Nerdcore for Life. Finally there is a movie about my kind of people. My favorite part of the trailer is when a show is introduced with, “you’re going to hear people rap about comics books, video games, role playing, nondeterministic finite automata”. The NFA part slides in as though everyone will obviously know what they are. Nice.
Also, I don’t know what a diamond video games or if an arcade made of gold makes sense, but I want one.
Several weeks ago I went to hear Paul Graham be interviewed by David Weinberger at Harvard’s Berkman center (video online) discuss his article “Taste for Makers”. As the discussion got more abstract and approached the “what is beauty?” stratosphere, my mind wandered. I’d seen Paul talk before, at Startup School last year and RailsConf this summer, and seeing him this time I put my finger on the fact that he reminds me of Travis Morrison of the disbanded Dismemberment Plan. Both strike me as very bright, have a rather high pitched voice & boyish looks, a certain nerdy charisma, a penchant for funny wordplay, and are a little, well, weird. But in a good and thoroughly entertaining way.
Toward the end of the Q&A (where it is required someone ask him about Arc) Paul mentioned that he’d been working on Arc this summer and that an upcoming redesign of the Y Combinator site to be more a resource for entrepreneurs is being written in it. That could be interesting.
I’m a New Yorker fan and have been for a while. Yet whenever I read a story I’d like to share with friends, it seems to be among the ones they don’t have listed on their site (not even for subscribers!). For example, the most recent New Yorker that showed up has an interesting George Packer piece about the anthropology of insurregency and the use of the global telecommunications in “the long war”. I wanted to give a link to some friends, and, of course, that 1996-era website newyorker.com doesn’t have it.
But there’s hope. I recently saw that the newyorker.com has a site redesign coming in February, 2007. Hopefully it will include their full content, searchable archives, and something to help their google juice because they rarely show up even when I know there is a New Yorker article I’m searching for. And who knows, maybe the Reddit guys and their alien can help our their monocled Conde Nast cousins add some interactivity to the site.
Update: Now the Packer article is online. It’s not linked to from the front page and I suspect it was put online because David Brooks linked to it in his year end wrap of interesting writing in 2006. (Brooks’ article is also behind a walled garden on the NYTimes Select.)
NBC has put up the full episodes for 30 Rock and Friday Night Lights on their site. They’re free except for the opening ad and mild pain of their flash player.
I hope both shows find a bigger audience to keep them around. I really liked the book Friday Night Lights is loosely based on, and was surprised when I saw they were making a tv show of it (since Peter Berg already made a movie of his cousin’s book in 2004). The book seemed more about holding up the football culture of West Texas up for examination and judgement. The tv show doesn’t take the same arms-length perspective of the book, and has more time to develop the characters beyond what was done in the movie. Before I watched, I was worried it would devote too much to each football game, but they wisely focus on the build up to each friday night game. The Friday Night Lights soundtrack is very well done with plenty of lonely-sounding guitar playing that, like the show overall, can move between celebrating and criticizing the town’s all-consuming focus on football. And this week’s episode had a well placed Jose Gonzalez song weaved in briefly, too.
30 Rock is very funny and deserves to be more popular than it is. I’m worried it’s going to be the next Arrested Development and slip through the cracks (hopefully being on Thursday’s will help). The show is smartly written to play to the strengths to each of the actors, without relying on one person for too many the jokes. And if I wasn’t completely sold before, the bit with Tracy Morgan on Conan as a “stabbing robot” hooked me.
Our brief trip to Philadelphia included:
