Year: 2008

The Great Scrabble Firewall

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Facebookers have probably been following the saga of Scrabulous, the online game that looks and behaves rather like Scrabble. Scrabulous was well put together, and allowed me to play with my friends all over the globe, in group and one-on-one games.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Despite their IP claims being rather, erm, shaky, Mattel-Hasbro seems to have brought down Scrabulous; it’s now only available for people who don’t live in the USA or Canada.

“Not to worry!”, they bugled. “We’ll bring out our own authentic version for you!”

“There’s nothing so sad and ridiculous as a shiny-nosed girl trying to be a charmer”

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So says the advertisement below for skin creams. While the cosmetics industry is still full of nasty beauty myth tropes, at least it’s no longer quite as condescending as this.


Image Credit: Ponds-HowToBecomeSomeMansDreamGirl originally uploaded by Wishbook

This phrase just makes me want to hurl: “wistful dreams of being some big strong man’s little dream girl”. Infantilising much?

Sexual assault perp Kyle Payne is asking for it – feel free to respond

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kylepayneKyle Payne, fauxminist, predator, and sexual assaulter, is up for open sentencing on August 11, though he is asking for it to be postponed so that he can continue his “counselling” and solicitation of “letters of support”.

Kyle Payne was a rape crisis advocate, women’s studies student, and resident advisor at his university. While “looking after” an unconscious drunk student in his care, he undid her shirt and took a photograph and video of her breast.

He has now published a statement on his blog, closed comments on it, and emailed a bunch of feminist bloggers to alert them to it. Yeah – he’s soliciting letters of support from feminists, in an effort to influence his sentence. Mm, that’ll go well:

SF Sunday: intricately detailed worlds etc

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I was having a grand old discussion about space-elevators (originally called sky-hooks) with my DBH last night, in particular how Arthur C. Clarke managed to flub some of the construction-tech in Fountains of Paradise, and how Charles Sheffield’s more accurate construction-tech in his almost simultaneously published space-elevator novel was mocked for not being the same as Clarke’s even after Clarke said “hey, actually he got it right”.

Otterday!

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Today’s Otterday shot is via “hiker” of Clubsnap. This pair of smooth otters was snapped at the Punggol River in Singapore.

They lied about the air too

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Like Andrew Bartlett, I agree entirely with Andrew Bolt regarding the shameful weaseling by the International Olympic Committee regarding the whole idea of granting the 2008 Olympic games to the authoritarian dictatorship of China in the first place. Addit: just… Read More ›