betajames

Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with "Bad Writing," a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don't necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful. But was Lott able to spin the straw of poems like "Sketches of Despair" into the gold of a nifty short film featuring interviews with the likes of George Saunders and Margaret Atwood? Hard to say, as "Bad Writing" has yet to find distribution.

compared with what it could have been saying about its strategy toward news companies, Google has undersold its efforts and rarely talked about them as an overall program with a central guiding idea. Partly this is because of the highly decentralized nature of most innovative effort at Google, which often takes place in “20 percent time”—a workday per week when developers can concentrate on projects they choose themselves. Partly it is because of the “permanent beta” culture at Google, in which projects are viewed as tentative and experimental long after they have reached what others would consider a mature stage. (The company’s wildly popular e-mail system, Gmail, officially graduated from beta-test status only last summer, after five years of operation by tens of millions of users worldwide.) And the news organizations that are trying out experimental approaches at Google’s suggestion and with its support have themselves chosen to be quiet.

"With seven million or more messages being tweeted each day, this data stream potentially allows us to take the temperature of the population very quickly," Smith said. "The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we're still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls.

Hatred is not the opposite of love; apathy is. Hatred requires passion, it's a deeply emotional state. Apathy is the lack of any emotion. So when Quake 4 was met with apathy by both critics and consumers, the toll that took on much of that development team was significant. Many of those team members were brought onto Wolfenstein. They saw many of the same problems on Wolfenstein which they felt held Quake 4 back from being a superior product. And so, misery turned into frustrations, frustrations turned into anger, and anger turned into resignations. Over the next 18 months at Raven, a very large number of people left. Many of them were my friends. Some stayed in the industry, others left the business forever. I had, for the first time, started to experience the dark side of development. The part that chews people up and spits them out.

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says.

Sitting in his carefully engineered workspace—a comfortable chair and two giant monitors placed at the precise distance that Wikipedia says prevents eyestrain and a humped posture—Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred per cent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”

t's no exaggeration to say I've been overwhelmed by the response to my post on why you should quit Facebook.

To those of you who shared your stories about leaving, or took the time to clarify some of the reasons for doing so, thank you. Apparently, I was hardly alone in making the decision to quit, or at least seriously considering it. It has been nothing short of inspiring to read your comments and realize how many of you cared enough to take action, whether it was actually deleting your account or simply taking the time to share your thoughts.

One of the most intriguing and useful features in Twitter is the "retweet" facility. If you see something in your tweetstream that you think might interest others, then you can click a button to make it visible to the people who are following you. Retweeting has become so commonplace that its conventions have already been the subject of a serious study by the anthropologist Danah Boyd and her colleagues at Microsoft Research. But it turns out that retweeting is not just interesting in terms of discourse analysis

The paper found that many real-world patterns of intimacy formation are recreated on the virtual stage. One interviewee recounted, "I and a guy I liked spent a lot of time flirting in game. One evening we discovered an abandoned hut near Ironforge [a major city in WoW] and spent the whole evening with our avatars cuddling on the bed just touching. I really felt close to him and didn't notice time passing."

But virtual worlds also create novel situations. "Originally, the guy... was talking to me a lot," wrote one man, "but I didn't realize that he was a guy, cause his avatar was a girl... It's a big joke with us really, because his girlfriend/fiancée thought I was hitting on him, and the whole time I thought he was a girl. Anyway, we all reconciled the situation, and we are still, what I like to call, friends to this day."

what convinced us that we had an advanced absurdist on our hands was the localization of Theory to departments of literature, the very experts steeped in the collective genius of expression, whom we judged to be as likely to embrace violations of the laws of sense and felicity as physicists to make merry with violations of the laws of nature.