The Drones Club has a web-page which generates a P.G. Wodehouse gem every time you refresh it.

Sample: He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consomme, and the dinner-gong due any moment.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

FDIV has the scoop on a programming language that is bound to be a hit with libertarian nerds.

Objectivist-C was invented by Russian-American programmer Ope Rand. Based on the principle of rational self-interest, Objectivist-C was influenced by Aristotle’s laws of logic and Smalltalk. In an unorthodox move, Rand first wrote about the principles of Objectivist-C in bestselling novels, and only later set them down in non-fiction. ...

In Objectivist-C, an object — every object — is an end in itself, not a means to the ends of others. It must live for its own sake, neither sacrificing itself to others nor sacrificing others to itself.

In Objectivist-C, there are not only properties, but also property rights. Consequently, all properties are @private; there is no @public property.

In Objectivist-C, each program is free to acquire as many resources as it can, without interference from the operating system. ...

In Objectivist-C, there are no exceptions.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

Very funny.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

I hate the slideshow format, whose only purpose is to extract as many clicks as possible out of you to up that website’s stats, but this one does have some amusing offerings worth a look. Example: (German) Backpfeifengesicht “a face in need of a good slap.”

This came my way on Facebook without attribution or explanation. I tried researching it with small success. The photo clearly comes from Russia, and that front goose looking sideways is a Photoshop addition.

Brazilian commercial for Flying Horse energy drink.

Hat tip to Advice Goddess.

Hat tip to Theo.

Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes to local government (when he objected to federal policies, including the Mexican War and the Constitutional tolerance of Slavery), so naturally enough the same federal government, through its National Endowment for the Arts, is using tax money to fund creation by a group of academics at the University of Southern California of a Thoreau’s Walden “game.”

Lead game designer, USC Associate Professor Tracy Fullerton explains that they are designing “a rich simulation of the woods, filled with the kind of detail that Thoreau so carefully noted in his writings.”

The simulation will “mimic the meditative outdoor life described in Thoreau’s best-known work, written about his two years spent living in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. The digital Walden Pond will showcase a first-person point-of-view where you can wander through the lush New England foliage, stop to examine a bush and pick some fruit, cast a fishing rod, return to a spartan cabin modeled after Thoreau’s and just roam around the woods, grappling with life’s unknowable questions.”

It is intended to serve as “an introduction for young people, who might not have read the book yet.”

There you are, $40 Grand of your tax dollars for a visual Cliff Notes experience of walking in the woods, picking berries, catching a perch, &c.

It doesn’t sound to me as if the designers have given any thought to score keeping.

Some suggestions:

Work in family pencil factory for cash —minus 10 points

Pick a quart of huckleberries —plus 10 points

Eat a groundhog —plus 30 points, but you become sick to your stomach and lose half your movement allowance for three turns

Make a campfire—plus 5 points, but you must roll dice. If you roll a pair, you have accidentally started a fire and will burn 300 acres of woods and lose 100 points

Sponge off Emerson—minus 10 points

03:45 “There’s a term for guys like President Obama. (pause) Probably not two terms.”

From Iowahawk.

Frank J. Fleming:

Had a few people try and tell me the Romney thing was horrible but Obama dog-eating is nothing. My response: nomnomnom

link

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

The Atlantic really buys into to all this, and lavishes praise on a fellow whose approach to gaming sounds to me a lot like films by Alain Resnais.

[W]hat makes Blow’s games so remarkable[is, that] at great personal expense, in ways no other developer has even attempted, he struggles to communicate a deeply authentic vision of the meaning of human existence. With both of his games, Blow strives to use the unique language of video games to impart the wisdom he has gained the hard way in his life. In The Witness, he hopes to help players try to “step outside their human viewpoint and see what the world is.” And in Braid, he sought to communicate something more personal still. ...

[W]hat he is [is]—a spiritual seeker, questing after truth in an as-yet-uncharted realm. These are the terms in which he sees his art. “People like us who are doing something a little different from the mainstream have each picked one direction that we strike out in into the desert, but we’re still not very far from camp,” he told me. “There’s just a huge amount of territory to explore out there—and until you have a map of that, nobody can say what games can do.

Via Gizmodo.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick.

I grew up in Shenandoah, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, about 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, so I have to admit my result was dead on accurate.

Yahoo explains the whole thing’s origin:

[T]he man in the photo is New York’s Zeddie Little, 25, who was taking part in the Cooper River Bridge 10k run, which was held on March 31, in Charleston, South Carolina.

Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) systems analyst Will King, who was just taking a seemingly random photograph of runners in the middle of the race, snapped the photo and uploaded it to his Flickr account.

“One of my friends commented on the picture and said something along the lines of ‘I dub this guy Mr. Ridiculously Photogenic,’” King said. “I thought it was a pretty cool comment, so I posted it on Reddit. For some reason it just took off from there.”

And QuickMeme has captioned responses.

(Scrupulously following our secret contract, Bird Dog never divulged the six-figure per link fee that NYM pays him.)

Secret video of Bird Dog celebrating his financial success achieved by blogging.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick.

From RumpChat (A satellite of Rumpus, the Yale undergraduate humor blog):

Overheard by the hot security guard: “there’s too many f****** liberals at this school”

But I seriously doubt that I can talk Karen into using Zombie Apocalypse sheets. (sigh! Women are so stodgy.)

From Jose Guardia.

Robert Lee Hotz, in the Wall Street Journal, describes recent academic studies contending that gaming quickens the eye, speeds the reflexes, and keep’s the predatory human brain alert. Lots of us knew all that already.

One particular statistic stood out.

[T]oday’s average gamer is 34 years old and has been playing electronic games for 12 years, often up to 18 hours a week. By one analyst’s calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species—about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.