When Bruce Sterling reads this Guardian article on brain implants used for treating depression, what comes to his mind is how people it could be misused by governments to induce depression instead. Whereas the first thing that pops into my mind is how it’d be nice to be watching the Olympics and seeing these modified athletes who are all operating with stimulated brains, you know, the bit that goees wild when your kid’s under a bus, and you lift it with one arm? Show me a sprinter with an implant there, baby. Oh, and the other thing I imagine is …
Month: April 2006
Me Want :: Roll-Up Keyboard
Maybe I’m just a hopeless gadgetgeek, but I want this Roll-Up Keyboard. From the list of weird keyboards Bruce Sterling linked to recently here.
ㅋㅋㅋ, k-k-k, kekeke: leet mutation?
In the Boing Boing post linking to this wikipedia article on the origins of leetspeak, I saw something I thought was unusual: it was claimed that “kekeke” was a Korean equivalent of “hahaha”. What’s weird about it is that the root of the expression is actually ㅋㅋㅋ, which is to say, kkk, without any vowels… and that, usually, when I catch students trying to render ㅋㅋㅋ in English writing, they use a simple “kkk” or k-k-k instead of kekeke. I have to wonder where the vowels got added in, or why this variant in any case arose among Korean gamers….
This Spartan Life
If you haven’t heard of This Spartan Life, well, it’s a Late-Show styled interview show that’s conducted from… inside a video game. Via this article in Wired.
fightglobalwarming.com PSAs
Recently I asked some of my students why we always advertise for things that are for sale, when some of the most important things in life cannot be bought or sold. I even had them do up PSAs. Well, they did them in print-advertisement formats, but I think sometime later, I’ll show them a couple of the ads from the fightglobalwarming.com webpage. If you want to see one of them, you can click under the “think about it” section in the sidebar, or have to look at the exended section of the post.