Don't Make Me Hurt You
Bagheera is strict, but fair. I have been warned.
Wes Phillips
His Special Place
Huckleberry hones those claws when he's happy. He hones 'em when he's frustrated. Essentially, he hones 'em a lot—which explains why my paws are so frequently bloody.
Never Use the Word "Very"
I grew up on the works of Franklin W. Dixon and Victor Appleton II, which is to say the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr., as they appeared in the early 1960s. I've had the same disillusioning experience as Gene Weingarten—except that I also devoured the original 1930s versions when I discovered the pulps collection at Alderman Library at UVA.
Memory Hacking
Ted Berger is working on wetware can reconstruct lost thoughts. Well, that's the eventual goal.
Tyger
Brazil's Guilherme Marcondes shows the big studios how to make animation interesting. Tyger mixes puppetry, illustration, photography, and CGI together to create something that Neil Gaiman describes as "like something I dreamed as a boy." When you start channelling Gaiman's dreams, you're in serious territory.
It Could Be Very Fresh and Clean
It could be Frankie.
Failing the Turing Test
You are what you IM, I guess.
Rock'n'Roll Daily
Remember when Rolling Stone actually wrote about music? Me neither.
Finding His Voice
This 10-minute F. Lyle Goldman/Max Fleischer cartoon about how talking pictures work is full of interest for us audiophiles. Vintage technology, vacuum tubes, and Western Electric Research Project humor—what's not to love?
What If We Taught English Like We Teach Mathematics?
"Imagine that your only contact with 'English' as a subject was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists—you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words."