Chronicide Online

Thanks to LifeHacker, I find this neat site:

Apparently, my family’s (unstated) mission to be numerous and everywhere hasn’t quite reached fruition yet…

And this was the line that awaited me when I got to my local Ben & Jerry’s at 7:40 this evening:

I only had to wait maybe five minutes for my free scoop of ice cream (chocolate peanut butter swirl, if you must know), but still an impressive line.

Yay, free ice cream! Yay, Ben & Jerry’s! And, because I likes me some chocolate and peanut butter, yay, chocolate peanut butter swirl!

This was the line that awaited me when I got to my local polling place at 6:40 this morning:

It was as long again inside before reaching the actual voting room. I haven’t voted in all that many presidential elections yet, and this is my first one at this polling place, but still…this is the first time I’ve had to wait in any kind of line to vote. And it is awesome.

I love seeing this kind of involvement. And I love it when people bring their kids with them, like the little boy in the yellow jacket apparently trying to scamper away above. Giving their children any kind of awareness about the process is undoubtedly a Good Thing.

(There was also a kid, had to’ve been in high school, standing outside the “no electioneering” zone handing out flyers, and he said he was there all day. Young people who get involved are the best!)

All this is to say: yay, voting! Yay, America! And, because I’m not trying to be partisan here, yay Obama!

This is a neat bit of emoticon performance poetry, courtesy of TED:

Watching it made me

This just blows my mind :

Ford Motor Company is introducing an innovative new technology – called MyKey – designed to help parents encourage their teen-agers to drive safer and more fuel efficiently, and increase safety-belt usage.

…

The MyKey system allows the parent to program any key through the vehicle message center, which updates the SecuriLock™ passive anti-theft system. When the MyKey is inserted into the ignition, the system reads the transponder chip in the key and immediately identifies the MyKey code, which enables certain default driving modes…

What type of default driving modes? A seatbelt reminder system that keeps beeping at you and keeps the audio system muted until you buckle up; earlier low fuel warnings; preventing safety features from being deactivated; and of course, the concern of anyone with a teen driver, fixed upper-limit speed (80 mph) and audio volume control (44 percent of total volume).

I can see why this is a neat idea, but if I were still a teenager, I’d be sooooo annoyed by those features.

I wonder what the security implications are for this?

Oh yeah, first things first…this is awesome.

I’ve never been shy about my fondness for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and (to a lesser extent) its sequels. I’ve read the book several times, and the earliest sequels (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) at least twice. At times, it’s been hard to defend this fondness: Card is a good enough craftsman as a storyteller, but his prose is hardly the stuff that will inspire generations; he can get pretty un-subtle and heavy-handed with a lot of his messages; and, in recent years, he’s come to espouse a lot of politics that I am, to put it mildly, in strong disagreement with.

Still and all, the story of Ender and his army, put in a situation they never should have been in, facing decisions no one should have to face, is a compelling one.

At least, it’s compelling to me. This afternoon, Jason drew my attention to a post from a few years ago that spoke of a less-than-admirable Orson Scott Card, a controversial interpretation of Ender’s Game, and a theory that Card wasn’t actually involved in the writing of the series. The post itself is hardly worth paying any attention — it’s nothing but anecdotal evidence (and twenty-year-old anecdotal evidence at that!), based on the author’s interpretations of events he was witness to or involved in — but the controversial interpretation of Ender’s Game gets a bit more of my time.

The author points us to his friend Elaine Radford’s 1987 essay Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman which appeared in the now-defunct Fantasy Review. As the title suggests, Ms. Radford makes the case that Ender’s Game is actually an apology for Hitler’s genocidal atrocities. Now, this is not a new essay, so I’m sure I’m hardly touching on new ground, but it was the first time I read it, and I had a few responses to it.

The short version is: I don’t buy it. The longer version is after the jump.

(more…)

Right, so if I want to see The Dark Knight in Imax on opening weekend, these are the showtimes that, as of right now, are still available to me:

• Saturday, 5 a.m.
• Sunday, 5 a.m.
• Sunday, 1:30 a.m. (it’s listed at the end of the day, so I wonder if that’s actually Monday at 1:30…)
• Monday, 9 a.m.
• Monday, 12:20 p.m.
• Monday, 3:40 p.m.
• Monday, 10:20 p.m.

(When I looked at the list not a half-hour ago, Monday at 7 p.m. was still available, so these things are definitely going quickly.)

What I’m saying is, this. Is. INSANE! There’s no way this movie isn’t going to break every box office opening weekend record.

And, yeah, looking at those options, I think I’ll opt for the non-Imax opening weekend, and catch it on the BIG big screen at a later date.

It occurs to me, I should share the excitement…

Coming this Tuesday!

What? You don’t know what Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is? Okay, check this out:

(Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.)

Awesome, yeah? That’s the brain child of Joss Whedon, folks; always worth a look.

So let’s look forward to seeing part one of this baby on Tuesday!

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to in my newsreader is Comic Book Resources , though, honestly, it’s one I ignore more often than I actually take advantage of. It’s the type of feed that innundates you with posts, so it’ll go from zero to 20 unread posts in an hour, and heaven forbid you actually go a day without reading it — there could be 60 or more unread posts waiting for you!

And, of course, it also doesn’t help when I go into the feed and find things like this:

I understand why it happens, but it can make it pretty darn annoying to wade through their feed…