string can phone

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency presents us with this over-capitalized list PUNCHLINES SUGGESTED BY ASHTON KUTCHER FOR PUNK’D THAT WERE REJECTED DUE TO THEIR ARCHAIC NATURE.

You’ve been hoodwinked!

You have been beguiled by my cohorts!

You are the victim of our flimflam!

You, unfortunately, are the jestee!

You are the one who was hornswoggled!

It is you the gomeril!

The previous contingency was an apery!

probably noticed, there is no mention named of anything remotely technological. That’s quite astute of you.

Somebody (probably those boffins at MeFi) introduced us to Toogle Image Search, a Google-like image-hunter that returns your result converted into a colorful ASCII-graphic.

What—you were expecting utility?!? Begone with ye.

Postcard Man (dot-net), which offers an extensive, searchable catalog of aged postcards. Travel to a different time and culture, all within the comfort of your browser window.

Robby Dohmen has put up an electronic gallery of his classic car paintings (framed in rusty steel in “real life”). Not, we joysfully hasten to add, in postmodern hyper-restored “splendor”, no — in all of their forgotten, rain-washed, rust-streaked, abandoned glory.

This also seems like an appropriate time to mention King Crimson’s “Dig Me”.

Diana D—, a Friend, writes:

It’s funny, I did a “string can telephone” activity with a class of kindergartners about a year ago—I didn’t realize going into it that these kids have basically no association between land lines and telephonic communication. Most of them probably live in houses where the main phone has been, and may always be, a cell phone.

I love watching movies where people fight over using a land line in any way—waiting for pay phones, arguing about who gets to talk next, race to answer telephones, etc. And of course, message machines. And movies from the 90’s where people have cell phones, but they are really large and unwieldy. In Takashi Miike’s DOA there’s a scene where the guy’s daughter makes fun of him for having an analog cell phone! I really liked that!

No Name No Slogan labs tests the latest (ugh) must-have device against "one of the all time great audio formats." Imagine our surprise when we found out they were not referring to wire-recordings! Still, their heart is in the correct place.

In an entertaining and circuitous rant, John Batelle takes on The Memex, The Story, and Searchstreams:

[….] That’s when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush’s famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush’s explication of the problem - that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush’s answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent - the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher’s discovery through the Memex’s corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them. [….]

If you must use the latest (ugh) technology, and you must use a fashionable carrying-case, SCP approves of this method.

Okay, so it’s a little frayed around the edges—what isn’t? If you’ve got any other complains, SCP advises you to put a sock in it.

What is the perfect complimentary audience to pornographic endeavors involving script-based automata? Why, humans who fail the Turing Test, of course. (O! Were that it simply a contest!)

Thanks to a significant effort and substantial amounts of time devoted by programmers obsessed with their childhood memories of virtual daring-do, you can now make your own version of Zelda. Go ahead, embrace your inner-Miyamoto