Posts Tagged ‘Pac-Man’
Tuesday Morning Links!
* CFP: Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes: PCA/ACA 2018.
* When Universities Swallow Cities.
* UC Davis’ Katehi will teach one course per quarter, conduct research in $318,000 position. Ah, so the standard rate.
* The Last Days of New Paris is China Miéville’s novella about a surrealist Paris magically overlapping with our realist Paris. At the back of the book, Miéville offers endnote citations of the surrealist art that inspired his writing. I corralled all the art in this post.
* Liking What You See will be an AMC series. Interesting!
* This Is the Way the College ‘Bubble’ Ends.
* I don’t like this: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for Hundreds of Applicants. If Admissions guesses wrong it seems to me the college should have to bear the burden of solving the problem.
* Border Agency Set to Jumpstart Trump’s Wall in a Texas Wildlife Refuge.
* The Fifty Year Ache: The Milwaukee Housing Marches.
* We seem to be entering a terrifying new moment of Trumpism. This October, Trump Will Try to Start a War with Iran. A Few Reasons to Impeach the President, Just From Today. How the Trump Administration Broke the State Department. You think? The Presidency in Exile. Kleptocracy. Here comes the pivot.
* RNC PR BS — no more! Inside the end of the Priebus era.
* This guy is on-brand. Aaaaaaand he’s gone. It’s gone to be a record.
* A good day for bad guys getting what’s coming to them.
* Has Jeff Flake really, truly had enough? I bet it’s bluster, and perhaps defensive, but we’ll see…
* All these “ha ha loser POTUS” pre-mortems forget that Trump hasn’t faced a crisis not of his own making yet.
* I thought this Russia subplot was over.
* No exit.
* Immigrant mother of three with no criminal record to be deported.
* Trump’s travel ban keeps orphan kids from US foster families.
* Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.
* The Academic “Success Sequence” – Get Lucky at Birth, Mostly.
* Left with Rage: What Happens When Trump Is Gone.
* Democrats Will Do Anything To Win…Except Change. Democrats Can Abandon the Center — Because the Center Doesn’t Exist. Guys, they’ve got this.
* Dogs probably domesticated us, not the other way around.
* And I say 137 years is too good for ’em!
* Oh, so that’s what happened.
* Why millennials cheat less than their parents.
* Of course you had me at pop culture detritus illustrated as abandoned, overgrown ruins.
* Close roads so children can play in the street like their parents did, say public health experts.
* The Ultimate Playlist Of Banned Wedding Songs.
* A brief history of speedrunning.
* All these worlds are yours, except…
* And I have just one piece of advice for you.
Midweek Links!
* For two years, claims about the cheapness of the MOOC format overcame widespread doubts about their educational and social effects. During this time, the main MOOC companies did not release specific financial projections. Now we finally have two spreadsheets, and their claims to cheapness are not confirmed.
* Jury Awards $13 Million to One Plaintiff Deceived by For-Profit College.
* Good news! Racism is over! Workplace harassment is a thing of the past! Climate change ain’t no thang! The innocent have nothing to fear!
* @sarahkendzior: “Our economic times demand a raise in the minimum wage,” declares @thenation, who pay interns $4.37 per hour. Meanwhile, Gawker Media is the next company to get sued.
* Death of the humanities watch, actual numbers edition: Humanities degrees were 17.1% of all degrees in 1971, 17.0 in 2010. Via Michael Bérubé. More links after the chart.
* Berkeley’s big stadium boondoggle.
* Porn wars: the debate that’s dividing academia.
* How you know you are not a brain in a vat.
* Unnecessary medicine shortages in this, the greatest nation in the history of the world.
* And scientists discover a silver-bullet quick-fix to improve your life expectancy by twenty years.
Sunday Morning
Earlier link dumps this week: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* CUNY Administration Declares War On Rebel English Department. This is stunning. Here’s just a little bit more.
* Education is a political act. For over half a century, the conservative movement has waged a political war on liberal arts education. They have waged this war because they know that without the skills we are provided by a liberal arts education citizens must abdicate our power.
* Well, I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to say it.
* The FBI has successfully thwarted another bomb plot they organized and outfitted. Promotions all around!
* Portraits of Sad Superheroes.
* …for the vast majority of the 500-plus students who graduate each year in Kalamazoo, a better future really does await after they collect their diplomas. The high-school degrees come with the biggest present most of them will ever receive: free college.
Friday Night Links
Friday night links while I wait for Jaimee to get home so I can watch some science fiction and turn my brain off.
* George Will is in the news this week for his latest stunningly dishonest column on climate change, which the Washington Post has perversely decided to stand behind. The statement from the paper’s ombudsman is here.
* The EPA under the Obama administration will finally be able to take carbon seriously.
* Secure website authentification questions.
* Howard Machtinger looks back at his participation in the Weather Underground to acknowledge the group’s failures. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.
While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.
WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.
* The complete Pac-Man dossier: everything there is to know about the game, from ghost logic to how to play the kill screen. Via MeFi.
* Hard to believe we’ve all outlived Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I haven’t watched the show in years, but it was formative to my sense of “funny” as a teenager. Here’s Colbert saying goodbye the only way he knows how.
* Wither Burris? It doesn’t look good for the man nobody wanted to be Senator anyway.
Three from MeFi
Three from MeFi:
* “There’s Something About Mary,” the amazing story of Mary McFate, a nationally known anti-gun activist who turned out to really be Mary Lou Sapone, mole for the NRA.
* Don Hodges looks at the kill screens from Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, as well as the Defender Extra Life Bug. Bonus: The Duck Hunt kill screen.
* Another set of videos that’s been hanging out neglected in my bookmarks for way too long: David Harvey’s twenty-six-hour lecture series on Capital, Vol. 1.
Springsteen, Pac-Man, Bad Smells
Thursday morning links.
* For my people, the right to listen to Bruce Springsteen is literally a matter of life and death.
* Also in the news: a “sniff-squad” of qualified experts is being brought in to determine whether the landfills in Northhampton, Massachusetts, are “bearable” or “foul beyond belief.”
* Retro Sabotage has a 100% true documentary on the secret origins of Pac-Man as a tool for mass manipulation and brainwashing.
Very early in its development, it was decided that the game itself should also, at a symbolic level, carry consumerist values. The main character was then reduced to a mouth eating everything that came across its path. At first it would be chased by a stylized specter, symbolic of guilt, but, during play, the guilt itself would be overcome and swallowed.
The North Korean version of the game, towards the end of the documentary, is actually sort of fun…