It’s not something I follow very closely, but I have been vaguely aware of the ongoing fugitive status of the drug lord “El Chapo” Guzman. So I had a bit of context when the CNN show that I had put as background noise started talking about a Twitter post that his son made which may give away his location.
It seems El Chapo Mas Pequeno (El Chapito?) had, intentionally or not, placed a geotag on a Tweet of a photo that may show him in the company of his father (the latter’s face being artfully obscured by those now…
Right after grad school I started working on a dream project of mine: A location-tied message posting app. After a lot of consideration I decided that the best way to implement this idea was as a Twitter client, and so, Landburd (now in beta!) was born.
At its most basic level of functionality, Landburd searches and returns tweets associated with various apps in order to give the user a sort of basic sense of what’s happening nearby. The kinds of tweets I’m currently presenting are posted via Swarm, Foursquare, and Instagram. I also show regular tweets if they’re heavily favorited…
Dumb science fiction done well
Last night I walked to my local single screen theater, bought a pint of pale ale, and settled in to watch what was probably the best sci-fi action flick I’ve seen in years. Maybe even in… decades? It is that hard to think of a better one.
First, let me be clear about a personal quirk. For me there are essentially two genres of science fiction. The first of these is “serious scifi,” whose exemplars include classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Contact, and very probably last year’s Her. …
… and Every Other Twitter Shit-storm Du Jour
You do not get to tell people whether or not they are offended.
Comedy is not a sacred place where everything is allowed.
Intention is not a free pass, but it counts for something.
And when language diverges from intention, this is the place to start a dialog. Patting yourself and your opinion on the back doesn’t help anyone grow.
Animated GIFs have been kind to me. The small amount of Internet fame I’ve managed to garner is due mostly to a very niche GIF-related project I finished last summer. So lately I pay a little more attention to the format, and yes, the Great Pronunciation War often weighs heavily on my mind. Today I’m thinking there’s a good reason many of us prefer the hard g (myself included), and I think it can be explained in a somewhat rigorous manner.
Now.
Close your eyes.
Find your inner peace.
And suppose, for a moment, that you had never seen the…
An Overdue Review, Submitted For Partial Credit
If there’s one quality that most science fiction is sorely lacking it’s the presence of a light touch. A movie with a scope of action that encompasses the fate of an entire world, galaxy, starship or what-have-you often has to sacrifice human nuance in the service of advancing the plot. The majority of works in the genre seem to bite off more than they can chew in this manner, and SF fans who crave subtlety at the theater can expect maybe one film per annum to live up to their standards.
In 2013 this film was almost certainly Spike Jonze’s…
In Which New Methods Of Human Flight Are Discovered, and The Facts Are Reconsidered
I’m something of an armchair critic of armchair critics of GMO food, but lately I’ve been making an effort to firm up my stance on the matter.
One of the first hard-science-citing articles that you can come upon when searching for the dangers of GMO food is written by a guy who also believes in something called “Yogic Flying” (you will find the relevant Wikipedia page on this to be subtle, but the Photoshop-stuffed Google image tab to be, well, not quite as subtle). The knowledge-hungry reader will be interested to note that one of the first sites I found…
A comprehensive manual to watching Star Trek with other nerds on the Internet
NEWS (7/7/14):
The @tweetTrek account now has an automated voting system for selecting an episode. To use it tweet:
@tweetTrek vote [series code] [episode code]
(e.g. ‘@tweetTrek vote TOS 2x06'). You can get the right codes for an episode by finding it on en.memory-alpha.org, and looking in the box with the picture on the right.
An Introduction
Although live-tweeting, Star Trek, Netflix, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are all wonderful and popular things, an astonishingly small amount of effort has been made toward finding a way to enjoy all of them simultaneously. We at @tweetTrek humbly aim to change that.
And I Need To Take The Antenna Off The TV Before It Destroys Me
Only in rare circumstances do I permit the wretched presence of over-the-air, old style TeeVee on my monitor-cum-televisions. The Olympic Games are one of these times. Downton Abbey was another. But carelessly leaving the antenna attached as I have invites the possibility of all manner of filth into my home. How long before I decide that I need to “give Fallon another chance” or that I should “put on the local news for weather updates.”
I’m really scared I’m going to watch the Oscars tonight, guys.
Lately I’ve been in the bad habit of trying to express complicated ideas on Twitter. An inevitable result of these endeavors seems to be about five-to-ten shitty tweets in a row.
The ideal solution is what you’re looking at: an in-between style bloggy type thing that’s bigger than Twitter, but not as complicated as WordPress.
Less shitty tweets. More complete thoughts. Enjoy.
nat{han} e{.} gri{ffith}
Minor league space scientist and last of the Apple ][ programmers. Destined to do something cool but heck if we know what yet. http://nathangriffith.info/
