we are not dead yet

This site is, in fact, not going away. You have read this before on a dozen sites and, no doubt, realized that the site was going away. It always does. Heh. I’m contrary that way. Not going to happen.

My brief kvetch tonight is, what the hell are we doing allowing the government to run public schools? If you’ve been on the internet at all, you have surely marveled at the tiny fraction of people who seem to have passed third-grade English. If you’ve been in a chat room, or read newspaper feedback, or played World of Warcraft, “u no excactly wat i men”.

Perhaps you can name some professional writers in technological fields (Cory Doctorow) who haven’t seemed to have figured out basic grammar or spelling (Cory Doctorow). It’s as if this science fiction writer, with his eyes on the future and firmly on the past, had never heard of such modern conveniences as a spelling checker, or the benefits of an editor. Not that I intend to mention any names (Cory Doctorow) but, if I did, the list might include Cory Doctorow.

And now for something completely different

A compelling, and compulsive, unusual rendition of the old Peanuts theme…

http://youtube.com/watch?v=N4UMqXMWdQM

You may gather a certain wrongness about the tune without knowing quite why. There’s kind of a key flaw, there… it really requires two players to do properly on guitar.

The go of the flow

Time was, a computer game was an arcade game. You went to a “video arcade”, which was a shop in a mall or, perhaps, on its own. You paid with quarters, one or two or four at a time, or perhaps you bought tokens.

You didn’t buy the games, you rented them. The shopkeeper bought the games. While they had to suit you, they were very much more designed to suit the shopkeeper. The games had to be attractive and fun to play… and, ideally, they had to give you the least amount of time playing them as possible, so you’d have to drop down some more money, or turn the game over to another customer.