Here are some pictures of the property. I can’t comment on what this property should actually go for as I’m a 21-year-old recent graduate and owning property to me is a bit like owning a zeppelin. It’s something people did in the past that seems crazy today and it eventually blew up in their faces.
– Dalkey house valued at €6.2m in 2007 has finally sold for €1.4m - Newswhip
Mediocrity
The slowness of genius is hard to bear, but the slowness of mediocrity is intolerable
– Henry Thomas Buckle, after his chess opponent took so long to finish a move that Buckle had time to write two chapters of a book on the history of civilisation. Buckle won the game.
I'm Comic Sans, Asshole
Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
Berlusconi Wants Another 75 Years
Science can help us live to 120 but Silvio has asked me to help him live to 150 because he thinks that way he can solve Italy’s problems.
Unpleasant Nothings
These tasted of nothing, yet somehow managed to make that "nothing" deeply unpleasant. It's like a small piece of fried potato failing to recall a repressed abuse memory while sitting on your tongue.
Charlie Brooker reviews Walker’s promotional flavoured crisps