Look, I get it. It’s fun to feel smart. It’s nice to think there’s some everyday use for the time spent reading that book on logic a few years ago. The one that you didn’t actually finish but still have your bookmark in where you left off and are totally going to pick it back up one day. It makes you feel like you caught your debate partner in a bear trap, that you’ve proven you are more correct (or at least more intellectually honest) than them.
Sadly, that superior feeling you’ve got is probably undeserved. The cute, possibly Latin, assault you’ve launched may not apply to the situation. If you’re lucky, it might almost apply, but your desire to score some points as an intellectual has likely clouded your judgment. In other words: There’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
So I propose to you these rules. Rules that I will do my best to follow as well. They’re for our own good.
If you are not sure what that logical fallacy means, don’t use it.
Last Friday I was waking up to test my equipment and get psyched up for the 48. Thinking about that is kind of surreal. This time last week, nothing that’s on my mind today had even happened yet. No pulling Musical or Western and freaking out. No writing and smoking Rocky Patel Jr.’s and drinking sake. Not getting a new cast and crew together or struggling with an echoing room or shooting a 4 minute dinner scene in a couple of hours. I hadn’t freaked out over last minute output problems, or freaked out over whether the movie files I turned in would play for the 48, or freaked out over whether the screening audience would like my film.
By the end of a week like that, part of me wants to sleep and play video games for a month, and part of me that’s so buzzed from the feeling of getting something done that I want to do it again right frakking now.
I won’t. I’ll do something closer to the former. I’ve got writing to do, and I’ll chip away at that, but it’ll be longer than I expect before I shoot something else. Truth is, it’s a lot of work and easy to screw up, so rushing into another project would be very dumb. Better to think it out.
Yes, this little robotic soldier feeds on dead bodies to fuel itself. This means we must no longer come up with insane reasons for robots to want to attack humanity. Rule us for our own good? View us as a threat to the planet? Use us in complicated breeding programs designed to create super-humans?
No. Now they can just devour our flesh for sustenance.
– There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I was challenged by @aimeesblog to help her prettify the Planet Money chatter page she had built onher blog. Needing some more experience in PHP and mostly just liking a challenge, I accepted. Below is the code I came up with after reading through the work of people much smarter than I.
There’s still one problem with it: any replies that are followed immediately by a comma are not turned into links. Also, I should probably make this more generic to allow a search term to be passed into it and the appropriate feed to be returned, but with it being built to be a WordPress plugin and not really knowing their API very well, this was what I settled on for the first version.
As you might have guessed, I’m calling it PlanetTwitter. Oh and if you aren’t already, listen to Planet Money.
First president to be remixed into a profanity laced techno song? Almost certainly. Thank you to Remutefor giving us all the best parts of Dreams From My Father set to a thumping bassline.
