Congratulations to my brother, who used to go by aramchek77 and has lately been aybeedee (though that's got to change), who just successfully defended his dissertation! It's an extremely thoughtful study of the Singularity phenomenon in post-cyberpunk science fiction that his advisor told him is the strongest dissertation he's seen in a long while. Apparently most ( Read more... )

It looks like somebody's making a Battlestar Galactica MMORPG. I'm all for BSG and sci-fi MMOs, but I can't imagine how this would work. Are they gonna force everybody to play Cylons, or are they OK with there being tens of thousands more humans than in the series?

( Read more... )

Check out this spiffy interactive map the New York Times put together. It shows you how various movies fared in the 2009 Netflix rental market in several American cities. It's all broken down by zip code, and it also provides the top ten rentals for each zip code.

Somebody actually recalled one of my hobo books. Weird.

This diary at dkos traces the current iteration of the American right back to early colonization waves. I don't know if the research checks out, but it's certainly interesting and seems to make a lot of sense.

Click to view

Of course, of course.

So it's apparently curtains for Sarah Palin's governorship and, reportedly, her political career. Rumors are already flying about an impending federal indictment concerning the possibility that she used building supplies purchased by the city of Wasilla for a sports complex in the construction of her home ( Read more... )

...if a chicken bites you?