According to the JuicyStudio readability calculator, you need 5.65 years of schooling to understand the posts on Snarkmarket. Our “Gunning Fog Index” score is a respectable 8.99, which puts us right smack at the reading level of most popular novels.

NYTimes.com has a score of 6.7, while the WaPo’s holding steady at 7.81. Not even the previously linked Valve post and its comments reached the current Snarkmarket score, topping out at 8.71.

The other blog I write for has a GF Index of 7.44, slightly below Reader’s Digest. (Robin’s clearly wrecking the curve — it broke when I tried to feed it his other blog.) My senior college thesis has a GF Index of 15.47, at the lower range of the academic papers scale.

As Robin points out, Snarkmarket may have taken a slide toward the nerdy, given that our score for October 2004 (quite a prolific month for us) was 8.26. I imagine this post has not helped the trend.

Via Kevin Drum.

… Yahoo purchases TiVo? Could happen, sports fans.

I don’t like most Firefox themes. I find the default theme ugly and many of the user-generated ones cartoonish. But I’m always hunting for good ones. Today I found PimpZilla. Surprisingly clean and detailed, although it kind of clashes with the Windows XP colors.

Awesome. Robin has been saying for a while now that he’d love to have some sort of online hub for his local coffeehouse, so the hordes of laptoppers inside could communicate in digital space. Well, here you go.

It’s nice to see college a cappella get a little MeFi love.

I’ve got to strongly recommend the movie City of God, although I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it. (Ebert.) But there’s this: I kept a stiff upper lip all throughout the film. Afterwards, as I’m wont to do, I visited its IMDB trivia page. Then came the tears. That’s never happened to me before. (Watch the movie before you read the trivia.)

Are we seriously still talking about this? Pharmacists are licensed to cover a basic range of services, including providing emergency contraception. States should not license pharmacists who are unable for any reason to provide this range of services. They are welcome to develop an alternative licensing scheme for people who only sell drugs that promote the cult of life, or whatever. Just don’t call it pharmacy.

The form feels a little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-ish (in a bad way) to me. The tiny bit of agency that allows me to choose one path over a second one doesn’t, like, mind-crushingly alter my entire relationship with the text or anything. So read Same Day Test because it’s a good story, any which way you slice it.

The Google Sightseeing blog filters out the most awesome satellite images from Google Maps. Via Micro Persuasion.

Just after Robin posted this Gamespot link on storytelling and video games, I left for a vacation in Orlando and my parents’ dial-up connection, so I could not contribute a proper reply. Here it is.

My favorite text addressing the place of video games within the spectrum of art/literature is Ernest Adams’ lecture at the 2004 Game Developers Conference, “The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design.”

You have to remember that Adams is talking to computer game developers, not academics, so he’s reductive at best and flat-out wrong at worst. (You may have to struggle to trust anything he says after he begins by boiling the last 200 years of Western philosophy down to English philosophy — logical and deductive — and French philosophy — touchy-feely. Germans, apparently, need not apply. And of course, you forgot Poland.) But once you get over his sketchy broad-brushing of history, he makes some wonderful points.

Adams maps video game storytelling onto the timeline of modern literary storytelling, and essentially decides that we’re just exiting the classical era. This feels spot-on to me. As much as I love Final Fantasy IV, it appeals to me emotionally in the same blunt, soaring, epic way Beowulf does.

Video game storytellers of today, Adams says, are still coming around to the Victorian age:

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