I just read Kottke’s self-assessment of his best posts/threads from 2008. One in particular — a loooong comment thread on the intentional mispronunciation of words — was a surprise to me, since I don’t usually read comments on JK’s blog (often ’cause he doesn’t enable ’em).

But! This reminded me that Snarkmarket has probably got thousands of readers who hardly ever look at the comment threads after they digest the nice juicy post or link elsewhere. So I thought, as Snarkmarket’s long-time commenter-in-chief, I would put together Snarkmarket’s Best Threads of 2008.

Read more…

This really is Lovecraftian:

In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada’s precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

This fact might be the best illustration I’ve seen of the unexpected consequences of climate change. “Inexorably rising temperatures are slowly drying out forest lands, leaving trees more susceptible to fires, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.” What a catastrophic chain of events. How frightening to imagine that global warming is powerful and sinister enough to co-opt the very forces that ordinarily keep it in check.

I just became a Boxee alpha tester, and while it isn’t flawless, it’s the best setup I’ve seen yet for watching TV shows and movies on the computer, particularly a computer hooked up to a television screen. Haven’t used its social recommendation engine yet (if you’re using it too, let me know), but the Hulu and Netflix integration set it apart from XBMC, Plex, Front Row, et al.

I watch a lot of computer-based TV, particularly since I don’t have cable. My setup — first-gen MacBook Pro with busted screen, Western Digital 500GB external, Wireless-G router, Samsung 26″ HDTV, Apple remote, and a Logitech keyboard (DiNovo wireless for Mac). I’ve got a DVI-HDMI cable and a simple stereo output running between the notebook and the HDTV. Best experiences – 30 Rock on Netflix and Hulu, The Daily Show at ComedyCentral.com, all five seasons of The Wire backed up on my external drive, and Yo Gabba Gabba through iTunes.

I’ve been mulling over a bunch of different ideas about this computer-media server-television hybrid, but first I guess I’ll just ask the ‘matrix — how do you guys watch TV with/without your computer? What do you like or not like about it? What are you still trying to figure out?

All of these insights have their deep and shallow versions.

1. Practical knowledge is impossible without knowing what information to discard.
2. Vapor in the atmosphere makes light visible.
3. Every cuisine is the triumph of centuries of vernacular chemistry.
4. The idea of the future is a lens that brings spaces closer together.
5. All of our neighborhoods hold familiar secrets, depths we’ve never plumbed.
6. Consider your arguments and carefully circumscribe your conclusion. Then exceed those limits by at least twenty percent.
7. Aesthetically, we respond to nuanced humanity and inhuman purity, the shaving mirror and the telescope, the contingency of a moment and the point of view of the eternal universe. Everything else rings false.
8. An unheralded virtue: vigilance against an urge for thrift, misplaced.
9. Any task of memory or thought benefits from an association (even an artificial one) with vision.
10. Maps fool us into believing that cities exist in two dimensions, when they actually persist in (at least) four.
11. Food, Books, Weather, Conversation — excellence in these four things is an apologia for an unhappy memory or an indifferent universe.

Thanks, Robin.

Rob Spence wears a prosthetic eye. It’s the 21st Century. Ergo, Rob’s new eye is going to include a video camera.

Unnerving Story of the Day™ is sponsored by Ratchet Up and the letter Um.

Was it Write Like Tom Friedman Day at the NYT on Christmas, Paul Krugman?

Just didn’t want to let that one go unremarked.

Watching The Big Sleep in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and it is glorious. Lauren Bacall is as cool as blue flame, but it’s hard to beat watching Bogart with Dorothy Malone. Even bookstore clerks are wise! In a way this is a key to film noir — what passes as toughness is really a monumentous and universally held contempt for the slightest stupidity.

“I’ve got a Balinese dancing girl tattooed across my chest, and I’d better take her home.” It’s enough to make you want to write pastiches of pastiche, like the Coen Brothers squared.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow, to win the hearts of academicians large and small. Committee breakfasts, a job interview (!), and a paper on paternity, modernism, and tragedy. (Apollonian patriarchy, legal fictions, Hegel’s love child, and Ockham’s razor abound! It will be awesome.)

I will catch you all after New Year’s if not before. Keep your Kindles warm.

P.S.: Special props to Robin for hosting me in SF. When he returns, the city will be especially strong in the Snark.

Soooo happy I gave myself a Kindle for Christmas.

The device came in handy immediately. I’m staying with my boyfriend Bryan in Minneapolis over the holidays, and the UPS guy arrived with the package very shortly after he left for work. As soon as I left Bryan’s apartment to go upstairs and sign for it, I realized the door had locked behind me, leaving me in Bryan’s robe and slippers, with no keys and no cell phone. But I did have a Kindle. Which meant I had Web access. I surfed to Ask MetaFilter, found lock-picking advice, and managed to get back in. Score.

Twenty-four hours later, I’m into the first chapter of The Rest Is Noise, and on the fifth chapter of The Four-Hour Work Week.

Gripes: Like everybody else, I’m not really a fan of the paging button positions. Also, when you start typing notes, they should auto-save. I’ve been done in a few times by the combo of these two: I’ll start typing a note, then accidentally hit the back key and lose what I’ve written.

The “locations” concept is smart, but I wish there were more cues about where locations start and stop.

Loves: Having a virtual library is already world-changing. I never imagined how cool it would be to instantly shift between different texts as I enter different information-seeking modes. I have always been a juggler of multiple books — there are times I want to read fiction, times I want to read non-fiction, times I want to read fluff. In the analog world, this is disorienting; it’s hard to pick up where I left off with one book after having read another. On the Kindle, freed from a cacophany of book darts and dog ears, this feels wonderfully natural.

It is the same sort of epiphany the iPod invoked for me. Carrying a bunch of books around at once, it turns out, is every bit as much of an experiential leap as carrying tons of music around was in 2001.

I love the way the notes I take are both integrated into the book and separate from it. I never used to take notes on books because I hated having to skim all the pages to snatch fragments of the insights that occurred to me as I was reading. Suddenly, I’m taking all kinds of notes. (This works especially well with cheesy self-help books like The Four-Hour Work Week, which require you to do all sorts of exercises.)

I love that you can read for hours and the battery bar will not budge from 100%.

I’ve named my Kindle “Inkless.”

Update: I extra-super-duper love the fact that I can use Google Reader from my Kindle. Yes, I could do this on my phone, but this is even nicer.

Gavin at Wordwright wants the word back:

“Graphic novel” is not any more descriptive, and worse in that it implies fictional content to the detriment of memoir, travelogue, reportage, etc., which is where you find some of the most interesting work being currently done