friday fun
jdupuis | August 20, 2010Ah, zombies. I found myself feeling a certain, ah, nostalgia for the good old days when I used to post non-stop about shambling dead, decaying wrecks. The good old days, way back at the beginning of July and even earlier.
I seem to be obsessed.
So, from Cracked: 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly):
They Have Too Many Natural Predators
They Can't Take the Heat
They Can't Handle the Cold
Biting is a Terrible Way to Spread a Disease
They Can't Heal from Day to Day Damage
The Landscape is Full of Zombie-Proof Barriers
Weapons and the People Who Use Them. As we touched…
jdupuis | August 13, 2010I'm still enjoying my informal, semi-serious, so-funny-it-hurts Friday Fun series on the slings and arrows of online social media/networking practices.
The first three have been:
5 Signs You're Talking To A Social Media Douchebag
5 Terms Social Media Douchebags Need To Stop Using
5 Things Serious Tech People Need To Stop Tweeting
This entry is probably the most serious and, oddly, the only one that doesn't revolve around the number 5.
Anyways...
Scott Berkun has a though-provoking list of things we should keep in mind when extolling the insane virtues of all that social networking and…
jdupuis | August 11, 2010Consider this a bonus Friday Fun entry for the summer silly season...
Anyways, the Cronk of Higher Ed finally sees fit to subject librarians to the mockery we deserve: Librarians Abandon Dewey Decimal System in Favor of Netflix Categories!
"We found that we were spending an extraordinary amount of time explaining the Dewey Decimal classification system to our students, and they simply weren't retaining the information," explained Janet Poleman, director of the college's library. "Our students will return this fall to find an exciting new system categorizing our literature."
All books in the…
jdupuis | August 6, 2010Today's Friday Fun continues the curious informal summer series of light-hearted takes on social media/network etiquette, begun two weeks ago with 5 signs you're talking with a social media douchebag and last week with 5 terms social media douchebags need to stop using.
This time around it's 5 Things Serious Tech People Need To Stop Tweeting.
Look technology friends, Twitter is a lovely thing, but when we tweet certain things we make our followers cringe and twitch towards the unfollow button. Do whatever you will, but after reading literally millions of tweets I think that if we cut out the…
jdupuis | July 30, 2010Yeah, last Friday I threatened a sequel and here it is.
Too much fun. And once again, looking in the mirror is a bit tough on this one. I did do a quick search on my blog posts and none of the offending phrases shows up per se. But, some seem a little too familiar.
I'm not done with the douchebags.
After I wrote the 5 Signs You're Talking To A Social Media Douchebag, I was met with heavy feedback.
Social media douchebags used social media to attack me.
Damn it.
Should've seen that one coming.
Here goes. Read 'em and weep for the future of humanity. The elaborations on the original post…
jdupuis | July 23, 2010This is soooo funny. So funny it hurts. Ok, so maybe I've been guilty of one or two of these. Ok, maybe you have too. The more you're guilty, the funnier it is.
To many, the Internet is a world full of promise.
To others, a ripe field ready to be harvested by douchebags.
Both are true.
I think the first douchebag was the knight in medieval times. You just know he clickity-clanked across the village in that dopey metal armor and thought he was so cool.
Oh look at me. I have armor!
And then he'd return to the castle and push the jester around with his joust. Jousting him in the ass,…
jdupuis | July 16, 2010So, it appears that Batman is on Twitter.
From the newly renamed Blastr site, I give you a selection of Batman's 34 greatest tweets:
Watch out criminal scum, I'm trying to kick caffeine again. And we all remembered what happened last time, don't we? DON'T WE!!!
Going to help with the clean up effort in the Gulf. And by "clean up effort" I mean breaking some BP exec's knee caps.
Hey Tony Stark, there's a "Rich Drunk Douchebags Anonymous" meeting tomorrow. I'll sign you up for a seat. With my fists.
Arkham is a disgusting, human rights-violating hellhole. It's like my Disneyland.
What do I call…
jdupuis | July 9, 2010I love Wikipedia. I probably use it every day. It's become an indispensable part of the modern information landscape.
But.
A few months ago, I was doing a session in our lab with a bunch of high school students. When I do these sessions I try and illuminate how the modern information landscape is a bit more complicated than they think -- I try and instill a little doubt and humbleness into their mostly quite confident attitudes. I talk about Facebook and privacy and Wikipedia and a whole bunch of things. Anyways, I'm talking about Wikipedia and demoing how easy it is to randomly change…
jdupuis | July 5, 2010Ok, ok, this is the last zombie post, I promise.
Here are some exmples of my favourite OTT, badass, crazy zombie fiction!
The Book of the Dead is a classic collection of short stories that's well worth reading.
Monster Island: A Zombie Novel is the first in a trilogy. It's one of those trilogies with significantly diminishing returns as it goes on, but the first book is great.
The Rising is well done and creepy.
Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry is top notch, the best horror/sf/technothriller I've read in a long time.
Pet Sematary is one of Stephen King's best novels,…
jdupuis | July 2, 2010Noted zombie novelist Jonathan Maberry as a two part post on his blog, Why Zombies? and Why Zombies? - Part 2.
The second post, btw, has one of the classic blog sentences of all time: "When I reached out to the zombie community to ask 'WHY ZOMBIES?' I got so many terrific responses that I broke the blog into two parts." Zombie community. Only on the internet!
Anyways, I digress. Maberry's researches with the zombie community include short bits from a ton of zombie novel authors.
Here's his initial question:
We kick off our rolling series of ZOMBIE PANEL DISCUSSIONS by addressing the…
jdupuis | June 30, 2010Rather like a normal Friday Fun post, I'm going to highlight some fun stuff I've found around the web on zombies in higher education. And I'm not talking about undergrads at 9am classes either. Note that a couple of these I've highlighted before.
BTW, first I thought I'd point out a couple of pop cultural items on zombies.
The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy
Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema
Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth
Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured Pop…
jdupuis | June 25, 2010Sometimes it's only through humour that we can understand just how serious an issue is. This is one of those cases. Heartbreakingly sad yet somehow ringing very true, this one is from The Onion: Suffering Blue Whales Plead With Environmentalists To Let Them Go Extinct Already.
NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN--Claiming that their miserable lives had become too depressing to endure, the world's remaining blue whales surfaced Monday and desperately pleaded with environmentalists to immediately cease all conservation efforts so the species could "just be done with it and finally go extinct."
The planet's…
jdupuis | June 18, 2010From McSweeney's, a glimpse into the future perhaps...
7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
And that's only the first half of them...head on over to the original link for more.
Of course, this is the kind of Friday Fun that really encourages audience participation. Let's see if we can't all take a few of our favourite books and turn them into link bait!
3 Amazing Ways to Turn Mars into an Earth-like Planet!
Want to create a plague that will kill…
jdupuis | June 11, 2010Priceless, just priceless.
PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…
jdupuis | June 4, 2010What can I say, The Cronk is my new Internet crush. I think I might be stalking them. But in a good way.
In any case, check this out: Students Blame Innovative Incentive Program for Tricking Them into Learning
Psychology professor Edgar Stevens is a popular topic of conversation at Farmington College today as he has become the center of an unusual campus debate. Stevens, a recent recipient of the Farmington Innovative Teaching Citation, inspired heated conversation at the recent Student Government Association (SGA) meeting as a result of an assignment in his second-tier psychology course.…
jdupuis | May 28, 2010I've been slowly dipping my toes into the manga universe, trying to expand my comics/graphic novel horizon. Moyasimon, for example -- the 1st volume was very good. Beyond that, I've only read a couple of titles here and there.
Of course, like any good librarian I've been looking for lists to help me in my explorations.
Here's a nice list from Robin Brenner via Jeff Vandermeer:
Antique Bakery by Fumi Yoshinaga
Clover by CLAMP
Death Note by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba
Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike
Monster by Naoki Urasawa
Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa
Planetes by Makoto Yukimura
Yotsuba…
jdupuis | May 21, 2010Funniest. Onion. Article. Ever.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It: Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit
Virtually every line is laugh-out-loud funny.
According to sources we feel really, really sorry for, Foursquare works by allowing users to "check in" from their present location, whether it be a bar, restaurant, nearby magazine stand, or man, this piece would be perfect to hand over to that schmuck Dan Fletcher at Time magazine right about now.
By "checking in," users can earn tangible, real-world rewards. For instance, the Foursquare user with the most…
jdupuis | May 14, 2010The Cronk of Higher Education is seriously my new very best friend. I work on a very large commuter campus and let's just say this very definitely resonated with me. I also take public transit to work every day through a very crowded and congested city, with my commute time varying from 60-90 minutes each way, sometimes worse if you include time waiting for the bus to arrive.
Take a look:
Bates explained that within the next eight months, all academic buildings at the university would be destroyed to create more available parking.
"Where the buildings once stood, we'll install JumboTron…
jdupuis | May 7, 2010Ah, The Onion. A true repository of snark and snideitude
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.
Project leaders receive data from the Mars rover Spirit.
"Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work," Callas said. "Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message 'HAPPY NOW…
jdupuis | April 30, 2010From The Cronk of Higher Education, New First Year Experience Class: How To Not Be An Asshole, this is very funny.
The six-week class is comprised of five modules:
So You're Drunk: A Guide To Quietly Stumbling Home
Street Signs Are Not Dorm Room Decorations
Streaking: A Fast-Track To Suspension
Noises Neighbors Hate To Hear After 10 pm
Nine Reasons the Police Will Handcuff You
Current students expressed skepticism about the offering.
"I think it's retarded," remarked Marco Miller, a current first year student. "Sometimes, when I'm mad, I just want to pee on a statue or throw bottles at…