meersan: Babble

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 05:19:10 GMT

Babble: Amazon's Terrifying New Facelift

Looks like Amazon has changed their product pages... I'm confused and afraid. All change is bad! Why wasn't I warned?

Maybe it's books [img / link] only? Here's a dvd [img / link].

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 03:27:02 GMT

Word of the Day: Guess Who!

mor·ga·nat·ic adj.

Of or being a legal marriage between a person of royal or noble birth and a partner of lower rank, in which it is agreed that no titles or estates of the royal or noble partner are to be shared by the partner of inferior rank nor by any of the offspring of the marriage.
-- Dictionary.com

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:32:14 GMT

The slightest bit of research. Really.

"Now, when your core consumers discover that foreigners are paying a lot less for the same product than they are, they sometimes get angry — especially if the product is one that can be imported at relatively low cost, like, say, drugs. The same is true for entertainment. Why should law-abiding Americans pay $15 for Martin Scorsese's latest masterwork when Chinese consumers [...] have to pay only $3 for the exact same product? Markets being what they are, mechanisms—legal, quasi-legal, illegal—spring up to allow American consumers to gain access to the goods at something like the same terms that foreign consumers enjoy."
-- Daniel Gross, "Next Up, DVD Reimportation: A fantastic moneymaking opportunity for Slate readers"

Apparently someone hasn't heard of region codes. Or Google. The question is--are people really this clueless about the copyright protection hidden in everyday items, and should they be banned from ever sharing their opinions with the public?

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 04:31:09 GMT

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 03:43:15 GMT

We are the hollow giant

The failure of democracy lies in the ability of its citizens to vote into office politicians who give them what they want: at the cost of mountains of debt (people who aren't born yet don't vote) and accounting chicanery. It's time for all conservatives who love their country to recognize the truth. We need a balanced budget amendment. Short of full-scale war there is no excuse for mortgaging our national strength in order to pander to senior citizens and other gimme-gimme groups. I am filled with despair at the empty rhetoric: and there is nothing I can do about it. Thus we see the fundamental truth of democracy in the United States, where one woman's vote is the equal of anyone else's, by which we mean equally worthless.

I am now going to curl up in a corner, listen to Franz Ferdinand, and suck my thumb.

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 02:49:53 GMT

Link: Tenser, said the Tensor

Merci beaucoup to Salon Blogs neighbour Subdued Citizen of Longtime SF Fan File for linking to this fascinating linguistic analysis of Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao. One could find it almost frightening how much detail and sheer brainpower went into reviewing a book like that, much less to say writing the book itself. As time goes on I find myself more and more terrified of science fiction and the exhausting level of specialized knowledge and research it appears to require. (And this is a book written in 1958!) Another excellent reason to stick to my normal haunts in genre fantasy, cowering in the shadow of Tolkien.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 03:00:12 GMT

J.K. Rowling is the glistering Ungoliant asquat the publishing world, and I mean that in the best sense

Now that the pub date for Her Soylent Majesty's 6th book has been announced, blogworld is abuzz with speculation on the plot. Who lives? Who dies? Who cares! We at e·nar·en are bored to tears by all the obsessing over a book we won't be able to read until July. Here, then, are our predictions for Book 7.

1) Harry does not die.
No narrative force. She would have had to set this up by book 5 at the latest. And didn't.

2) Therefore, Voldemort's destruction turns Harry into a squib.
Harry and Voldemort are inseparably twined. Rowling beats us over the head with this at every possible opportunity: Harry shares Voldilock's power. During the climactic mano e mano showdown, Harry must choose to destroy the man who killed his parents at the cost of slamming the door shut on the wizarding world. I presume this is why HSM inflicts those painful Dursley sequences on us every book. Harry's muggle relatives shall serve to reestablish him in Mundania when he's no longer able to wave his wand with the rest of wizardkind.

Think bittersweet Frodo ending. Think mass book burnings and general outrage if Our Hero dies or things are "too easy". Think of the fetid masses churning and spawning a legion of boy-wizard novel writers on an unsuspecting world. And have mercy on us, Oh Deathless Spider-Queen.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 02:15:20 GMT

Saveen Ter Prise

Quote:
I gave up on Enterprise halfway into the first season. I enjoyed Star Trek V'ger when I stopped thinking of it as Star Trek. I gave up on DS9 when it turned into a Bajoran soap opera, but the turning point to suck came in Star Trek the Next Generation when they had that retarded episode, Force of Nature [tvtome.com], that warp drive was wearing out the fabric of spacetime. I think they ignored it after a while, the way they ignored the Organians after the first Klingon episode in classic Trek. Doctor Flox is even more annoying that Neelix. So killing Enterprise would be a mercy. Though I think they could save the show by having Six of Nine hot oil wrestle with T'Pol in a remake of "Gamesters of Triskelion" using time travel to grab competitors. I'd wager 30 quatloos on that.
-- Ranger, "Gave Up A Long Time Ago

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:37:50 GMT

What in tarnation is fellwalking? It sounds dangerous.

I'd never encountered this word--fellwalking--until last night. The separating chain of events is rather torturous and somewhat tiresome, so in the spirit of wasting my own time as well as yours I will endeavor to detail it here. My fellow Salon blog, The Hermit's Notebook, was the instigating culprit. He--j'assume--started it all off with a link to the Wikipedia article on Proto-Indo-European language. The external links from that article took me to a fascinating article by Geoffrey Sampson, who claims, among other things, to be a fellwalking enthusiast.

What, then, is fellwalking?

Wikipedia returned naught. Google, like that smarmy kid in gradeschool you always wanted to smack, had the answer. Here is a lovely, strange page by a devotee of fellwalking who explains, by means several intriguing chalk or pastel drawings, that fellwalking is another word for mountain hiking. Indeed. I have a writer's imagination but I was hoping it had something to do with abjuring spirits, or maybe a sorcerous variety of power-walking.