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August 7, 2007
New Feauture: BOLD or strikethrough
Howdy, Digressers. Today, in my continuing efforts to make it possible to blog every day, I'm launching a new feature: BOLD or strikethrough, a picks 'n' pans sort of quick romp through what's highlight-able and delete-worthy.
BOLD! -- Kyle Gabler has put together a fun and thought-provoking web application that attempts to map human brain word associations. Check The Human Brain Cloud out here. (via Joystiq)
strikethrough -- Blizzard's art direction team for World of Warcraft gets a much-deserved shame! for their sexist and just-plain-silly armor gendering. Jill Walker brings the point up in her post here, but really there's a larger problem. If little more than a battle-thong (accessorized with a cape or headband, your choice) is all you need to battle Persian armies or snake demi-gods, then why not show the male toons in WoW the same minimal-coverage love? Shame, shame on Blizzard!
BOLD! -- Here's something to ponder: what would your city/town/village be like if all of the humans in it died? Alan Weisman explores this very question in his new book The World Without Us, which you should check out. You should also check out the multimedia page of the book's web site for some awesome graphics of a world without us.
strikethrough -- MIT's Henry Jenkins (I taught one of his articles last semester in the CyberCulture course) muses on the recent CNN/YouTube Debate. His brief analysis gives rise to two! strikethroughs. First, shame on the Democratic candidates for not doing a better job of moving away from talking points and the same, tired rhetoric we're already tired of hearing. And second, shame on the Republican candidates for being so terrified at the prospect of having to stand up and respond to 30-second video clips that they've all (except for the long-shots McCain and Paul) realized that they have to... um... wash their hair that night. So shame, shame on the Democrats for being robots (and not the cool kind)! And shame, shame on the Republicans for being cowards!
BOLD! -- The UK's Times Online has a feature up about "The 50 Best Movie Robots. They even have links to the trailers for the movies, in case you missed one here or there. Check it out.
strikethrough -- The UK's Times Online leaves out some of the greatest robots of all time, the Nexus 6 Replicants (and possibly a Nexus 7 or two) from Blade Runner. Shame, shame on the Times!
BOLD! -- This picture at Gizmodo freaks me out. Cheers to central-column designs and cantilevering, but man...
Click through to read about it.
strikethrough -- GayGamer, one of my favorite game blogs was recently the victim of a series of denial of service (DOS) attacks, shutting the site down all weekend. Shame, shame on homophobic hackers who flooded the site and its forums with slurs, hate speech, and death threats!
BOLD! -- "Autobots, transform and run out!" TechEBlog brings us running gear in disguise: Transformers Optimus Prime and Megatron as transforming running shoes. How amazingly cool is that?!
strikethrough -- To the Michael Bay Transformers movie. Alien Loves Predator's Bernie Hu and VG Cats' Scott Ramsoomair identify some of the major problems with the film. To their able critiques, I'd like to add that the knobby and cable-y designs of the robots when in robot mode made Bay's trademarked spin-the-camera-around-until-everyone-pukes style of filming battle made it almost impossible to tell what was happening or to whom. When one of the robots gets ripped in half (but which one?! this spoiler-free blog will never tell), I had to explain to The Spouse both what had happened, and to whom. That's just wrong, friends. Shame, shame on not-unattractive director Michael Bay!
BOLD! -- Hooray for getting good news (and praise, even!) from the editor who is including one of your articles in her book! "Valuable"! "Thought-provoking"! "Important"! "Compelling"! These are just a few of the fantabulous words used to describe my work. I will confess that I'm feeling pretty good about my scholarly self right now.
strikethrough -- To having waaaaaaaaaay too many e-mails in my various in-boxes. At last count, I have 372 in Gmail and a whopping 948 in my university account. Ouch! So, if I owe you an e-mail (or 12), please be patient. I'll be working through these monsters in the next few days. Shame, shame on me!
Posted by reparent at August 7, 2007 3:29 PM