XKCD just mentioned TVTropes‘s addictiveness. that meme has well and truly gone mainstream then.
funny
Wait, Dickens did what?
Dickens himself took a swing at the mystery genre with his 1870 novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and perhaps laid the groundwork for some of our greatest film mysteries, particularly some of the open-ended films of Alfred Hitchcock. Drood, you see, is left unresolved, the case unfinished, allowing (perhaps forcing) readers to imagine the ending, constructing a resolution that fits the facts as they interpreted them. It was a risky literary trick and few save Dickens could have pulled it off.
If the rest of the research in Thrill-Ride: The Dark World of Mysteries and Thrillers is as good as this titbit, remind me not to read it. Remind me also not to piss off Nick Mamatas with do my research for me type questions…
If only…
If only the Comment is Free moderators would treat bad, rambling, slanderous articles as harshly as the comments, every Cohen post would look like this.
The Dave Osler drinking game
The Dave Osler drinking game, as inspired by this post:
- A glass of your favourite for every time Dave brings up a pointless anecdote from the seventies.
- Another glass for noticing some current political development unfavourably. The more scolding and po-faced the tone, the stronger you can make your drink.
- Just half a glass for the inevitable tedious history lesson of disjoined examples of why this development is bad; you need to save your liver.
- Nasty, unnecessary sneer at Respect or the SWP? Just a sip.
- Empty the bottle when you come to the last paragraph and Dave’s conclusion is that we need a true socialist movement and therefore you need to vote Labour “through gritted teeth” or otherwise.
That’s it, every Dave Osler domestic electionering post ever. Drink plenty of water before you go to bed and have fun with your inevitable hangover the next morning.
Marsh rips Bono a new one
Bono has always been a smug wanker whose simplistic view of world problems does more harm than good, so it’s nice to see Dave Marsh ripping him a new one:
Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission.
(via Through the Scary Door.)