I’m a bit of a fan of four-line kites, but flying one like this is disconcertingly reminiscent of Rover from The Prisoner.
No? Just me?
Year: 2013
Holmes
Great post by Genevieve Valentine over at io9, on the Jonny Lee Miller/Lucy Liu Sherlock Holmes update ‘Elementary’ for CBS. It’s very different to the BBC’s Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman update, and it would be wrong to regard it as a cheap knock-off. While I still don’t warm to Liu, Miller is outstanding and the show’s scripts, while patchy, had moments of brilliance. Long moments. Even entire shows.
I particularly liked the late-series episodes which were allowed to find their own languid pace. This isn’t an action-procedural show where everything has to happen quickly to squeeze in the next plot reversal before the ad break: it’s (mostly) more thoughtful.
Also check io9’s previous piece lamenting recent portrayals of Irene Adler. It predates Elementary’s unorthodox take on the character, but is worth a read for those of us who liked, you know, the book version.
Tumblr, blogging, and all that jazz
Where Tumblr Came From – Anil Dash
many of us who were familiar with blogs already saw tumblelogs as “just a simple blogging template”, similar to what we were already doing on Movable Type or WordPress at the time, rather than a fundamentally different medium.
Despite that myopia, there was a lot of momentum around simplified, media-rich blogging at that moment in history.
Just read the whole thing. Blogging: it’s not as simple as it seems, and history is littered with the corpses not just of dead blogs, but of dead blogging systems.
(– via everyone)
Bank robbery for fun, profit and government.
The Distributed Me
High time I noted here: I’m also blogging (again) in a few other places, notably:
- StoryCog, mostly work/video/scicomms/public engagement stuff, and
-
ScienceDemo.org, a revival of an old failed wiki site by a small group (yet to be fully revealed, and maaaaaybe taking applications) who really care about demonstrating science: the demos themselves, and the issues around them.
Meanwhile, I’ve cobbled together a hub of sorts at jjsanderson.com.
The Police > News > Revolver
Terrifc article reproduced from Revolver circa 2000, interviewing The Police:
Copeland: You are absolutely correct. I remember when we did our first album, I only wrote these punk songs so we’d have something to play, then I realised, ‘Ah… lyrics…’
Summers: Stewart and I were jumping on the bandwagon. Totally insincere! But I wrote all of ‘Omegaman’. Can we talk about ‘Behind My Camel’ some more?
Revolver: Oh shut up. One World is the most ‘old-school’ Police song on the album.
Copeland: And it was my favourite song at the time because it did have that early Police vibe, where we jammed on one chord for hours.
Summers: Unfortunately, I never did find out what that one chord was.
Hilarious, fiery, oddly moving — the interview both traces and mirrors the arc of the band’s career. Also:
Sting: No, no, I’m a simple man. A simple man in my huge Tuscan villa, so piss off.
See also the thread at MeFi trying to work out whether it’s an April Fool or not. Consensus: it’s good enough that everyone’s going to claim it’s real anyway.
Geo for Bootstrap
Utter genius: Geo for Bootstrap, a Twitter Bootstrap theme that returns an achingly dull modern web app to the glory days of GeoCities.
(Via Waxy.org Links)
Opening lines
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Opening lines matter, and I’d forgotten how good Neuromancer‘s is. More than 20 years since I read it, almost 30 since it was written. Sheesh.
Everything’s moved
One of the disadvantages of being an old-time blogger is that I signed up, long ago, to the idea that good URLs remain stable. See, it must have been a long time ago: we still called them ‘URLs’.
Turns out, pretty much everyone reneged on that pact. Looking back through my archives, I’m stunned by how many links are broken. Usually, the linked-to article still exists, but the address has changed and there’s no redirect in place (or the redirect is itself broken).
Given how hard I’ve worked to maintain stable URLs for my sites — including, at one point, manually coding 400+ rewrite special-cases from a particularly crazy CMS-from-hell — I’m disappointed. You hear me, internet? I’m disappointed in you. All of you.
T’ch!
Sleep and youth
I recently pulled an all-nighter, partly to see if I still could.
It was surprisingly OK. I did have a short nap in the small hours, and another the following afternoon, but I was mostly functional. Sure, I wouldn’t have driven a car, and in conversation I was pretty random, but the stuff I was working on turns out to be pretty good. So how was the recovery?
I slept for eleven hours straight, then the following afternoon for another three.
Drat. Not as young as I used to be.