Advertising writers in Florida were planning to pitch haemorrhoid-relief products with a commercial featuring the Johnny Cash classic Ring of Fire, but Cash’s family said there’s no way they will let it happen
Librarians have warned that the free trade deal will lead to huge increases in copyright licence fees paid by Australians for use of intellectual property, including novels, poems, films and songs. And a legal expert said it was literally a Mickey Mouse
deal, as the Disney Corporation had been among its most powerful backers. The 20-year extension of copyright terms brings Australia into line with US restrictions — via Lessig Blog
I’ve seen walk-throughs and screen-movies of video games that explain how to win, but this takes the cake. It’s a how to win guide for Super Mario Brothers, and the authors have invented an ingenious, ASCII-based tablature for noting the proper key presses at each moment in the game for a perfect win. It’s hard to say what’s more impressive here: the obsessive documenting of the winning strategy or the marvelous creativity in the invention of the tablature itself
Some wag has found a use for an iced up freezer, recreating scenes from Star Wars.
Strange, I only ever find peas and paddle pop sticks embedded in my freezer, which makes cleaning it out a bit like a mini archaeological dig. Maybe I should be on the lookout for small plastic men setting up camp in there in the future.
There is strong interest in using DSL to deliver pay TV to more Australians, as both Telstra and Optus say that there will be no further extensions to their cable networks, says Alcatel’s new local chief
Comcast’s hostile bid for Disney this week has created turmoil on three pivotal fronts — and the outcome of each skirmish could have a direct impact on what most Americans see on their television screens and when they use a high-speed cable Internet connection. On the business front, Disney won’t take things lying down. Wall Street aren’t too impressed with the spectre of the AOL-Time Warner deal still in recent memory. And consumer advocates have signaled they’re going to fight the merger
Technology Review has an interesting article about how kids are writing Harry Potter fan fiction and editing each other’s stories in order to become better prolific writers.
FictionAlley, the largest Harry Potter archive, hosts more than 30,000 stories and book chapters, including hundreds of completed or partially completed novels. Its (unpaid) staff of more than 200 people includes 40 mentors who welcome each new participant individually. At the Sugar Quill, another popular site, every posted story undergoes a peer-review process it calls
beta-reading. New writers often go through multiple drafts before their stories are ready for posting.The beta-reader service has really helped me to get the adverbs out of my writing and get my prepositions in the right place and improve my sentence structure and refine the overall quality of my writing,explains the girl who writes under the pen name Sweeney Agonistes — a college freshman with years of publishing behind her.Like many of the other young writers, Agonistes says that Rowling’s books provide her with a helpful creative scaffolding:
It’s easier to develop a good sense of plot and characterization and other literary techniques if your reader already knows something of the world where the story takes place,she says. By poaching off Rowling, the writers are able to start with a well-established world and a set of familiar characters and thus are able to focus on other aspects of their craft. Often, unresolved issues in the books stimulate them to think through their own plots or to develop new insights into the characters.
US-based Primus Telecom Group announced its pending acquisition of ISP AOL|7, expanding the group’s customer base to a nearly half-million strong
An amusing image in response to the eternal whine of a many a small girl — and they’re always girls — about wanting a bloody horse.
What is it with little girls and horses anyway? Do little girls who want horses turn into the scary women who are armpit deep in cats? — via Die Puny Humans
A vinyl fan stumbled on an amazing find at a flea market — a collection of about 35 or 40 hand-drawn and hand-painted album covers made between 1969 and 1976, some complete with fake cardboard records inside them. Mingering Mike [BugMeNot] put together all of these albums as if he were the musician. The covers are complete with hand-drawn barcodes, track listings, lyrics, drawings of the band(s), and in some cases, liner notes. He did soul and funk albums and blaxploitation soundtracks (for movies that never existed), and even a christmas album
MoveOn.org organised the BushIn30Seconds campaign to raise the money to air a 30-second spot during the SuperBowl detailing the problems with the Bush administration. CBS baulked at airing the winning ad, claiming that it would be too topical for them and is getting criticised for its blatant censorship of political discourse
Recreated in Flash for your retrospective pleasure, these classic arcade games — including Pac-Man, Tetris and Space Invaders — should stir up a few memories of twiddling with joysticks as a kid
The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. If a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC web site, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuisance-free version of the player. It’s because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a licence fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it
Pixar has announced that it will end its distribution agreement with Disney. This comes after much bitterness at Pixar over the terms of their current deal with Disney, where Disney took a sizable (and some would say unfair) portion of the $2.5 billion in revenue generated by Pixar’s films
David Hasselhoff has claimed partial responsibility for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Claiming that in 1989, the year the wall fell, he had helped reunite the country by singing his song Looking for Freedom
among millions of German fans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin… I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Check-Point Charlie
Charlie Stross has posted his essay for the now defunct Singularity issue of the Whole Earth Review, entitled The Panopticon Singularity:
If a panopticon singularity emerges, you’d be well advised to stay away from Massachusetts if you and your partner aren’t married. Don’t think about smoking a joint unless you want to see the inside of one of the labour camps where over 50% of the population sooner or later go. Don’t jaywalk, chew gum in public, smoke, exceed the speed limit, stand in front of fire exit routes, or wear clothing that violates the city dress code (passed on the nod in 1892, and never repealed because everybody knew nobody would enforce it and it would take up valuable legislative time). You won’t be able to watch those old DVD’s of
Friendsyou copied during the naughty oughties because if you stick them in your player it’ll call the copyright police on you. You’d better not spend too much time at the bar, or your insurance premiums will rocket and your boss might ask you to undergo therapy. You might be able to read a library book or play a round of a computer game, but your computer will be counting the words you read and monitoring your pulse so that it can bill you for the excitement it has delivered.
If you’re not a fan of Ikea stores and can’t escape being dragged around them by family members, maybe you’d enjoy it more if you treated it like a video game:
You start this world armed only with a UNIVERSAL FURNITURE-ASSEMBLY ALLEN WRENCH. This is the weakest weapon in IKEA: You will have to hit a person 16 times with it to kill them. So your primary goal in this level is to find more lethal means of dispatching your enemies.
As you enter the SHOWROOM, perform a rolling dodge to the left. Grab a free PAPER TAPE MEASURE and a handful of IKEA EMBLAZONED GOLF PENCILS from the kiosk near the entryway. The PENCILS serve quite well as ranged weapons, but it will take some time to master their use. Before venturing further in the world, stand at the kiosk and practice hurling GOLF PENCILS at patrons as they enter the SHOWROOM. Remember: Hitting the eyes does triple damage.
And if the idea of leaving the warm glow of your monitor is too much, Dolphin Dash is a seizure inducingly fast Japanese style Flash game. You will need vast amounts of caffeine in your system before attempting to play with the dolphins.
AA Milne’s granddaughter has had her bid to recapture the licensing rights to Winnie the Pooh denied by a UK court. The Milne heirs licensed the rights to Pooh to Disney, only to discover that Milne had previously sold them to his literary agent, who is now suing Disney for all they’re worth. The UK court ruling is the latest setback on the way to what could be the Disney company’s financial ruination for trademark infringement
What does the Star Wars geek do when thought turn to modifying his four wheeled conveyance? Turn it into an X-Wing, of course
There’s pretty cool interactive site to the xBox game Fable. It works like the old choose your own adventure stories. Shame about the annoying Flash reloads for each page
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