Thursday, 20 November 2008
...
A man who is always asking 'Is what I do worthwhile?' and 'Am I the right person to do it?' will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.
-- Mathematician G. H. Hardy, via Aaron Swartz
A Neil Gaiman interview [PublishersWeekly] on the occasion of Sandman's 20th anniversary:
Were there any Sandman stories Gaiman never got to tell? “God, yes,” he replied. There was one about the dreams of an unborn fetus, which Gaiman decided not to do, fearing it would be misused by opponents of abortion. He “would still love to do” a miniseries about Delirium, as well as Sandman Zero, the tale of the great battle that preceded the Sandman’s imprisonment in issue one.
Gene Weingarten (a sometimes funny humor columnist for the Post) on Twitter:
Brevity . . . is the soul of twit [WPost]
Once I joined, though, I discovered I was wrong. Twitter is not at all like a gathering of fops. It is more like a gathering of fourth-graders at Ashley's birthday party after way too much sugar has been consumed.
...a Berkeley grad student sent out a one-word tweet to his network of friends -- "arrested" -- as he was being hustled to jail in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. Friends alerted college officials, whose pressure led to the student's release. Also, reports from West Coast Twits apparently beat the Associated Press by nine minutes in reporting the most recent earthquake. But defining Twitter by those lofty milestones is like defining "dog" as a "mineshaft rescue engineer."
To test the idea that you can communicate any kind of complex meaning in 140 characters, he applied Twitter's limit to the Gettysburg address:
87 years ago, our dads made us free. Yay! Still want free, but hard! Fighting, dying, burying! Need more fight tho, so dead be happy.
Okay, twits, you win. Not much lost at all.
I thought of his column again today when I saw @brentsimmons sum up Jabberwocky:
Carroll rendered into Twitter House Style: Beware the Jabberwock, my son! He smells of half-chewed children and regret. Plus he’s stabby.
Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web [37signals] - I suppose.
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Thanks for sharing~
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