My new favorite blog called How To Write Badly Well, where the author tells you all about the what not to dos about writing… and shows you how to use them.

She manipulated the garment in a cogitative mode.

‘Hmm,’ she vocalised. ‘This attire is verifiably marvellous. What is it constituted from?’
‘From the most meritorious velveteen,’ defined her interlocutor, simpering coincidentally.
‘Is it?’ iterated the party of the first part. ‘That’s felicitous.’
‘Additionally, this specified object has the property of being subdivided in terms of its defining mercantile characteristic, and can be taken possession of for the diminutive quantity of merely a half-dozen currency units,’ the retail employee informed.
‘Exoneration?’ supplicated the protagonist appropriately. The commercial tertiary sector worker eyeballed her perspicaciously.

‘I said it’s five ninety-nine. Do you want it or not?’

I’ve never played the first Left 4 Dead (well, there was this one time two weeks ago for like, half an hour at a friend’s house), so I wasn’t sure what to expect other than killing lots of zombies infected humans, which I’m a fan of. That, and killing zombies, I guess.

So I loaded the demo up, and wow. I am really impressed. A lot of chatter on the Steam forums are saying that it’s nothing like the original, and it’s all mindless shooting rather than teamwork (nobody helped me up until I typed in chat, “help me up you morons”), but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, necessarily. I don’t really care that much, it’s just a game, after all. And there’s a lot of talk about not much change and it’s pathetic and it’s a ripoff. Then again, this is the Steam forums we’re talking about here.

So the campaign found in the demo is called The Parish, set in New Orleans (so they say, I’ve never actually been there). One of the chapters is The Park, or at least part of it is, and it’s mindblowing how much violence is to be found there. It’s basically parts here and there from the chapter, ranging from zombies infected humans in the park (didn’t see any of the so-called Hazmat infected though), to a part in the bus stop after going into a trailer and stocking up on weapons. It’s really cool to be this guy, decked out in sniper rifle gear and shooting the shit out of stuff that moves. I was on a laptop, so I couldn’t zoom, which sucked, so at first chance I grabbed an AK-47, which was awesome. Also picked up a frying pan, but more on the melee later.

After the bus stop chapter and getting in the safe room, I was treated to another part of the campaign which is located suspiciously like the French Quater in New Orleans. I decided to be somewhat of a jerk, and I simply ran like hell all over the place trying to avoid any confrontations with the zombies infected humans, and no, it didn’t work. But after going into a corner restaurant, I saw a few cars here and there, and a little warning saying something like, “DON’T SET THE CAR ALARMS OFF, IT ATTRACTS THE HORDE” or something like that. So guess what I did? Of course I aimed my Kalashnikov at the cars and fired.

I ran like hell, running into zombies infected people here and there, and I used my melee weapon, the frying pan, and whacked the shit out of everyone. Now that’s something I liked to do. After doing good to the world, I happened across the safe room, and that’s where my adventures with the Left 4 Dead demo and killing zombies infected humans ended. What do I think about the game? I think it’s great and I can’t wait to download the full game. Those whiny bastards who were all about boycotting the game, shut it. This game is proof that Valve, despite its many faults, knows how to make a good game.

The writer of a Macintosh (like, from the 80s) review for the LA Times posted the review, and it’s astonishing how much has and hasn’t changed since the beginning of personal computing. One of my favorite things to do is to poke fun at the old software and stuff people back then had to make do with, in retrospect. And my favorite section is about MacWrite.

You can vary the type size from 9 point (about the size used in most newspapers) to 72 point headlines. You can also change your type style, selecting an Old English font or one of the more common type styles. Your type can be in bold, italic, underline or even shadow print. All this magic is controlled by the computer itself — the software merely takes advantage of it.

WOW! Changing font sizes! More on this and that magical MacPaint stuff here.

Recently, I’ve been getting into nerdtastic stuff for some reason. I’m actually reading Scientific American, I check out The Naked Scientists podcast regularly, and I’m really into the Mandelbrot set.

Surprisingly trippy and almost definitely LSD-induced works of art, they’re freaking amazing. Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time figuring out really easy ways to make them without actually drawing stuff. It’s really hard to draw infinity, you see. Mathmatica is ridiculously expensive for something like this. Any ideas?

That service that hosted the cliched web pages of the late 90s is dead.

Remember back in the day when you barely had dialup and you were updating your ugly, blink-tag laden Geocities page you hand-coded in Notepad while signing up for Beenz and discovering Webvan? Oh, those days of pre-millenium Internet culture has been long gone, and Geocities was the only place that more or less still existed from those days (Angelfire? I hope that will stay around too, but it’s not very likely.) and continued to soldier on, even if it wasn’t making any money. Sometimes I wish I could find a ton of old 90s sites and surf them endlessly, like going back in time or something. But the closest I can get is Archive.org, which most definitely will display some of the sites that Geocities hosted, as a tribute to what got most of us into the Internet. Now almost nobody codes HTML in Notepad, thanks to CSS and the wonders of blogging.

XKCD, that comic that you either love or hate has, despite its many flaws as a comic strip, turned its site into one giant tribute page. If only it stayed that way forever.

So long, Geocities. But you will not be forgotten.

Thought for today: Church is for deranged murderers. Why not just worship God in the comfort of your own home, in your own time, away from old people you don’t like and that suspicious-looking priest?

Look on the right of my awesome site (and you should do that more often) and see that lovely Pay Now button?

Well, click on it and toss me a few bucks here and there. Pays for my coffee, you know. And I’ll give a special something to those who pay the most.

So get donating! Put as much or as little as you want, that empty box where you enter your price is whatever cost you want it to be.

A whole new community of sharp-eyed Internet users as emerged, looking for mistakes in Google’s scanning of books.

Just look this up.

Yes, I do actually read books. Really, I do. And here are two books I’d love to get my hands on.

SuperFreakonomics

If you don’t know, this is a sequel to the amazing and mindblowing book Freakonomics, which I bought and read and I loved. This is why I do economics. Of course, the writer admits he’s no good at econometrics and things people get Harvard degrees for, but who cares? This is a great book anyway. With even more things to compare and make extremely insane statements that actually make a lot of sense but you don’t ever realize, this book is a sure bet for something to read that is actually interesting.

Makers

A book published by Tor (so you know it’s good) and written by the genius Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame (so you definitely know it’s good), it’s a great book about people inventing economics models and what happens when things don’t work properly. It’s being serialized in 81 parts, but I really want to read it on paper.

As you can see, I’m a fan of stuff related to economics and economic models, mostly because I like things with statistics and watching things we take for granted fail. I hope I can find these books in my local bookstore, it’s rare to find a Tor-published book locally anyway.

It’s HORRIBLE.

Or Taleban, if you’re British. Sheesh guys, spell it OUR way, dammit.

Anyway, a journalist and his other journalist buddy and his driver in Afghanistan were kidnapped. And being New York Times journalists, obviously they made him write a fancy exclusive series about his experience and put it in five parts over a few days and stuff. Pretty amazing stuff, from the capture to the escape, in very gritty detail, like they… made it up. Just kidding. Very narrative-like, which isn’t a bad thing.

I suggest you read it before the writer turns it into a book and charges thirty bucks for ir.