Opinion & Commentary

Pinheads All the Way Down

Bill O'Reilly takes on all those pinheads who think that gravity is enuf. But in a fantasy smackdown with Richard Feynman, who fares better? Videos after the jump.

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Unevenly Distributed: Gadget Blogging, The Human Centipede

If I were to equate gadget blogging to some occupation in a slice of modern cinema, the film that most immediately comes to mind is The Human Centipede: First Segment. That 2010 parable, directed by Tom Six, focuses on the misadventures of three people who, through a wacky series of missteps, are each sewn... shall we say... input-to-output to one another. Gadget blogging, you see, is primarily an act of chain digestion.

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Unevenly Distributed: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The @

I start this column with only one aim. I would like to try to impart my love for one of the oldest, and most impenetrable, and aesthetically unattractive, and sociopathic and schizophrenic genres of computer game to a reader who will doubtlessly hate it for all of those exact reasons. I'm talking about rogue-likes, so called because of their ancestry in a progenitor called Rogue. Let's see how I do.

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Wikileaks and the End of Stolen Kisses

Slavoj �i�ek says that Wikileaks is hated not because of the secrets it has revealed, but because it exposed the cynicism of a system that has long stopped believing in the values it imagines itself to uphold. It's a problem not only for diplomacy and governance, but for the eroding distinction between public and private life.

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Everlastingly Strange

G. K. Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth."

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Unevenly Distributed: What Gremlins Says About The 80s And Its Tech

Even before the viewer catches a glimpse his first Mogwai, Joe Dante's Gremlins establishes the link between the titular goblins and malfunctioning technology by way of Randy Peltzer and his many incompetent inventions. It's a film very much of its time, with many fascinating things to say about the way Reagan-era Americans looked at technology. It's also a movie that would be impossible to remake today, for one big reason: the smartphone is our Bathroom Buddy.

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