Slashdot Mirror

Kelson writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Vincent Connare, designer of the web's most-hated font, Comic Sans. Not surprisingly, the font's origins go back to Microsoft Bob, where he saw a talking dog speaking in Times New Roman. Connare pulled out Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns for reference, and created the comic book-style font over the next week. 'Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer. ... The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web."

Kate Thompson writes "The Boston Phoenix followed up the news that Matrix Online would be hiring live performers to play characters from the movies (Morpheus, the Oracle). The article looks at what qualifications you need to be an events implementer (or "imp"), how they get their scripts, and how Lawrence Fishburne felt about watching an imp play his part. Warner Bros. apparently has big plans for this - they consider the Matrix Online to be the 'fourth Matrix movie,' and they want players to feel like they're actually shaping the Matrix story. It's not clear, though, how far they'll really take that."

Kate Thompson writes "A week after San Francisco's Genetic Savings and Clone revealed the sale of their first cat to a customer, the Boston Phoenix reports that GS & C acknowledges it has been hired by anonymous buyers in Hollywood to bank genes of show business animals."

Lets start this off with some eyecandy from Mdog. Hi res pics of coronal loops meet Rob's First Rule of Art. Wow. Not enough eye candy? tradica noted that Pixar's new movie 'Monsters Inc.' now has trailers available even the the movie won't be out for a year. Course since Jobs is @ pixar, no surprise that I can't watch the clip. Instead of food for your retinas, Nerf97A4 sent in recipes that will never be used on Iron Chef since they all involve cooking with twinkies in some form or another. Deep fried Twinkies? Makes me shudder... maybe instead you should look at jedigeek fouund an online store called CyberCandy which allows you to buy candy from around the world. funferal noticed that a OECD have publshed their Privacy Statement Generator. Ant noted one wizard that that probably doesn't exist in Word. alecto sent us a fun link where you can read 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall which has code snippets to generate the song in languages from APL to zsh. PhadeRunner sent us Mr. T vs. The Matrix. and FlameSnyper sent The Matrix and Ghost in The Shell. One is slightly more serious then the other. An anonymous reader documented filling a cubicle with packing peanuts in case your boss is out of time and you need some help. Speaking of bosses, Need a weapon? WD_40 aims you at a site where you can learn how to create your own spud gun. Course you could do it the old fashioned way: pimp showed us a site dedicated to electrocuting common household stuff. Like, for example, a furby. While on the subject of electricity, loose_change sent in several links about Power meters and how they aren't exactly the best in user interface. A competition followed to try to make a better on. The winner is definitely less hostile ;) CresentCityRon sent in something you don't want to electrocute: apparently MIT students are working on Geek Porn which is pretty much what is sounds like. School officials aren't so happy about it.

Croaker writes "Hmm-the PalmPilot as a fetish object? This article makes a pretty interesting case that, since people are pushing the Pilot to do things that are really outside its simple, elegant design, that it's more of a fetish symbol than tool " Interesting account of Palm experiences.