The passage in my last post came from The Lord of the Rings: the first sentence of the climactic paragraph where Sam stands on Mount Doom and sees Sauron's works fall to ruin. I just reformatted it ( Read more... )

. . . of this passage in blank verse: One turned to stone. A brief vision he had
Of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it
Towers and battlements, tall as hills,
Founded upon a mighty mountain-throne
Above immeasurable pits; great courts
And dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs,
And gaping gates of steel and adamant:
And then all passed.
(It's a ( Read more... )

Here's the 'best' of the first half-dozen 'poems' from my new program: it babbles at random according to a Markov model using the most common bigrams from Google's whole-web corpus, constrained to a Shakespearean sonnet.

( not safe for work )

And since they're using optical scan machines, my vote probably even got counted.

This post brought to you by the letters F, U, and W and the number -8.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.


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I'm visiting the SF Bay area over roughly the next week. Want to meet up? Email me or comment here. I'll be staying with a friend for the first few days, but I'd welcome the chance to crash with someone else for the rest of the stay -- wouldn't want to impose on him that long. (I'll find a hotel if there are no volunteers ( Read more... )

In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, the 'invisible art' is in the space between the panels:


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In the game Zendo, a master makes up an arbitrary, secret rule, and students compete with each other to be the first to guess it. The rule classifies configurations of pyramids into two types. We call a configuration of pyramids a 'koan'. An example rule: a koan 'has Buddha-nature' if it has a red pyramid pointing at a green one ( Read more... )

The darius endorsement for U.S. president goes to Barack Obama. As pnh puts it:He’s not an insurgent; he’s the standardbearer for a faction of the country’s political elite. I believe that, on balance, this particular faction happens to comprise many of the the smartest and most conscientious individuals from within that elite. So I’m supporting Obama and ( Read more... )

I met Beethoven's piano sonatas and The Lord of the Rings at about the same age, around 10, though they were never especially linked in my mind before ( Read more... )