April 2012
32 posts
Anyone want to do an Indie show in Chicago?
Weekend of Regret got ourselves booked at an indie show this Thursday at 10pm, while we’re in town for the Chicago Improv Festival. They’re looking for more NY teams, so let me know if you’re interested!
I don't think your guys' ad is that bad. BustedTees sells women's erect nipples, right?
Originally, yes. The shirt company began as a side project to replace the shirts shredded by erect nipple products.
One Sentence Summaries of Classic Movies #1
Breakfast at Tiffanys’s
A young Col. Hannibal Smith falls for the prototype of Natalie Portman’s Garden State character in this premake of 500 Days of Summer.
Improv Nonsense: Improvy Moves In Movies →
improvnonsense.tumblr.com
I’m going to write an article about “improvy” moments in movies. Not moments that seem to be improvised, but story decisions that seem like the kind of decisions that an improv education would encourage.
I have two main examples:
- How in Teen Wolf, the movies treats the emergence of a werewolf…
I think Ghostbusters is a great example of “Yes, And”. Every step of the movie could’ve been justified to death or fought over, but instead the film accepts everything as a normal progression. The film starts with “quack scientists kicked off campus” and ends with “scientists battle ancient Sumerian god on roof of high rise.”
Is Punning a Disease?
Last year author Douglas Coupland predicted that within the next 10 years: “We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette’s, has no medical ability not to pun.”
Turns out some researchers already think “bad humor,” including excessive punning, is a disease. MSNBC reports:
Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don’t they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It’s also sometimes called the “joking disease,” and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it’s a “tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes.” We’ve covered all sorts of strange disorders of the mind in earlier Body Odd posts: one disorder makes you believe your loved ones are strangers, another convinces you that your hand has taken on a life of its own. Now, we give you a brain disorder that actually causes a poor sense of humor.
Then again, puns are awesome.
The Trouble with Elegant Solutions
The trouble with elegant solutions is that they are created in an elegant world. Gears click together effortlessly, ideas flow without interruption, and friction fades away. In the elegant solution, equations balance, simplicity persist, and logic reigns supreme.
But the summer of problem solving ends, as all summers must, and we’re abandoned to the winter of application. Datasets are imperfect, edge cases arises, and all those beautiful, perfect little systems we’ve planned turn into a mess of conditionals and clean-ups. The pretty little world of crisp logic and simple algorithms is revealed to be nothing more than a sandcastle built during low tide.
Now your project is weeks late and every day staring at code just brings wave after wave of complication.
Oh, and the client wanted an igloo, not a sandcastle.
(Related: Is there a contest for beautiful and/or pretentious writing about software development? )
“Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors’ orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.
[…]
As the Celebration will contain Adult material we respectfully ask that no children under 18 attend.” —Excerpts from the obituary of one Michael “Flathead” Blanchard.
[…]
As the Celebration will contain Adult material we respectfully ask that no children under 18 attend.” —Excerpts from the obituary of one Michael “Flathead” Blanchard.
