random ha-ha - Anil Dash

Shushers: Wrong about movies. Wrong about the world.

There’s been a delightful debate the last few days about how to accommodate the increasing number of people who want the experience of watching movies in public theaters to fit in with the way they live the rest of

Jamaica Avenue!

Everyone claims to be at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell: And yet, this venue has no mayor! THE BLOGOSPHERE IS FACT-CHECKING YOUR ASS, Das Racist! As you might expect, Foursquare shows some delightful results if you check the

And Then There's Us

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag’s book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere‘s Charlie Todd, the New York Times‘ Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War

Say My Name Say My Name

For about ten years, Slate has had an intermittent series of articles that explain how to pronounce names of people who are in the news. As someone whose (first) name is frequently mispronounced, I can appreciate the effort. (For the

I Find It Bonkers, By The Way

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ve been missing out. But fear not! I take care of my loyal blog readers as well, by offering you the highlights of the interesting links I’ve been sharing there:

The Web is Full of Riches

I have some things to share with you. Alice Marwick‘s extraordinary keynote speech on internet celebrity from last year’s ROFLCon. It was the highlight of the event, imbued with both humor and a conscience. Mike Pusateri: “I am

On Spark

Those of you who liked my post the other day about not missing anything while I was offline might also enjoy a conversation I had with CBC Radio’s show Spark, part of which will be on the air today.

EXCLUSIVE UNBOXING FOOTAGE

I have to admit, I was a little bit gobsmacked when I saw that our little nerd world is becoming so mainstream that Jimmy Fallon had a gadget blogger featured on his show the other night — and it wasn’t

Feeling Blue

While listicles (articles that are simply lists, as cataloged on great sites like Listicles) are often the laziest form of journalism, they can also be among the most delightful. Something about the “I’m just phoning this in” nature of

Whoa Unto Thee

Whoa Is (Not) Me is a site that’s a little over a year old, dedicated to defending the career and reputation of Keanu Reeves. It is distinguished from other Keanu fansites by a number of traits, including that it

Embracing Constraints, Revisited

[P]erhaps the two best examples of how [religion-based food] bans have resulted in delicious and fascinating food are Jain cooking, with its ban on anything that remotely involves taking life, like root vegetables (little critters might get killed while

Serious LOLs: Come to ROFLCon

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I’ve been at least tenuously linked to some of the web’s most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate

The First Flush

I like to drink tea, either from my neighborhood tea shop or from what I brew at home, a nice cup of Darjeeling. “Darjeeling Tea” means more than you might think. According to the Tea Board Of India – “Darjeeling Tea”

What a Relief!

Tom Patterson, of the U.S. National Park Service, wrote a great paper five years ago on improved realism in NPS maps. There’s some very insightful analysis that was useful even to a layman like me. He covers a

The Family of Languages

From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a delightful family tree of Indo-European languages, though I was kinda miffed at the omission of my parents’ native tongue.

Et Tu, Spock?

Maybe I’m just a pushover, but I felt like there was something very charming and sweet about this video of a school project that I found on YouTube. It’s a restaging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that takes

Office Tools of Expression

One of my favorite posts that I’ve ever written was Excel Pile, about people’s propensity for using Office tools like Microsoft Excel to track mundane parts of their lives, or even as tools of artistic expression. From that

The LOL Street Journal

What makes lolcats appealing is that it’s simultaneously obscure and accessible. It’s an inside joke told in an online lingua franca, but with a bit of effort anyone can become an insider. “An in-joke used to be constrained

All Over the Web

I’ve found some nice responses to conversations I’ve had recently that are probably worth checking out. First, and most importantly, Soundwave: The Touch, the story behind Soundwave’s omission from the recent Transformers movie. Thanks to Nima Yousefi

Proof that cassingles really were evil

My fellow nerds, the moment we’ve waited more than two decades for has apparently arrived. Soundwave has arrived. He really transforms. And he really plays music.

U Don't Have To Be Rich

In the New Yorker, Bruce Wagner tries to live my life: The performance began at two in the morning and took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was amazing. I was so close to Prince that

Someday we'll even obey Article 5

I don’t know if it’s just that I went to lousy public schools, or that the xenophobic maniacs who resent the common ideals of humanity were successful in their efforts to shield kids from good ideas, but somehow

Later, They Fell Out Over "The Deck"

Over at The Cold Inclusive, the truth behind Jennifer Love Coudal Hewitt’s seminal role in Coudal Partners. TCI has been incredibly insightful in revealing JLH’s role in the birth of Web 2.0, but I found this latest

Friends of Faux

Behold, It’s (K)not Wood. I hestiate to make such a bold prediction, but it just may be the best blog dedicated to fake wood and woodgrain that you’ll see today. I daresay it’s the one you’

They Got Married?!

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the past, oh, ten years, you’ll have seen the ad for Classmates.com that features an improbable matrimonial matchup of a bookish young woman and a dreamy young man.