Ruse You Can Bruise

The Eagle Has Landed

Pete — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:40:13 GMT

We made it. I'm writing this now via some neighbor's wireless.

The Right To Bear Fardels

Sumana — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 06:06:47 GMT

During a recent summit The Poor Man made some nonsensical remark denying that there's any humor in C.S. Lewis or Shakespeare. One of those half-drunk "contrarian = sophisticated" bits of bollocks.

In refutation, I've found my favorite (so far) joke in the Bard: Act III, Scene 2 of Hamlet, the bit about Guildenstern, Hamlet, and the pipe. Gertrude has sent Tweedlecrantz and Guildendee to check on why Hamlet Jr. is acting so crazay. Our goth protagonist asks Guildenstern to try playing a recorder.

GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumbs, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN
But these cannot I command to any utt'rance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play'd upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

In the four-hour Kenneth Branagh version this little rant is especially breathtaking.

Geeks, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Riana — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 19:37:26 GMT

Seth and I were at Defcon in Las Vegas this weekend. Seth got our friend Praveen to bring Seth's giant Fresnel lens to the con when Praveen drove out on Saturday. The Fresnel lens is roughly 1 meter in diameter. On Sunday afternoon, as the con was winding down, we took the lens (wrapped in a black sheet for safety) out to a quiet back lot behind the convention hotel and, though the sky was overcast with a thin cloud layer so that we could not focus direct sunlight through the lens, we set some stuff on fire. Seth brought four pairs of welding goggles and two pairs of sunglasses for the group, plus safety gloves for whoever held the lens. It was about 102 degrees out, scorching hot even with the clouds, but before the heat drove me back indoors, I watched Seth and David Weekly burn a brown spot into the side of an aluminum can; turn a piece of wood to charcoal; set aflame and burn through a handful of dry grass; and light an onlooker's cigarette (placed on the ground, not in his mouth!). They also tried unsuccessfully to melt a penny and a quarter. I guess it's not as easy as I thought to burn through your money in Las Vegas.

She's an ENIAC

Sumana — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:35:23 GMT

From phone conversations today I gather that Leonard and Frances are visiting the American Computer Museum. In contrast, I'll be enjoying Will Franken's comedy shows tonight, whose most computer-related joke is probably his absurdist "voice command for file cabinet" bit. You can get a hint of that style in his "Show!" clip.

Note to local comics I saw in the back room of a pizza place last night: it is possible to do good spam and Match.com jokes. Please try harder.

Mr. Joad's Wild Ride

Pete — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 13:15:00 GMT

Today Annalisa and I start our drive out west. On our first trip out, we lost a mirror in the middle of Nebraska at 80 mph, ran over a tumbleweed in Colorado, got our truck towed in LA because it was in 7th Heaven's shot, and almost rented Charles Manson's quaint Topanga getaway... here's hoping for a less exciting trip. Here's also hoping that I will be able to post while I'm on the road. California, here we come!

Overheard

Sumana — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 18:06:18 GMT

"Do I need a safeword to get you to stop pouring?"

Magnify. Enhance.

Sumana — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:13:23 GMT

For some reason Leonard owns a magnifying glass (lens, since it's plastic). This would be cooler if it magnified to better than 1.5x.

It's Back

Leonard — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:03:30 GMT

I am reinstating the guest weblog while I go on vacation. My trusted lieutenants will provide you with the irreverent links and irrelevant commentary that you have come to expect from News You Can Bruise, or perhaps some other weblog. It's hard to know, but I do know that this rag-tag band of posters is your only hope for new content on the crummy.com homepage until I come back from Montana and Alberta.

Ambiguous Headline Watch with your guest anchor Pete Peterson II

Pete — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 19:28:37 GMT

I seriously had to reread this article and the headline twice before I figured it out.

It Found Kitten In 23 Tries

Pete — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 17:01:02 GMT

AI 20 Questions. It asked, "Can it be dried?" I said no. But I guess you can dry kittens... I imagine they'd make a tasty jerky if seasoned properly.

Sumana — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:45:16 GMT

At the moment, Leonard is at Brendan's place. In the growing guest blog tradition, before you go I'll urge you to read stuff. For now: Spam As Folk Art.

Anticipating the link frenzy

Brendan — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:20:33 GMT

Given the likely dissolution of the Fellowship of the Guest Blog, and in the interest of moving my albatross of a huge post off the front page, I present to you Stephen Heintz's Acid Zen Wonder Paint. If you like Pokey the Penguin, but only because you hate anti-aliasing, this is the comic for you!

It's also very funny, and is one of a very few webcomics I can claim to have inspired. That's me on the right in the very first one.

Don't bother, I didn't hide it here

Brendan — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 18:09:54 GMT

A good long while ago, I talked to Sumana and Leonard phonewise on the same night. We all three discussed Qwantz, which, I think, is rapidly becoming the darling of the whole entire Interweb. Sumana pointed out how their creator hides further punchlines in both a title tag for the comic image itself and in the subject line (sometimes even the body!) supplied by the "comments" email link. Leonard and I talked about the idea of hidden content in general, and other ways to put Easter eggs into web pages.

The title tag (formerly the alt tag) shows up in several other webcomics--Achewood, for example, and until recently Scary Go Round. I know there are more out there, I just can't remember which ones. Homestar Runner (warning! Flash!) includes at least one hidden hot spot in each of their weekly updates, as did the now-defunct animated comic Boomslang. The latter originally inspired me to start adding the occasional hidden rollovers to my own comic.

Lore Sjöberg, formerly of the Brunching Shuttlecocks and now of many distributed sites, announced once that he was going to use stylesheets to completely hide some of his href tags as a way of making his blog more interactive. I'm not sure if he ever did it, as I've never found any, but then I haven't really searched that hard. Similar to this is the "include a clever or didactic title for every hyperlink" meme, which I, for one, picked up from Kevan of kevan.org. It's both highly contagious and strongly persistent, and it's been interesting to watch its spread.

The logical extension (or perhaps origin) of all this hidden stuff is code comments, especially in HTML. One of the better examples of this is last year's great Crummy entry on "concave" in Chinese, which prompted my unnecessarily clever complementary entry; I'm pretty sure that that, in turn, is what got me on the RYCB author list (as the only alternative was allowing me free to roam the streets).

The reason I like searching for all this stuff is the same brief, pointless sense of achievement that's kept people playing computer RPGs and watching Scooby-Doo for so long. The reason I like creating it is uncomfortably close to the clue-sending instinct that drives the more interesting serial killers. All together, though, it does actually provide an interesting goal: in the same way that hyperlinks allow for richer expanded context, hidden material increases the density of content in the same amount of real estate.

What other methods of hiding stuff are out there?

Alas, poor Zork! I knew him, Horatio.

Pete — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 21:08:03 GMT

Hamlet Interactive Fiction.

Happy Anniversary, Baby

Pete — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:08:06 GMT

I realize I'm using up my guest weblog chits real fast these days, but I just gotta say, Dino Comix Is One Year Old Today!