Linkspam: DuckDuckGo, solitary confinement, anachronistic language, and addictive videogames

[firecat]

The DuckDuckGo search engine has exploded in popularity since Snowden. IMO, the next step is to switch from "google" to "quack" as the verb to mean "look up something on a search engine." (Isn't JFQI more fun than JFGI?)
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026698/inside-duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor

The cruel, unusual, and ineffective punishment that is long-term solitary confinement. "no U.S. prison is willing to allow its otherwise isolated prisoners to take part in research."
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-solitary-confinement-180949793/

Anachronistic language in the TV show Masters of Sex
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2014/02/masters-of-sex-nobody-said-that-then.html

The life and death of Flappy Bird, and an amusingly overwritten essay on why it's so addictive
http://mashable.com/2014/02/10/flappy-bird-story/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-squalid-grace-of-flappy-bird/283526/
"Flappy Bird is not amateurish nor sociopathic. Instead, it is something more unusual. It is earnest. It is exactly what it is, and it is unapologetic. Not even unapologetic—stoic, aloof. Impervious."

Comments

[jae]

AUGH, that Masters of Sex article is paralyzing for someone who's currently trying to write something set in 1966.

-J

[silveradept]

I like DDG a lot. It's a very useful engine and getting better all the time. The other articles are quite interesting themselves.

[selki]

I quack, you quack, yay.

"We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator." LOL

[firecat]

Indeed!

[flarenut]

I'd go further than that: the language is designed specifically to *be* anachronistic. If people spoke the way that actually did it would freak us (the great overwashed viewing audience) right out. Accents have changed, locution has changed, we just don't have the cognitive resources to follow plots and character in a foreign argot.

(And I'd also like to say that the visible scenes are also horrifically anachronistic, just in ways we've become used to. They look like photos and films of their periods, which bear the same kind of relationship to how things actually looked as restaurant food does to what people eat at home. Imo of course.) They also use modern fabrics, clean fabrics, wall-maintained clothes and so forth.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for the link about anachronistic language in *Masters of Sex*. I'd noticed "way" and a few others.