Skip to content

Amusing Stuff

Illustrating the cognitive surplus

If you’ve wondered what’s going through the mind of people who work on Wikipedia or other online social endeavors, this comic strip might provide some answers.

Behind the scenes on the Backroads beat: Learning Spanish

I just got back from an interview for my next Backroads story, due out Monday. This will be the third Backroads in a row to profile a local veteran — the series is a lead-in to Memorial Day at the end of the month.

Earl Vining in his military daysI interviewed Earl Vining, a 78-year-old veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. Earl is a talker, and reporters love talkers. The problem, though, is that you wind up with more material than you can possibly fit into the column inches allotted to your story.

I guess that’s why the journalism gods created blogs.

Anyway, here’s a story that Earl told me during our interview today.

Read More »Behind the scenes on the Backroads beat: Learning Spanish

SimCity evil genius constructs megalopolis worthy of a Matrix sequel

This is, quite frankly, scary. This fellow spent three years and a lot of graph paper designing the “optimal” SimCity 3000 city. He used an advanced grid and zoning layout to achieve a perverted sort of urban planning perfection. The result: a simulated city with a population of more than 6 million Sims — a higher population than Hong Kong.