Whoa, this is pretty much scary as hell. It’s 2011. We’re still in Iraq. Iran’s not only got nukes, but using them. The world’s a disaster. Yes, that pretty much sounds like a cheap “future-of-the-world apocalypse terror†story, but this one has a few catches. For one thing, it has a sense of realism. Basically, Bush screwed up the country and pretty much the world, and now McCain’s president and Iraq’s such a mess he can’t get us out. Also, there’s a whole tech and future of journalism angle, involving the main character, Jimmy Burns, as a young blogger in NYC who ends up accidently streaming a live video of a Brooklyn Starbucks being blown to pieces by a suicide bombing. After becoming an overnight sensation from his footage being streamed live on national television, he gets sent to videoblog Iraq by the eerily CNN-like Global News Network. And did I mention that it’s also a web comic? Yep, that just about sums up Shooting War. If you can’t get it online, a print version will be released in 2007. Overall, it’s a really thought provoking and creepily plausible future of America and Iraq, while at the same time combining it with the future of technology and journalism, all in a comic format, online.
Oh, and by the way, I’m blogging this directly from the Word 2007 beta, which, surprisingly, doesn’t totally suck.
Update: Actually, I’ve discovered my first Word 2007 flaw — any document posted to a Wordpress blog gets its date set to December 1969. Ouch.
While browsing the digg RSS feed yesterday, I came upon this map of the Island in Lost. While I am everything but a fan of the show, I thought that the readers of my blog might be interested. In addition to providing a map of the Island, the Map also includes lots of information about the characters, and a world map with important lost facts corresponding to geographic locations surrounding it. Also, I just though that’s it’s kind of funny to call something a “Lost Map.”
Technorati Tags: lost, map
Have you ever wondered what to do with your iPod when someone approaches you? If you have, than there’s good news for you: New York magazine has a section called “The Four Levels of iPod Interaction : Whom you do and don’t have to unplug for” as part of their Urban Etiquette Handbook.
[via MacUser]
Yes, such things do exist. Check out “Google Your Race: Racial Profiling with Google” to see the what the number one racial stereotypes on the Internet are. my favorite falls under “Middle Easterners are known for…”:
making pizza and raping Swedish women
[via del.icio.us/popular]
Technorati Tags: google, middle easteners, race
Apparently Gawker, the immensely popular Internet gossip blog, has a lot of Jewish flavor to it. According to this article of the Forward 50, Gawker has a lot of Jewish flavor and humor to it, which seems to make sense being that it’s run by Jews Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld. Some of the Jewish flavor found in Gawker can be found in the short Foreword paragraph about its to main editors:
Currently run by co-editors Jessica Coen, 25, and Jesse Oxfeld, 29, the site courses with Jewish flavor, ridiculing old canards about Jews and the media even as it relishes them. “Next week’s New York [magazine] wonders whether, as a recent scientific study purported to prove, Jews really are smarter,” an entry right after Yom Kippur stated. “All we’ll say: We had a day off yesterday, and we ate pounds of excellent lox for dinner. You goyim did not. QED.” Another time, the editors said “yisgadal v’yiskadash” over a Conde Nast employee’s firing.
Of course, despite Gawker’s Jewish flavor, it’s not exactly my favorite type of blog. I think that I’ll stick with reading Engadget and the rest of the tech blogs.
P.S. Right below Coen and Oxfeld’s paragraph is a paragraph about Carolyn Hessel, who is a very, very powerful woman in the Jewish book world who my dad knows personally and who I have met on several occasions. She can be summed up briefly as “very small, but very powerful.”
Technorati Tags: blog, gawker, jesse oxfeld, jessica coen, judaism, carolyn hessel, the foreword
With my podcast and MacUser blogging, my life has become pretty busy, which is why I decided that I needed a calendar. So, I had two options. One was to go with Apple’s included iCal software, which works pretty well and is a good choice. But the other one was even better. Google Calendar had just been unveiled, and a lot of people are choosing it over iCal. So, I decided to pick gCal. gCal is GREAT. It has a Quick Add button so that you can schedule dates as if you were talking to a normal person, for example, saying “Dinner with Mom at 7pm Sunday” would create a date titled “Dinner with Mom” that would occur at 7:00 PM, April 22, 2006. And, it can even do date ranges, so I can say “half hour Dinner with Mom 7pm Sunday” and it would make an event titled “Dinner with Mom” that would occur from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM, April 22, 2006. Another awesome feature of gCal is that gCal has a huge calendar database. For example, I have a movie release date calendar, a Jewish Calendar, Candle Lighting times, and the weekly parsha (Torah portion). There is some room for improvement with gCal though. For one thing, Google needs to make a mobile version of it like it has for GMail and the Personalized Google Homepage. Also, you can sync Google Calendar with other programs that support the iCal standard, but you can only write to your calendar on one of the programs, while the other is read-only (for example, I can either make my dates on gCal and read them in iCal, or make the dates in iCal, but read it in gCal). Still, Google Calendar is a great program and really worth using.
Technorati Tags: calendar, google, google calendar
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This is very, very funny. Who knew that Walt Disney was racist, anti-semitic, and blacklisted his own employees? Just re-enforces my point that Disney (the company, not the person) is evil, or at least trying to brainwash the minds of young children. Maybe that was a little too harsh. Maybe.
Technorati Tags: disney, disney vault, youtube, saturday night live, snl, video, walyt disney
What’s a great thing to do when you’re bored? Spend 10+ years making an ASCII version of Star Wars! It’s still not done yet, but is still very fun to watch. Just open the Command Line in Windows or the Terminal in Macs, type in telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl, and enjoy.
[via MacUser]
Technorati Tags: ascii, star wars
As most of you probably know, I am now a paid blogger on MacUser (actually a paid trial blogger). I got that opportunity through an invitation, so it’s not like just anyone can sign up. But what if you want to be a paid blogger, and don’t know anyone one these paid blogs? Well, Weblogs, Inc., the company that owns and runs a huge network of blog including the immensely popular Engadget and TUAW blogs, has applications to anyone that wants to join any one of their 90 blogs. To do so, just go to the Weblogs, Inc. homepage, and click on “More Info” under the big box on top labeled “Bloggers.” There is now age or experience requirement, but you have to remember that there must be a lot of people trying out for the really popular blogs like Engadget, TUAW, and Joystiq. But still, this is an awesome way to make some cash by doing something that you love.
Technorati Tags: blog, blogs, Engadget, Joystiq, paid blogger, TUAW, weblogs, Weblogs, Inc.
Most of you know about digg, the online peer-production news site. I’ve been using digg for well over a month now, and until today I’ve though that it was the best peer-production news site out there. Boy, was I wrong. I figured this out today when I went to see the SEOmoz’s 2006 Web 2.0 Awards, which pick the best Web 2.0 site in a certain category based on the number of peer nominations. While browsing the categories, I noticed the winners of the peer-production news category. Instead of seeing digg in first place, which I expected, I saw a site called Newsvine. Digg had made it to second place, yet this Newsvine site and somehow ousted digg in this category. This made me very interested, so I decided to check out Newsvine. After briefly exploring some of the site, I decided to join, which is of course free, to try out all of the features it has to offer. Within 30 minutes, I became obsessed. somehow, this little site had become even better than digg in my opinion, even though digg is still vastly more popular. Here are some of the features that showed me why:
Technorati Tags: news, peear-production, newsvine, articles, stories, digg, Web 2.0
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Aaron Freedman is a 16 year old who's very passionate and knowledgeable about technology and journalism. He enjoys working on his two main projects, 
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