putative.com

What is Twitter?

It's like this:

Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide. In order to become a "follower" on Twitter, teens first must flash their high-beam headlights at an oncoming motorist on the highway. Then, if that motorist flashes his or her high-beam headlights back in reply, the teen must kill the motorist in order to be initiated into "following" the online gang.

Oh! Mikey: an insane, Adult-Swim-style Japanese TV show, now on G4

Via Boing Boing:

The cotton swab, the DNA, and the phantom serial killer

I think Andrew Sullivan is right, there's something deep in here:

Police in Germany hunted a sinister phantom killer for two years after finding the same DNA at 39 different crime scenes--only to discover that the source was a woman who made the cotton buds used to collect the sample! The case was one of the most puzzling in recent times. Hundreds of detectives in six specialist committees were set to work hunting the ominous female serial killer.

Sculptures that continuously teeter on the edge of catastrophe

(via Kottke)

Settlers of Catan in Wired

Great, longish piece in the new Wired on the hegemony of Monopoly and the history and social context of Settlers of Catan and board gaming in general—with, it should be noted, pictures of the man himself, Klaus Teuber! It also does a good job of explaining to a lay audience why Settlers and other "German-style" games are so entertaining (and so different from traditional American board games). 

A few fun facts/quotes from the story:

1. Settlers has outsold Halo 3. ("Since its introduction, The Settlers of Catan has become a worldwide phenomenon. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold a staggering 15 million copies (even the megahit videogame Halo 3 has sold only a little more than half that).")
2. When you play Risk in Germany, you're greeted as a liberator. ("Violence in particular is taboo in Germany's gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. In fact, when Parker Brothers tried to introduce Risk there in 1982, the government threatened to ban it on the grounds that it might encourage imperialist and militaristic impulses in the nation's youth. (The German rules for Risk were hastily rewritten so players could "liberate" their opponents' territories, and censors let it slide.)") 
3. As you probably know, there is a lot of *secret math* in Settlers. (From making the Xbox 360 version: "Teuber created elaborate logic chains and probability matrices in a complex Excel spreadsheet so the videogame developers could see how every possible move and roll of the dice—from the impact of the Robber to the odds of getting wheat in a given scenario—compared. The end result was a sort of blueprint for the game that gave Big Huge Games a head start and showed just how complex the underlying math was. "It was the biggest, gnarliest spreadsheet I had ever seen," Reynolds says.")

Thanks to the article, I also now love the phrase "Roll your dice, move your mice"—a shorthand description of retarded, zero-strategy gameplay models, as in Monopoly. 

 

(Thanks for the tip, Shelley!)

A Creature Thus Be Born!

In case you know Amy and Shanti and hadn't already heard... A Creature Thus Be Born!

Silas' first—and perhaps last—bite of Peep

He tore off the head and was unimpressed. There was like .5 more of a bite before he decided he was done with it. 

The Peep was hand-embedded on a cookie, cutely decorated (with a green coconut-flake "grass" nest and everything) by a 10-year-old-ish girl who was selling them on Fourth Ave yesterday, for her Catholic Youth Association group to fight hunger or something.

More details on the GOP's "Road to Recovery" budget alternative

Nate Silver has the scoop:

End the war on Octomom!

You can't touch Mormon Jesus

A new poll says that people's outlook on the economy is improving

It's true. And because consumer spending is close to two-thirds of GDP, that means things could actually sloooooooowly start to get better.