Frickin' Frackin' Freezing

This is ridiculous:

Jack in a box

If you don't see a Youtube video, go to the original post here

Conversation

The Economist magazine recently published an article that questioned whether the art of conversation was dying. In their words:

American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would “speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.

In college I was a student of the art of conversation. Sort of. As a debater, they taught you that effective communication and persuasion happened by talking as fast as you can, never looking at your audience, and calling your opponents racists and homophobes.

As you can see, I most definitely know what I'm talking about. So I can say without a doubt that conversation and effective communication aren't dead. I give you proof. What's that, you say? How can a comic about videogames save discourse?

To this, I say, stop asking dumb questions. Tycho's posts which run alongside each comic are the stuff conversation books are made of. He dabbles in metaphor the way my kitten dabbles with my foot, which is to say: he sinks his teeth into it with a force previously unimaginable. Take his description of using an MP3 player:

Most of my observations are the sort of thing anyone with a substantial portable player already knows, and they aren't unique to the Zune. Access to that much audio without being tethered to a computing mothership is decadent. It's decadent like eating gold. Seriously, like if you ate some gold and weren't even that hungry to begin with - just hunched over a yawning treasure chest, chowing on doubloons for no reason.

If you read the previous paragraph and your faith in human discourse was not renewed, then you not only are wrong, but are alien to me.