It’s a slow summer Friday, and we’re moving offices, and the moving guy is trying to take my trackball away. So you know what that means. It’s another Nerd News Top Five.
1. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Harry Potter musical is … kind of awesome. From a legal point of view it’s got to be essentially levitating with …
Here’s a fine kettle of fish:
Earlier this week, a hacker broke into Twitter and stole a trove of business-related documents detailing the workings of the popular startup. The hacker, supposedly, plans to publish the documents at some point—but before he does, he gives them to Techcrunch, the king of tech blogs.
Mike Arrington, …
I don’t really review movies here at Nerd World. We have an actual critic who does that. I more barf out a series of thoughts that occur to me while I watch them, which form an MST3K-like running commentary. I tend to post them relatively late, since they’re only fun if you have just seen, or are just about to see, the movie in …
I spent this past weekend (+ Friday) at Readercon.
Although Readercon is an ancient and stable institution — this was the 20th one — I’d never been before. It was held in Burlington, MA, which involved a whole peripheral psychodrama since I grew up in Lexington, which is the next town over, and spent most of years 10-16 in the …
They’re here.
This was a tough piece to write. There’s a school of journalism that you might call the what-will-those-crazy-nerds-think-of-next! school. That is not the school at which I wish to matriculate. I wanted to give a genuine unsnarky, unwinking account of what Wizard Rock actually is. This is not something that contemporary …
Dick Cheney testifies before the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding a top secret counter-terrorism program whose existence he allegedly hid from Congress:
Dianne Feinstein: Mr. Cheney, this is truly astounding. You knew of a mysterious program whose mission was so important you hid its very existence …
Chiggity-check out the new trailer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjihaK7HfGs&hl=en&fs=1&]
I hate the part of me that gets all fanboyish about things like this. Sort of doomed to disappointment (cf. the matter of Cloverfield et al), I suppose. You can see the bare outlines of pretty conventional plot being hinted at here: …
Commentator John McEnroe, describing Wimbledon champion Roger Federer, who had just won a record-breaking 15th Grand Slam Title:
He looks just maaahvelous, as Billy Crystal said.
This is why comedy writers do what they do. For immortality. To live forever.
Michael Moorcock is one of the basic architects of the crumbling Piranesi-like structure that is my brain. As a teenager I was a major major Elric fan. Give a skinny albino nobleman a massive black parasitic sword, and there is really nothing I don’t want to know about what happens next. During that period of my life I was not absolutely …
I’ve been trying out some old-school Ask.com natural language queries on Google lately. This little gem sprang up fully-formed when I was in the middle of typing “When will the Narnia books be in the public domain”? (Answer: 2033.) I reproduce it here verbatim. Notice how the last stanza gently reprises the themes of the first …
Marc Andreessen, the father of the modern Web! Today he announced that he’s launching a $300 million venture capital fund with his old biz partner from back in the glory days of Netscape, Ben Horowitz.
This is interesting on a number of fronts that have nothing whatsoever to do with Nerd World (raised $300mm in worst fundraising …
Sorry about the recent posting rate. It has been teh infrequent. This is not the shape of things to come. The shape of things to come is more about giant global ant colonies.
Now for an off-topic post, because I feel like I have to say something about the completely mental interactions that are going on between authors and critics …