Wikipedia The Movie: the maddest thing I’ve read in some time
Wikipedia The Movie, a wiki-amusement started by Mark Pellegrini during the Chrome Age of Wikipedia, is hard to describe, and not exactly what you might expect. It is a surreal cataclysm of in-jokes pretzled together into a tilable shape. Its pieces have been polished by those who appreciate it: editors with a sense of humor, reflecting on a larger community whose relationship with humor is more nuanced. In short Dalí-scented scenes, and the language of cafeteria gossip, it captures something about the projects in a way that is honest to the madness of humanity. Enough to make any committed editor wince/smile. It makes me wonder what a similarly frank slice of subtext would look like for other large-scale projects.
While I remember the original being written – not called ‘Episode 1’ at the time – I only discovered last year that it had been turned into a franchise, slowly unfolding year after year. And I can’t complain that I was cast as my favorite Shakespearean fragranceur.
And then there is the musical version. For you who have shared the private hallucinations of those who breathe too deep of lemony Huggle vapour, give over a few minutes of your day to a stroll down memory’s phantasmagoria:
That curious creature, the technicolor starling, illuminated
My power animal: Hildebrandt’s starling. Similar to some butterflies, these starlings are colored by the microscopic structure of its feathers, not pigment.
Putting peacocks (and the stray chalybaeus) to shame for 2,000,000 years.
HT: Gaia. via Wikimedia Commons. (this one is from Tanzania)
To “snub” you must find someone who can be made to feel inferior
“A snub,” defined Lady Roosevelt, “is the effort of a person who feels superior to make someone else feel inferior. To do so, he has to find someone who can be made to feel inferior.”
ᔥ Quote Investigator, ↬ Meredith Patterson
Cambridge doggerel in celebration of her glorious sunsets
140 characters, just like mom’s.
The sunset was pretty
in Cambridge. The ember
of Sun cast the city
in hues to remember.
When I tried to draw Rindge
and Latin, ’twas orange.
LOC is down. Archive.org remains up. What can this teach us?
Thanks to the US government shutdown, the Library of Congress website went down today. So did NASA, the NSF, the USDA, the FTC, and the National Park Service. On the other hand, privately-run websites such as the Internet Archive (and, thankfully, its glorious Wayback Machine!) remain online and unaffected by these sorts of government changes.
As we plan for making our Internet more robust in the future, we should make sure to avoid single (or small-group) points of failure, as even services run by major corporations or governments can go offline in a hurry. (People who live their lives on Google tools: I’m looking at you 🙂
Wikipedia itself should be sure to support a thriving mirror network, and should probably move towards a fully distributed cache-and-forward model where possible.
