I just discovered AM radio. It’s like podcasts, but it comes over the air using some sort of voodoo system. It’s pretty great! When I turned it on this evening, I heard a pleasant, middle-aged female voice saying “… so it’s not a great superhero movie, but not a terrible one either, and I must say, as someone who’s been taking a large quantity of steroids for medical reasons, that I looked upon the Hulk breaking out with a great deal of sympathy.”
Then a man came on and started talking about Grote Reber.
Genetic interactions suggest that Buffy acts downstream of Reaper, Grim and Head involution defective, and upstream of the apical caspase Dronc.
— Buffy, from The Interactive Fly
280slides is a presentation app written in a new Web framework called Objective-J, which is a port of the Cocoa APIs to JavaScript along with an Objective-C-like syntax. There’s an interview with the developers here, but it’s audio and frankly not that enlightening: for example, they respond to questions about implementation detail with “that’s all just implementation detail” and “we use the technology available”. Probably the most interesting part is that the developers consider using Objective-J to be working at a higher level than using other Web frameworks. While other frameworks try to co-exist with each other, Objective-J assumes it owns the DOM, intercepts all events (to support its own event mechanism), etc etc. As a result, the app doesn’t look like a Web app. It reminds of Java’s Swing, at least in the early days, where Swing apps looked obviously different to native apps, usually worse, and all your keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t work because the Swing guys decided that being cross-platform was more important than being usable on any particular platform. Oh yeah, and you couldn’t use any of the standard system dialogs (such as a file selector) because Swing had its own, nastier, one. Gah. Bad memories.
Even so, 280slides is a pretty fantastic program. It looks great and feels very much like a desktop app. Maybe not looking (or behaving) like a Web app isn’t such a huge deal when most Web apps look terrible.
I found a good plot summary of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull online. Warning! Spoilers.
Mutt picks then to enact his brilliant escape plan, which consists of punching the guard, then running, and setting the tent they went through on fire.
SPALKO: Curses! We’ll never catch them now!
DOVCHENKO: Couldn’t we just go around the burning tent?
SPALKO: And walk over the Ground of Middling Discomfort? SILENCE!
As Raphael’s hand caressed Leonardo’s firm, green thigh, he sighed and smiled down at the blue-masked turtle. “One day, you’ll take off that mask, Leo,” he whispered, stroking the shivering, exhausted turtle. “One day,” Leonardo responded, pushing Raphael back on his shell, his strength suddenly returning in a rush of arousal… god ok i can’t write any more ahaha— Catie speculating on how Anaïs Nin would write fiction if she were a blogger after reading this article
Last year some teenagers broke into Robert Frost’s house, had a party, and trashed the place. As part of their punishment, they are being forced to take poetry classes, starting with “The Road Not Taken” which is, as far as I’m concerned, Geneva Convention-scale poetic torture.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” [Middlebury College professor Jay Parini] thundered, reciting the opening line of the first poem, which he called symbolic of the need to make choices in life.
“This is where Frost is relevant. This is the irony of this whole thing. You come to a path in the woods where you can say, `Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?”’ he said. “Everything in life is choices.”
Even the setting had parallels, he said: “Believe me, if you’re a teenager, you’re always in the damned woods. Literally, you’re in the woods — probably too much you’re in the woods. And metaphorically you’re in the woods, in your life. Look at you here, in court diversion! If that isn’t ‘in the woods,’ what the hell is `in the woods’? You’re in the woods!”
