Month: February 2005
I just heard two of the people at my job say “make yourself a dang quesadilla!”
The movie has jumped the shark, friends. It has jumped with both skis flailing.
Tangentially, there’s a pretty new place across from my job that’s either a school for the blind or a blindness advocacy group–I can’t remember. Anyway, their logo image is Braille, I think four letters, which presumably matches up with the acronym of their name (at least it does on the sign out front). This logo is repeated around the walls of the building.
Several feet above head level.
With incandescent light bulbs.
So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.
Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!
It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)
Not many people will understand how hard this is
Right, Lent. I’m giving up french fries. Starting tomorrow because I didn’t know I was doing it when I got lunch.
Addendum: I have officially quit reading The Well at the End of the World. I’m sorry, I just don’t have the strength. I really want to know where those entries in the dictionary came from, but there’s a reason I rarely read anything written before I was born (the reason is that I’m a terrible person).
Ah, damn. Hitherby Dragons has 367 entries today–actually yesterday–which means it’s officially outstripped Anacrusis, with its mere 365. Anacrusis started first (July vs September 2003), but Hitherby posts on Saturdays, so that was guaranteed. By math.
What you have to understand is that Hitherby Dragons and Rebecca Borgstrom are superior to my writing and myself in every possible way. I live in Kentucky; Ms. Borgstrom lives in Seattle. I have nearly completed a Master’s degree in CS; Ms. Borgstrom has her doctorate. I took AP classes; she registered at UCLA when she was 12. I want to design games someday; she writes for White Wolf, and already wrote Nobilis, the greatest damn game I’ve ever read. Her daily fiction work is usually about ten times as long as mine, without feeling like it, and every one is invested with the kind of psychotic whimsy I’d love to capture once a month. Anacrusis has 40 subscribers to its LJ feed; Hitherby Dragons has 161. It was described as “a webcomic without words” before I even thought of Anacrusis that way.
So I nurse just this tiny little coal of envy in my heart for Ms. Borgstrom and her extraordinary stories. In case you can’t tell!
You should be reading Hitherby Dragons. I have run out of words trying to find superlatives for it. I will steal them instead, by quoting Penny Arcade’s Tycho (in reference to Checkerboard Nightmare): “It’s so good that it’s depressing for me to read it. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. How am I supposed to stand out against that level of quality?”
Dear everybody who loved Sideways so much
Didn’t you guys see it the first time? When it was called Swingers?
I liked the movie okay, and of course the cast members–especially Thomas Haden Church–did their jobs with pinhead spot-on laser accuracy. But to what purpose? How many books and movies are there in which a pessimistic, divorced English teacher writes a book that’s too long so he goes out with his immature, more handsome friend and ends up finding some kind of unresolved redemption with a woman who blah blah blah. I saw Wonder Boys too. I guess this one had wine in it, which is great, if you like wine.