Shakespeare’s Battleship
Excerpts from William Shakespeare’s Battleship.
CAPTAIN
How now, Rihanna? What ho, guy from True Blood?
What news dost thou bring from the radar thingie?RIHANNA
Ay me, dear captain! Most grievous fortune!
For we are invaded by space robots!The CAPTAIN is confused.
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/KbU7ri
Bringing Down America
We can either study for our law finals, or we can bring about the violent dissolution of the American legal system.
Sure we can study. We can go over our notes and take a couple practice tests and pray we get good enough grades to land a sweet summer firm job. But let’s be realistic. How hard is it going to be to understand the complex web of choice-of-law analysis implicated by Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins? Now how hard is it going to be to instigate a bloody nihilistic revolution the primary result of which will be the complete collapse of the federal and state judiciaries and the instantaneous and complete invalidation of four centuries of American law and jurisprudence?
Levels in Call of Duty: Postmodern Warfare.
Level Five
You play through the life of 16th-century Venetian cobbler. Events unfold in real time and take 97 years to complete. The level explores the themes of love, abandonment of dreams, and how much the Black Plague sucked.
McSweeney’s is printing quarterly editions of the best of Grantland.
TV pitches from a guy whose girlfriend broke up with him forty-five minutes before the pitch meeting.
A dating show about a bachelor who must choose between thirty beautiful women. Each week he goes on a series of dates with the women and things are going well for a while and then he shows them his webbed foot and explains to them that the deformity is the reason he keeps his socks on during intercourse, and then the women no longer want to be intimate with him, but they tell him it’s because they’re stressed about their jobs and not because he has a webbed foot, so he sits in the limo by himself, alternately masturbating, napping, and crying. (Possible titles: You Are Going to Die Alone, Love is a Lie Created by the Greeting Card Industry in a Joint Partnership with Lord Voldemort, Come Back, Amanda… Please.)
Ineffective pick-up lines for the modern internet persona. [via]
That gorgeous woman over there keeps looking this way, like she recognizes me or something. I do maintain a mildly successful YouTube account with over sixty subscribers, so I’m used to this sort of unwelcome attention.
A court-ordered letter from Dora the Explorer’s mother.
Yes, it is true that Dora spends most of her day in the woods with a talking monkey that wears red boots. Yes, that monkey is actually named Boots, after his own footwear. Yes, the days my daughter spends in the woods with this monkey occur instead of attendance in an actual school. And yes, I admit, I never follow her into the woods or check on her welfare in any way. I just hope for the best while she wanders the woods with her friend the monkey.
Please know that I am concerned about her well being but I also recognize that she returns home safely—eventually—after each one of these days. And frankly, those woods terrify me. I don’t want to go in there. I mean, one talking monkey I can handle but those woods are full of talking maps, talking backpacks, talking birds, talking crocodiles, talking squirrels, and this odd talking fox. These things should not talk. And they should not be bilingual.
Famous opening lines from novels updated for the modern age.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an internet startup to call his own.
Wow. McSweeneys (sort of) redesigned their site.
A few months ago, coming up on this site’s six thousandth article and thirteenth anniversary, we realized that it was probably time to make sure everything was still working the way it should. (It might not’ve been the numbers that made us accept this. It might have been the way that, whenever we attempted to describe to people who worked on the internet of today how our site was sort of just a bunch of hand-edited text files, these people laughed nervously and did not believe us.) Surprisingly, a lot of it was still working—even having our web editor manually copy-and-paste bits of HTML was still pretty much working, in a charming folksy way—but we found a lot of things we wanted to tweak, too. So this redesign, in large part, is intended to reinforce all that is good about mcsweeneys.net (the style, the layout, etc.), while also incorporating some of the things that have come to seem more important since the salad days of 1998, when we launched the site.
An open letter to the gentleman blow-drying his balls in the gym locker room.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamt of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people that just finished exercising at this pricey sports club.
In the beginning, there was a vaguely defined business model.
Then the Creator did issue a memo, and said let there be a logo. And the Creator saw this logo and it was good, for it was colorful and yet simple and reminded people instantly of plastic toothbrush castings without being overly oral. And the Creator called this first logo “not a bad start” and did increase Her billable hours. And thus the first re-branding effort was made.
(Source: readability.com)
McSweeney’s dives deep into the current state of the book industry. [via]
Even with the rise of e-books, and the struggles of some bookstore chains, all the anecdotal evidence we knew pointed to the book industry being on solid footing. But we wanted proof, so back in May of 2010, amidst some of the most dour prognostications about the state of the industry, we asked fifteen or so young researchers to look into the health of the book. Their findings provide proof that not only are books very much alive, but that reading is in exceptionally good shape—and that the book-publishing industry, while undergoing some significant changes, is, on the whole, in good health.
Dan Kennedy visits the Genius Bar.
