February 2009
26 posts
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An aside on linking style
Please excuse me while I briefly break character.
When linking, rewrite the title, unless it’s already perfect. Keep it succinct and free of irrelevant clutter.
This is a bad title: The Springfield Shopper | Lifestyle | Health | My Bloody Valentine: You need a heart to live | February 14, 1998 | springfield.com
This is a good title: You Need A Heart To Live
When quoting...
How Are Those Guys Datamoshing? →
“It makes you sad! People want to believe he’s hacking. They want to think he’s away wizarding down in the assembler.”
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The death of the reader, with responses
Joe Clark, “Unreadable”:
We realise now that long documents do not work on the web. We should never have thought otherwise. But all those short documents we’re reading instead are poisoning our ability to read long documents.
Mandy Brown, “Unreadable?”:
And here’s what’s missing from this conversation: the design of a text has a lot to do with how we...
Good news from the U.S. Treasury →
The Duke Ellington quarter!
Q: Why is Ask MetaFilter so great? →
A: Because they don’t tolerate shitheads.
NASA and ESA to launch joint mission to Europa and... →
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Saved from Drowning: Barthelme reconsidered →
“The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.” (Sorry, subscription required)
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“It is true that that which is true is true. It is false that that which is true...”
– Mortimer Adler, 1932. From Time, “Diagrammatics”.
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Found in space →
The ‘blind astrometry bot’ analyzes night sky photos on Flickr, determining which part of the sky is depicted and noting heavenly bodies of interest.
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“If you read old books you get a sense for how thin the searchable veneer of the...”
– Jim Stodgill, “The Kindle and the End of the End of History.”
Sprite Database →
The James Joyce Checklist →
The massive bibliography is now online.
Conventions and visual grammar of comic book...
“Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file.”
Michael Bérubé takes the GRE English test →