Reading chinaSMACK makes me lose faith in the Chinese Internet. Reading the China Digital Times helps me regain it.

Neither voice is truly representative of Chinese public opinion--both are run by foreigners with agendas. (Pot, kettle, black, I know.) But oh, how good it feels that someone over there is able to look through the gilded lens of ( Read more... )

Virtually every country in an emerging position of power has produced a document to this template at some point ( Read more... )

I need to prime the pump for my Georgia Tech writing sample. Let's talk Magnasanti. Behold:

Click to view

I first saw this unprecedentedly huge SimCity 3000 megacity as part of the Credit Due installation at Babycastles, where it was surrounded by a fan of notes--dozens of pages of optimizing equations and geometric diagrams in efficient, impeccable ( Read more... )

Two great events at Babycastles yesterday: a screening of GET LAMP and a presentation on Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. GET LAMP is an excellent, well-researched, and surprisingly financially successful set of documentary films on the text-adventure / interactive fiction genre by filmmaker and Internet historian Jason Scott, who also did BBS: The ( Read more... )

"For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the ( Read more... )

There's been a bit of a brouhaha over the recent passing of State Question 755, an Oklahoma referendum that amends the Oklahoma state constitution to "makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases...forbids courts from considering or using international law...forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law." (Source.) ( Read more... )

Happy 99th, Taiwan.

100 years of Chinese democracy--a century without dynasties. Let's hope for 100 more.

Today, with all the oil spilling out over the Gulf of Mexico and ruining livelihoods and killing sea life and provoking nervous ha-ha-only-serious jokes about burning hurricanes over Texas, it seems appropriate for me to talk a little bit about oil, and why it is so important.
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Dear news blogosphere:

Joseph Andrew Stack III was not a madman. He was not a liberal. He was not a conservative. He was not a Marxist. He was not a teabagger. He was, if his suicide note is any indication, a sane, rational, educated human being, disillusioned with the left and the right and everyone in between, who burned down his own home after ( Read more... )

Sometime in 2008, Cliff Harris, former Lionhead Studios programmer and current head of small-time developer Positech Games, got absolutely fed up with seeing software pirates eat up a huge chunk of his revenue. He logged on to various well-known Internet forums and flat-out asked gamers why they pirated his games. This was, needless to say, an ( Read more... )