“Wow, Felicity,” he said. My Internet name was Felicity, after the coolest American girl doll. “I never met someone who knew so much about Harry/Draco before.”
I laughed. “Thanks, Sasuke420, I guess not everyone is as serious as I am about the Classic Ships.” Then I turned on the best song, “Spice World,” by the Spice Girls. I saw his eyes go wide as he got my musical reference. He was a keeper.
“In a while, Totodile,” I said, which is a Pokémon.
If you’d told me these were real, I would have believed you.
Facebook is constantly urging you to share your immediate thoughts and reactions to every life event. We were a couple days into the company’s biggest challenge before Facebook’s creator shared any of his thoughts on the matter. There’s probably a lesson in that.
This is the best reaction to the CA/Facebook story that I’ve read.
If this is true, this is an ugly precedent to set as we move more and more to entirely cloud-based storage. You don’t own your data even if you pay someone else to store it for you.
Eric Heisserer describes how he adapted Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life for the screen. What I love about this is that his method for deconstructing the story actually became part of the screenplay.
The films, in addition to having diminishing returns, were causing a physical toll: He was a big man doing stunts, running around in front of green screens, going from set to set. His body began to fall apart. “By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China,” which was 2008, “I was put together with tape and ice”
This is the rawest interview I’ve read in a long time.
That breaks my heart, because so much of my start on the web came from being able to see and easily make sense of any site I’d visit. I had view source, but each year that goes by, it becomes less and less helpful as a way to investigate other people’s work. Markup balloons in size and becomes illegible because computers are generating it without an eye for context. Styles become overly verbose and redundant to the point of confusion. Functionality gets obfuscated behind compressed Javascript.
This is one of the best things I’ve read about the current state of web design. It’s not really an old-man-yells-at-cloud nor a wistful reminiscence. It’s a manifesto for diligence.
The Polybius Conspiracy is a series of podcasts from Radiotopia’s Showcase, and it managed to tickle so many of my pleasure-points all at once. It’s urban legend meets conspiracy theory meets creepypasta. And it’s terrifically well told.
I’m genuinely bothered by the rise of spoiler culture, where any talk about a piece of pop culture – even just mentioning the name – causes normally rational people to start shouting “no spoilers!” Personally speaking, I can think of at least three examples of where learning about a quote-unquote “spoiler” has caused me to actually check out something I otherwise wouldn’t (the most recent of these would be The Good Place, a show that hadn’t even hit my radar until I heard someone talking about the final episode of the first season, which made me want to watch the entire thing. And a good thing too because that’s one of the best shows on telly right now).
Although I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read this part:
Sebastian Starcevic, a journalist living in Australia, has written about his passion for spoilers as well. “I was actually sitting in the movie theater the other day watching a horror movie. I initially decided I wouldn’t spoil the movie for myself so I could enjoy it the way it was intended,” he told me over email. “By the first jump scare, though, I was skimming the Wikipedia page to find out who the serial killer was.“
Good grief Sebastian. Using your phone in a cinema?! Haven’t you read the Wittertainment code of conduct?
Ever fancied pretending you were an alien decoding this weird golden disc that’s travelled billions of miles of space to reach you? Well, with Audacity, you can! This is seriously cool.
johnke.me