The End, perhaps

As you may (or may not) know, Snappy Patter is where I tend to post brief items and links, because I wanted to keep that sort of thing separate from the longer posts I used to write for Sloganeering.Org. Unfortunately, that function is not necessary any longer, since I’ve decided to stop posting at Sloganeering.

I will continue to do short posts (amongst various other lengths) at the new site. But does that spell the end for Snappy Patter? Well, maybe—but who knows? I’ve come to rely on this site as a venue to explore more experimental paths. Perhaps I’ll be back here again, one day, doing something different. I don’t know.

I just don’t.

But who will they cast as “It”?

A Wrinkle in Time movie? It might happen! I don’t know how to feel about that.

Your boss is sensitive, vindictive

... so you may find this useful: Things you should never say to your boss. Interestingly enough, they leave off some important key phrases to avoid, like: “I can’t come in today,” or, “Fuck you, turkey.”

A web event of note

It should be mentioned that the first match of The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books has been posted. I’m a great fan. It’s like getting a sneaky peek through the windows of a rich person’s house!

This is ripe for parody

From Threat Level:

The next time someone tries to “friend” you on Facebook, it may turn out to be an undercover fed looking to examine your private messages and photos, or surveil your friends and family. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained an internal Justice Department document that describes what law enforcement is doing on social networking sites.

The 33-page document shows that law enforcement agents from local police to the FBI and Secret Service have been logging on to MySpace and other sites undercover to communicate with suspects, read private postings and view photos and videos that are restricted to a user’s friends, according to the Associated Press.

It pays to know who your friends are. Or, I don’t know—maybe don’t leave so much information about your life just lying around on the hard drives of companies that don’t give two shits about you, yeah?

Well of course they did

From Slashdot:

"This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization.”

I can’t say I’m surprised.

It’s beta. It doesn’t have to work all the time

“Hi everyone,
Thanks for reporting this. Unfortunately, this is a known issue that has been plaguing us for some time. The problem occurs when you've created, deleted, and recreated a very large number of tags. We've been trying for some time to find a fix that'll work for the majority of users without impacting performance but so far we don't have a concrete ETA for having the problem solved. I apologize for the inconvenience and we'll continue to search for a satisfactory workaround in the meantime. Thanks for your vigilant bug reporting and for your patience.”

The answer is Bloglines.

How dare you question the intelligence of the market

From the Consumerist:

This is also why you're fat. A graph of inflation-adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows how the prices of different food and beverages has changed over the past three decades. The price of crap food over the past 30 years has dropped. At the same time, the food you used to try to hide in your glass of milk has gotten steadily more expensive.

Obviously Coke is better for you than oranges—we’re all rational actors, aren’t we?

Time enough for fandom

The Grand Unified Timeline? Brilliant.

[Via Chaos Theory]

Playing by ear

This is impressive as hell:

Jordan Verner recently beat The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. You might not be initially impressed by this feat, since it's 2010 and all, but surely this becomes more impressive when you learn that Jordan Verner is also blind, and the way he beat it is by four dedicated nerds writing down every single move a player would need to make in the game, a task that took them over two year and resulting in a (100,000 character) document which Verner's computer read aloud to him as he played.

Just amazing.

Bad medicine

From the Blog of a Bookslut:

Not only is "The Poisoner's Handbook" as thrilling as any "CSI" episode, but it also offers something even better: an education in how forensics really works.

Also maybe how to poison people to death.

No, really --- it sounds interesting.

This used to be my dumping ground

Work has been absolutely insane lately, and I’ve been spending my evenings just vegetating and trying to demolish my brain with whatever’s near to hand. This being the case, I’ve fallen behind on a bunch of saved links that, until now, have been cluttering up my bookmark file, of use to no one. So... here they are!

• If there ever was such a thing as a “privacy war”, then yeah. We lost.
• Should David Eggers edit the Paris Review? Sure, why the hell not.
• The Mercury News: Hey, government, please give us the data on the gender and ethnicity of some tech companies. Google, Apple, and Yahoo: TRADE SECRET! TRADE SECRET! Mo-ooooom!
• Michael Cader says that people who buy ebook readers are so stinking rich that they ought to pay high prices for ebooks. Well, why not? That’s how premium unleaded works, right?
• Meanwhile, in super-secret treaty news, a new leak reveals that it’s quite, quite bad. And all this time, I thought they were hiding it so we wouldn’t see the flying unicorn ponies and rainbow lollipops that they were planning on giving everyone!
• A Doctor Who trailer. Yeah, sorry – I’m required by Fan Law to link to things like this.
• Bankers like money, give themselves some. What’s funny is how they’ll tell you that it’s not greedy, it’s just that the only way the system could possibly work is to hand out giant-ass bonuses; never mind that the system is what’s crushing the life out of you.
• Social media is scary. I prefer one-way communication streams.
• The great sleazebags of the 80’s. Too bad they had to stick to sci-fi movies, because man there were a lot of slimy dudes in suits back then.
• George Lopez may be the new voice of Speedy Gonzales. I thought that dude had been banished to the land of offensive stereotypes? (Speedy – not Lopez.)
• Did you know the government may have been engaged in hundreds of potentially illegal intelligence act – oh, what do you care? How’s Lost turning out this season?
• Cybermen! (Sorry!)
• What is the government doing with all that baby blood?
• Bizarro Fiction! Is it like Gonzo Journalism? (No!)
• Giant sips are what you take/walking on the Moon (if you happen to be near the polar ice cap)!
• Don’t flip off the cops. They might not like it, retaliate, and there’s not much you can do about it.

I forgive me

From the Consumerist:

Harold says he paid $40 to check luggage with valuable camera equipment on a multi-leg United flight from Hawaii to Tucson, only to discover his camera had been lost. When he complained, United would have none of it, claiming it's airline policy not to assume liability for camera equipment.

Policy is a magic word. It means never having to say your sorry, or do anything you don’t want to. Like my “I’m awesome” policy – you can’t argue with that! (Actually, you can... but we’ll have to go into arbitration.)

Hell is the people in your neighborhood

If you’re a writer trying to get any work done, that is.

She got better

From the Consumerist:

Imagine the scene: Your beloved grandmother has been hospitalized for a respiratory illness. And then comes the bad news — A nurse at the hospital calls to say your grandmother has passed away. You go to her room to gather her personal items, and that's when your dead grandmother wakes up.

Well, that's exactly what happened to a family in Brooklyn over the weekend following a mix-up at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center.

Guess what screencap they used to illustrate this article, yet?