Internal Monologue

A language preserved only in certain obsolete texts, whose more recent editions, though much clearer and better organized, have been drained of a sense of wonder. What a treat, to grow up reading text like this: The true splendor of the Vault can be appreciated only by those with infravision, or by use of the roseate lenses or a gem of seeing. The Vault is a strange anomaly, a hemispherical cyst in the crust of the earth, an incredibly huge domed fault over 6 miles long and nearly as broad. The dome overhead is a hundred feet high at the walls, arching to several thousand feet height in the center. When properly viewed, the radiation from certain unique minerals give the visual effect of a starry heaven, while near the zenith of this black stone bowl is a huge mass of tumkeoite -- which in its slow decay and transformation to lacofcite sheds a lurid gleam, a ghostly plum-colored light to human eyes, but with ultravision a wholly different sight. The small "star" nodes glow

As I once pointed out, messaging, instant and text, has replaced the phone call as the chief means by which teen-agers communicate their woes to other teen-agers—but if messaging had come along first, and the phone call just been announced by Steve Jobs a week ago, can anyone doubt the huge technological leap the phone call would present over the instant message? Real-time conversation! Hear your girlfriend’s every breath and sigh! Escape the tyranny of the keyboard for the roaming realm of the real voice! “Real Speech, Real Time, At Last The Real You,” Steve would say, and we would all be rocking in his wake. - Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

UPDATE: More at boingboing . UPDATE 2: The Volokh Conspiracy and Sullivan have now posted on this. (But you read it here at Internal Monologue first!) Story seems to have touched a nerve. I think everyone can empathize with a guy in prison for life who has had one of his few sources of richness and pleasure taken away. Punishing people who are already helpless just seems awful, no matter no matter how much they deserve it. Question: does putting people in prison really reduce crime, or does it just push crime into a hole where most of us don't have to deal with it? ...and I say give it to him! Yes, he was convicted of 1st degree murder, but when you take his D&D stuff away , I'm on his side: MADISON, Wis. - A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide has lost his legal battle to play Dungeons and Dragons behind bars. Kevin T. Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison after a p

If the typical furry is a humanoid being with a animal head, then these are sort of reverse furries : Question: Were the ancient Egyptians furries? I'm not the first one to have pondered this .

While waiting for the next season, we call mull this over: No contemporary television show employs a quieter camera than Mad Men. Its disdain for the Law & Order version of cinematic realism that reached its apogee (or nadir) in Cloverfield is palpable: the camera frames scenes from multiple fixed positions and the shots are spliced together at a pace designed to have a soporific effect on anyone born after 1980. The framing and the pacing are a deliberate homage to the films of the period represented on the show. Though it may seem natural to direct a series set in the early 1960s in the same mode Douglas Sirk shot films in the 1960s, it is anything but. Most films that aim to be realist depict the past in the dominant contemporary realist mode: Saving Private Ryan looks realistic to us because it panders to what we think looks realistic. Had Spielberg directed it in accordance with the realism regnant in 1942 the film would have looked dated. I point out the obvious here

Would House Democrats please pass the deeply-flawed Senate health care reform bill? We can do some fixes by budget reconciliation later. Don't let one special election against a lackluster candidate send you into some kind of feinting spell tizzy. And if you don't do anything, that will be a horrible moral catastrophe. And if that doesn't motivate you, it will be a horrible political catastrophe for you as well. Your base is already very upset with you. If you let this chance slip away, it will be awful awful awful.