One reason I haven’t been blogging with much regularity lately is that I’ve been working on a book, a fantasy novel. (Also: I am a lazy puke.) One of the great things about writing a fantasy novel is you get to roll your own magic system. Because every fantasy fan I know has always harbored the secret belief that nobody has ever gotten …
It’s My Birthday and I’ll Blog If I Want To
Which I don’t really. But I will post this, since it is Internet law that every blog in Christendom must post it. It being the teaser for Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Howser, I mean Harris.
What the hell is this? Whedon explains.
Why I Love EVE Online and Why I Don’t Play It
When I was little I assumed that all video games were eventually going to look like Star Wars. Massive spaceships with chunky irregular outlines, white with the occasional colored industrial markings, would hang in the inky void with tiny fighter ships flaring and dying around them by the dozens. Pink and orange planets and multiple …
The Completist
As I get older, it only becomes more and more clear I will never read all the books I want to read before I die. There’s just no getting around it. There’s too many books! Even my Amazon Wish List, aka my Amazon “Don’t Want To Read That Much So I Will Put You On This Pointless List” List is swelling at over 300.
This is tough …
More Profound Thoughts About My — Our? — PvP Obsession
I don’t know how many of you out there in the land of the living read PvP. I do. There was a time when I did not ‘get’ why PvP was popular, but now that I’m down with the full continuity I find it consistently funny. I don’t even really mind that it has basically nothing to do with gaming anymore. Kurtz’s deep fluency in the code of pop …
There Is No E-mail in My In-Box
I haven’t kept careful records or anything, but I am willing to stake my journalistic integrity on the claim that at no point in the past 10 years have I had an empty in-box. A few weeks ago, when I came back from a leave of absence, I had a four or five hundred e-mails in there. I’ve been winnowing ever since.
Last week the scroll bar …
I Should Be Working, But I’m Reading Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods
That’s the title of Frank Darabont’s unproduced Indy IV script. You know what, it is good. Too bad it pretty much amounts to fan fiction at this point.
Now in Paper-Vision: Stealing Wi-Fi
This week in Time I wrote a column (which started out as a blog post) about stealing Wi-Fi. It’s here.
The main thing that I don’t think I properly conveyed in the piece is the incredible, psychotic obsessiveness that you develop when chasing a distant Wi-Fi signal. It always begins so well — whenever you join a network on a Mac, it …
Friday Afternoon Link-o-mat: The Venture Brothers
I’ve got a deadline, so I’m just embedding linking to the season premier of The Venture Brothers. Whose medium is dying now, TV? Huh? Huh? Not mine!
Nerd Archives — 1983
The following is an unedited transcription of one of Matt Selman’s actual seventh grade homework assignments.
I would like to meet…
I would like to meet Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams for three reasons.
Zaphod has three arms and two heads. I think it would be interesting to meet someone …
Indiana Jones and the Unsolvable CAPTCHA of Doooooom
Last week I wrote a piece about CAPTCHAs, which is the name for those images of wavy, distorted letters that you sometimes have to retype in order to make the Web give you something you want, like an email address or whatever. The point of them is to prove that you’re not a bot run by spammers, since software is very bad at reading …
Miracleman: Anthem for a Forgotten Superhero
OK, forgotten’s probably putting it too strongly. But listen: when I was growing up in the 1980s (cue Grandpa Simpson voice) we didn’t have the Interweb. So when I started reading Alan Moore I read him in almost total isolation — it was my brother who hooked me up, but apart from him I didn’t really have any perspective on Moore’s …
