Just another nerd.
The Smithsonian dug up some awesome ads from the early part of the 20th century complaining that recorded music was destroying the livelihood of musicians who had previously been paid to perform live during movies. Just one giant step from this to Kim Dotcom.
Growing up in Michigan at exactly the right time in history, I was one of the misfortunate few to actually visit AutoWorld during its short, pointless existence. Since then, bizarre theme parks have been a mini-obsession and Chatham, England’s Dickens World certainly fits the bill.
Sam Anderson wrote a nice piece for the New York Times on the many travails of bringing Dickens World vision to fruition,
It promised [for its planned 2007 opening] to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house or set their kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin’s Den, after the filthy kidnapper from “Oliver Twist.” The park’s operating budget was $124 million.
Alas, the park was hit by the same economic downturn the rest of us experienced and its opening was delayed and many of the ambitious plans it had were never actually completed. Visiting the park 5 years after its opening, Anderson does find one thing that would have made my visit to Autoworld a lot more interesting if only Six Flags had gone a different route with it,
For a park that markets itself to children, Dickens World was surprisingly grisly. I saw at least two severed heads, and when the performers lip-synched their way through a dramatization of “Oliver Twist” in the courtyard, it ended as the novel ends: with Bill Sikes murdering Nancy by beating her head in with a club, then being chased by a mob until he accidentally hangs himself. The violence was suggested rather than shown, but still — I flinched slightly for the kids who had been pulled in from the audience to play orphans. The gruesomeness was admirable, in a way: you wouldn’t want Dickens World to exclude the darker side of things — that would be a misrepresentation. But it made me wonder, again, if the idea of this place really made sense.
Oh, hell yeah.
Excellent speech by Dr. Sapolsky condensing his awesome Human Behavioral Biology course, which is also available in its entirety on Youtube.
For the past couple years I’ve been using WordPress and a the FeedPress plugin to maintain my lifestream project — essentially an aggregation of everything I do, post or say online. Recently, however, I ditched FeedPress since it hasn’t been updated in more than 6 months and sometimes is less than stable, and decided instead to use If This, Then That to aggregate all my activities
Obviously you need an IFTTT.com account. Then it is a matter of simply pointing your iFTTT.com WordPress channel to whatever WordPress install you’re using for the lifestream aggregation.
Many of the tools I use and want to aggregate are already channels in IFTTT.com, such as Google Reader, Last.FM, Facebook, Twitter, etc. For each of those services, it is fairly trivial to set up a Task in IFTTT.com to take any post or mention on those services and automatically post that content to your WordPress install with appropriate tags and/or categories.
Many other services will have RSS feeds that IFTTT.com can also easily republish any new content onto WordPress. For example, I do this with Goodreads so any book or review I add on that site automatically gets posted to my WordPress install. Using IFTTT.com to republish RSS to WordPress is far more reliable than FeedPress was, so I’ve switched all those over.
What is frustrating, however, is the increasing number of services that have abandoned or never bothered to support RSS.
Sarah Johnson creates, among other things, a series of Ordinary Batman Adventures portraying Batman doing…well…ordinary things, like fly fishing,
I have a blog in which there is only one member and account creation is turned off. A lot of the posts added to the site are done automatically via the XML-RPC interface, and I wanted a way to set a certain subset of those as private so they wouldn’t appear to non-members.
The O3World Members-Only Categories will automatically restrict posts to members-only based on post category.