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050725 20:35 Comix

Life sure has changed for web designers in the past ten years....

050715

050610 13:45 Intellecual property

The spread of Creative Commons.

050530 18:08 Currently reading

Michael Marshall (Smith): The Lonely Dead.

Tom stared at the man's back, suddenly realizing that while His Time Away might have changed him, it had made no difference to the outside world. There'd been no culling of the parts of his life he didn't like. Out here, the dreary, long-running series he lived was going strong, despite the fact its primary audience - himself - believed it majorly sucked.

050525 20:57 Hardware

Just what I need: the blank keyboard.

This keyboard is unique in that it has no inscriptions on the keys, which the maker touts will make you type 100% faster in a few weeks since it will keep you from looking at the keyboard.

050524 00:00 Web development

The Web Standards Group interviews graphic designer Jason Santa Maria:

Russ: Late last year you talked about the frustration of constantly having to learn new skills just to keep up. Do you think this is an ongoing problem for anyone in our industry?

Jason: Of course it is. How are you supposed to get ahead when there is practically something new to consider every time you turn around? Well, you don't. There are only so many hours in the day. You learn as much as you can and, most importantly, as much as you can retain without drifting too far from your core specialties.

050430 00:05 SciFi

Joss Whedon tickles his fans with a 5 months early pre-screening of Serentity.

It's possible because some clown put a bunch of Universal execs in a theater full of Browncoats and dude, they came out SWEATING, they never seen energy like that. They loved it, and even though they were already wicked supportive of the movie [...] they simply weren't ready for you guys.

050425 10:51 Culture

Good news of the day: TV doesn't make you stupid - on the contrary.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that "24" episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of "24," you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like "24," you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. [...]

The modern viewer who watches a show like ''Dallas'' today will be bored by the content -- not just because the show is less salacious than today's soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime.

After decades of being told that this is a plot to keep the masses occupied with brainless stuff, you might wonder why this shift to fostering smarter audiences.

The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing.

050422 14:57 SciFi

The boring superhero trend in SciFi looks to continue for another year. Super heroes and super powers everywhere. The movies coming in 2005 don't look too thrilling either. Some of the worst:

Citadel, starring Corin Nemic as a member of an elite corps of American soldiers who must destroy a creature unleashed on Europe by the Nazis after D-Day.

Black Hole Terror (working title), a thriller from director Tibor Takacs (Mansquito) about a failed experiment which threatens to swallow the entire Midwest. Kristy Swanson and Judd Nelson star.

Squid/Tentacles (working title), a creature feature starring a giant squid which attacks the crew of a treasure-hunting expedition.

Does this sound a bit retro to anyone else? And does it remind anyone else of the SciFi 'dark ages' of huge nuclear post-war monsters - unscientific and paranoid. Super heroes, super powers, super monsters. Super scared of something super irrational. SciFi as a mirror of current trends in society?!

050412 00:00 Fun

Make your own South Park dude. Here's mine:

050411 23:26 Weblogs

Word is getting round: Jorn Barger is back.

050411 18:31 Intellectual property

Yahoo launches Creative Commons search.

050411 18:19 Intellectual property / Filesharing

Via LawMeme: Show the Supremes Some Significant Non-Infringing Uses

Death in the Afternoon proposes filling up the p2p nets with socially-important content: CC-licesned works, free course materials, banned books, and public documents (such as the oral arguments from Grokster itself). The immediate purpose, of course, is to help demonstrate to the Supreme Court the immediate usefulness of peer-to-peer technologies in enabling broad access to essential knowledge and widespread shared creativity.

050404 20:07 Web development

Dave Shea goes overboard and creates a CSS table for tabular data... by accident... out of habit... in a coding frenzy... He might need a holiday.

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