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20041030

Michael Chabon is writing Snow and the Seven for Disney, a live-action martial-arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to be directed by Yuen Wo Ping. How insane is this, I ask? And I'm totally stuck for an answer. I have no real idea how insane this is.

20041027

Hobbitses! In Indonesia! We loves it forever! (via Kottke)

20041026

Okay, this is mostly for Michael Hall, as he's mentioned he doesn't like emails saying "look at this thing!" (fourth comment), so I'm propping it on the ol' blog for pull-down goodness. Joss Whedon posted at Whedonesque the other day about High Stakes 2004, held last Sunday. The comments in the thread range from inane to deeply thoughtful, and ZachsMind especially has a tone. Also interesting was the civility of exchange among members. Apologetic, considerate, respectful, temperate, even moderate discussion, even though the subject matter often touched Bushy vs. Kerry contentious hot-hot-hot issues, and even though the members seem a fairly diverse lot. I was impressed, and I spent half an hour reading more than 200 comments. Skim it, anyway. (Don't forget to read Joss's bio.)

20041025

Dammit, videoblogging rigmarole on MeFi eats 15 minutes of my life! Ars Technica writer on metadata in a spatial finder eats half an hour! Stupid broadband internets at work! It's my life, here!

20041023

Language Log: They are a prophet is almost darned tootin', although "perenially clueless" overstates things regarding the estimable and venerable Strunk and White. Nice to have such a clear example of standardization in action.

20041017

Okay, it looks as if I owe it to myself at least to say a few things about this High Stakes 2004 thing. I read through the comments thread at Whedonesque as a lurker and noted a blank, not-recognizing-the-existence-of-self-organizing-systems sort of mentality. The organizers of this event are supposed to be ourselves; it’s up to us; if we don’t make phone calls and arrangements, set up convergent times and schedules, and hie ourselves into living rooms at appointed times, nothing much will come of the idea. We are the responsible parties in this sitch. (Nota bene: Nothing prevents a Buffy for Bush kind of organizing, either. High Stakes 2004 looks endorsed by Joss, who is supposed to participate in conference calls during the parties on the night of October 24, but the whole idea here appears to involve getting off asses and making personal efforts, which is as available an activity for Reps as for Dems of whatever stripe.)

As primers on the sort of behavior High Stakes 2004 appears to me to be trying to encourage, try browsing Howard Rheingold’s site Smart Mobs, especially the book summary and the power of the mobile many category. Wikipedia can help you understand almost anything, but for smart-mob stuff, try Smart Mobs and its relevant links, especially collective intelligence. Read through WorldChanging, especially its Means of Expression archive. High Stakes 2004 looks like a clear example of these kinds of collaborative efforts, enabled by the internets among other things, to enact a desired world. Anyone can play. Sing along. Shout at the devil. Pick your poison.

Oh, snap!, as Riley Freeman once said of a Christmas present he never thought he’d receive. More Like This Weblog finally followed up on the Whedon/Election post tantalizingly linked before.

Note similarity in tone and character dynamics between Buffalo ’66 (1998) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 2nd episode in season 2, “Some Assembly Required” (air date 019970922).

When I was maybe 9 years old, I had a homework assignment to make a list of homonyms, which assignment I took more seriously than any of my classmates, eventually accounting for several hundred such words on the specific list and resulting in ongoing if intermittent additions every few weeks or months since. That assignment oddly represents one of the most influential parts of my primary schooling. Anyway, this afternoon at work, I typed the word “peaked” and happily recognized it as another whiz-bang homonym. Thus: peak, peek, pique; and their array of inflected forms: peeking, peaking, piquing; peeks, peaks, piques; and so on. Lovely, lovely homonyms.

20041005

Got a writing date at Sven’s tomorrow morning. I want to write about Hours, which is the combination time-education-community idea. It has elements of «”The Time of Your Life”» essay and of the One Percent idea. It also has some of an idea about education, self-education, and mutual-education I thought about a couple of years ago, a sort of directed project, tutorials, modules, whatever.

Kottke links to Tom Coates’ interesting-looking site Plasticbag.org, which referred me to atomiq.org by talking about folksonomies, which apparently are ad hoc, bottom-up taxonomies of knowledge. The idea is, people tag some datum with a label, those labels are aggregated somehow for many data, and the data then become more easily searchable by way of the tags. The models are services I’m unfamiliar with as yet, such as Flickr and del.icio.us, but which seem extremely cool. Atomiq.com linked to Thomas Vander Wal’s site, and I spent a few minutes poking around. He’s using the tags and noting them at the bottom of blog entries, so Feed on This is tagged with the labels

Posted at 2:25 PM from Bethesda, MD.
Marked as :: Content Management :: Folksonomy :: IA :: InfoCloud :: Information Aggregation :: Internet :: Intranet :: Metadata :: RDF :: RSS :: Web :: Web apps :: XML :: in Essay
[perma link for: Feed On This ]

for example. I think I can get the hang of this, but does it look enough like the future to bother? Maybe it does.

Dunno what this is, exactly, but it bears watching, dunnit? If you're a US Citizen, a fan of Buffy and Joss Whedon, and you want to help elect John Kerry as our next president, then keep the night of Monday the 18th open, okay?

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