Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Category: Life
Arcadia & Orange Moon Over LA
Saturday night we went out to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a comedy about love, sex, math, history and the pursuit of knowledge. The show follows two main stories: the lives of a student and her tutor during an 1809 visit by Lord Byron to her family’s estate, and the present-day efforts of two historians to figure out just what happened during that visit. (One of them gets it spectacularly wrong.) It was a good production, though I got the impression that the actor playing Bernard was trying to channel Ricky Gervais.
Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.
About that orange moon.
Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…
…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.
If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.
Sun Shower
This afternoon I found myself entertaining the notion that Orange County, California had somehow switched places with Orange County, Florida. The weather was certainly more typical for Florida in July than California.
It was 90 degrees and sunny when I left the office a little after 6:00 pm, though the eastern half of the sky was dark with clouds. It started raining before I pulled out of the driveway. Just a little. I was halfway home before I decided enough of the raindrops were staying on the windshield that it would be worth turning on the wipers.
It was still spattering a little when I got home, but nowhere near enough to soak the ground. The drops were evaporating quickly. A far cry from the heavy rain and thunderstorms a few miles farther inland.
The rain’s stopped here, and the half-and-half cloud cover and sunset are giving the sky a dingy yellow color.
Well-Done
Overheard at a medium-fast-food restaurant: a small child repeating, “I’m well-done! I’m well-done!” a half-dozen times. Kid, you keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(On the other hand…wouldn’t it be funny if he grew up to be a medium?)
SDCC, Universal, and Not-Produced-Here Syndrome
It’s funny how some companies will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging the competition. Universal Studios has a panel at Comic-Con promoting the movies Paul and Cowboys and Aliens. Here’s how they describe Paul and its part of the panel:
Paul— Scheduled to appear for Universal Pictures’ sci-fi comedy-adventure Paul are a who’s who of film comedy. Director Greg Mottola (Superbad) will be joined by cast members Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz), Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead), Kristen Wiig (Date Night), Bill Hader (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Jeffrey Tambor (The Hangover), Joe Lo Truglio (Role Models), Seth Rogen (The Green Hornet), and Sigourney Weaver (Baby Mama) as they discuss the movie about two sci-fi geeks whose pilgrimage to Comic-Con ultimately takes them to America’s UFO heartland. While there, they accidentally meet an alien who takes them on an insane road trip that alters their universe forever. Q&A session to follow.
Does anyone really think that the Comic-Con audience will best remember Sigourney Weaver for a supporting role in Baby Mama? (I didn’t even know she was in it.)
Not, say, her starring role in the Alien series?
Or if you want to go for something more recent, it’s only been half a year since Avatar.
Or heck, since it’s a sci-fi comedy about fans and conventions, how about Galaxy Quest?
Guess what? Those movies weren’t produced by Universal. Baby Mama was.
Talk about underselling the guests! That’s like promoting that you’ve got Harrison Ford from Sabrina!
I see it in comic books as well, though not quite to this extent. DC, when it realizes that someone is best-known for their work at Marvel or somewhere else, will at least mention the fact…but they always seem to want to downplay it. Standard practice is to put the DC titles in all-caps and anything else in standard title case. For example: Flash: Emergency Stop by “Grant Morrison (FINAL CRISIS) and Mark Millar (Civil War),” or Superman: Earth One by “J. Michael Straczynski (BRAVE AND THE BOLD, Thor, Babylon 5).”* It always leaves the impression that they’ve kind of hoping that, even though they’re banking on the name recognition, you won’t really notice.
*Ironically, Babylon 5 was produced by another subsidiary of Warner Bros….and the licensed comic books were published by DC.
Links: Yen Droid Mobile Woot Quake!
I’ve always wondered how the name of Japan’s currency ended up meaning “craving” or desire in English. It turns out to be coincidence, probably from the Chinese yáhn or yin, “craving.” Word of the Day: yen.
TweetUp acquires Twidroid and changes its name to Twidroyd “to ensure minimal confusion with products from Lucas Films.” Fortunately no one will mistake Lucas Films for Lucasfilm…
Last month, KTLA reported on a 3.3 earthquake in the Inland Empire. “Dozens of residents” in the region felt it. Dozens! Wow!
I have to agree with @rzazueta: Woot’s Amazon buyout report is an instant classic (via @boingboing)
Chart of the Day presents: What people are actually doing with their cellphones (aside from talking) based on a Pew survey on mobile internet use. (via @ThisIsTrue)
Quake
That was a surprisingly long earthquake. When it started, it was mild enough that I thought it was just someone walking heavily across the office. (I wonder how many small quakes I don’t notice because of that?) After about 20 seconds, the shaking got stronger…and it just kept going. 60 seconds? 90? USGS rates it at 5.4 near Anza-Borrego.