Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurdles Down At You” video trailer
Kudos, Electric Literature.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUClJFjFEgk
Stephanie Johnson Reads Online at Keyhole
Just caught the last few minutes of Stephanie Johnson’s live web-reading over at Keyhole to promote her book One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others and general good-feeling web-literature emotions. Great stuff; I enjoyed it a lot. She read two pieces (one was the title piece of the collection).
Stephanie will read again tomorrow at 8pm CST and Thursday at 8pm CST. To watch live, access Keyhole‘s website or go to the UStream link. It’s pretty simple to figure out; I didn’t have any trouble.
You can also chat with Stephanie after the reading, though you may have to do it through a UStream account.
You can watch an archived version of tonight’s reading here.
Moon Publicity
I found this bit on the Writer Beware blog: supposedly, a company called MegaNova is planning to sell the rights to robot technology that would allow one to embed a message/logo/advertisement into the robots’ programs so that the robots could then trace the message/logo/advertisement into the dusty surface of the moon. Call it MoonPublicity. What does everyone think? Hoax?
Really really hope this is real. Really want to live to see the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment finally happen.
Plotting with 419Eater.com
I somehow spent an hour or so this weekend reading various ‘baits’ in the PublishYourWork forum over at 419Eater.com, a site devoted to the art of scambaiting (if you’re not familiar with scambaiting, read this post by Tom Whitwell at The Times Online).
As I read through the threads, I was surprised at how scambaiters talk about their work. Scambaiters use specific terms to describe what they do: a ‘lad’ is a targeted scammer, a ‘trophy’ is something the scambaiter receives from the lad, a ‘mark’ is a victim of a scammer (known as a ‘mugu’ in scammer circles apparently), and so on.
I was also impressed with how involved some of these ‘baits’ are. A few of the better scambaiters put a lot of effort into working the scammers: they play multiple characters, from clergymen to hackers to other scammers; they do their best to send the exchange into odd twists; and they often wait until the right moment, just when the scammer has done all he thought he needed to do in order to get the money, before revealing the hopelessness of the situation/play their trick/etc.
Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick it up.
Hey do you remember ska? I do! It was SO GOOD. My parents were all like ‘don’t listen to that razzamatazz!’ and I was like ‘but mom there are HORNS in there!’ and she’s like ‘well, can’t argue with a good horn section…’ and then this gave her the opportunity to make me listen to Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and then I saw the album cover and my eyes were all like ‘boinnnnng!’
I started listening to ska because Melissa Napoleon (happy Bastille Day btw) had a patch on her Jansport that covered up the Jansport that said ‘SKA’ on it! At first I thought it meant SKATE or POLSKA but nope! So I went to the Princeton Record Exchange and bought three albums! Skankin’ Pickle – The Green Album! Fugazi – Repeater +3 Songs! Gorilla Biscuits – Start Today! Two of them changed my life! One of them did not!
Either way, we can all laugh about it now! (Literary Ska-Band Names: David Foster Skalas, The National Books Critic’s Circle Skaward, One Hundred Years of Ska-litude)
Except for SOMEONE WE KNOW. Yes, Pitchfork Media, the Internet equivalent to that one friend who is kind of a douche but sometimes suggests decent stuff except when they went on that art-noise kick (ew!) had a layout change a few months ago. In this giant html htmlgiant-like facelift, they did a little bit of housekeeping, including eliminating the 9.5 review they gave of Save Ferris’ debut album ‘It Means Everything’. A 9.5! Wha! You remember those guys! They were famous for being mis-identified as No Doubt when you downloaded their feel-good cover of ‘Come On Eileen’ off of Napster! They had a song called ‘Spam’ that was about ‘Spam’ the meat not ‘Spam’ the email! 9.5!
Seriously…the review exists (it was one of the super short ones way back when) and is absolutely nowhere to be found on the Interwebs; a link from Wikipedia is dead. We at Le Giant are no stranger to unpublishing and the risks of publication online, but this is a conspiracy like that conspiracy movie! If you can find this review it needs to be saved 4ever! SAVE SAVE FERRIS
42 Comments
July 14th, 2009 / 7:47 pm
July 14th, 2009 / 7:47 pm
HTML Giant: The Game
Gene and I were chatting about Shotgun Ninja last night and found out that we both had the same secret desire. We both want to meet an indie video game designer and collaborate with them to make games. But how would we ever make this happen?
Well, we have a blog. We have readers. We may as well go ahead and ask.
Are you an indie video game designer? Would you like to collaborate with willing members of the HTML Giant team? Would you like to be the HTML Giant Gamemaster? Get in touch. I’m at
giantblinditems
at
g
mail
dot
com
Imagine: EVER, The Escape
[ ]
[ ]
[ ] [ ]
Or pr’s Baked Tennis All Stars.
Or BE SAM PINK: the game.
A Jello Horse’s Giant Turtle Rampage.
The Log of the S.S. Marie Unguentine Movie Tie-in Game.
An HTML Giant text adventure.
Etcetera.
Spread the word. We’re serious.
Ryeberg!
Q: How cool is it that this exists? A: Pretty cool.
One of those distinguished people is none other than Mary Gaitskill, who has written on four clips so far, one of which is Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” video, which was the essay that inspired my friend Meehan to alert me to this site’s existence in the first place. Another one is “Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention,” wherein Gaitskill discerns an analog between Palin and the “false Maria” of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Other, non-Gaitskill contributors to Ryeberg include –
Alana Wilcox – “Knuckles and Narrative” (an essay on boxing, with a video of a guy teaching a little kid to box)
Peter Lynch – “The Nobody in All of Us” (on Warhol and Scorceses’s The King of Comedy)
Alexandra Shimo – “What Nazis Watched Over Dinner” (exactly what it says)
Your favorite bitter literary characters on Omegle
Whoever said Omegle is the Internet-chat version of truckstop-bathroom sex didn’t think to throw ‘great literature’ at it to, you know, maybe class it up a bit. Well, I thought it, and I threw it, and I somehow still feel dirty, ashamed, and full of regret. I feel like I’ve ruined something.
I give you the underground man chatting on Omegle, followed by Molloy chatting on Omegle.
The Petabyte
I’m not suggesting that you don’t know what a Petabyte is, only that I came across ‘their’ flyer and felt like posting it. Okay just click for more. READ MORE >
Sorry Benjamin Kunkel.
The insular, dramatic affirmations just don’t cut it this time.
Speaking from my experience, the internet (lowercase ‘i’) is what lead me to the serious study of literature and philosophy and history. Need I point out how many comprehensive and correct resources there are for said ‘serious’ study? I would use some more time to turn every word in the last sentence into a link for Benjamin and everyone reading this, but my severely addled ADHD brain just won’t let me. I see something shiny. Damn you, Interwebz! And that same ADHD mind is going to pass on your next article, because, hell, there’s so much more pseudo-subsumption to get to.