On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes about the novel The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod, a thriller that includes as a plot element an internet video feed of people being tortured and killed. No one knows where the signal originates. Sound familiar?  Long live the new flesh!

Yet another great xkcd strip.

The AACS LA doesn’t want you to have the number 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2.  They can bite my computer’s shiny metal ass.  [h/t Boing Boing]

I saw Shrek the Third with friends this evening.  It was fairly entertaining, but not up to the standard set by the first two films.  The story is weaker and consequently less engaging for adults.  For me, the highlight was a new character played by Eric Idle.
I rate it 8 on a scale of 0 [...]

On Friday night we watched Viva Zapata, Elia Kazan’s 1953 biopic, starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn. It is well thought of (IMDB 7.6), but I found it an uneven collection of performances that were within themselves jewels. Once such scene takes place when Zapata is speaking with Mexico’s new president Francisco I. Madero. [...]

Hanford Lemoore and I were both early employees of ReplayTV.  Hanford writes about how he became a DVR user more than a year before any were available commercially, and how he has now gone DVRless for over year.
I watched very little television before using a DVR.  I would set my VCRs to record the few [...]

As reported by the BBC, it wasn’t a reunion.  David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright played together, and Roger Waters played solo.
Shine on, you crazy diamond!

I was listening to the “Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan,” and he played “Mama Get Your Hammer (There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head)” by the Bobby Peterson Quartet.  Aside from being an amusing song, it was an interesting juxtaposition with a billboard I happened to be driving past at the time: [...]

Hanford Lemoore recently wrote about the low sales figures for the indie game Gish. in which the player controls a gelatinous blob of tar, navigating subterranean coridors and traps, dealing with monsters, etc. They actually have a Linux version (as well as Windows and MacOS X versions) and a free demo; the full game [...]

A friend is playing a strange new online game, “TaxCut Free File.” I’ve only observed for few minutes, but it doesn’t actually look like he’s having much fun. The rules seem to be incredibly complicated, and it’s not clear how the player can win. There’s been a lot of swearing at it, [...]