I am aware of the immense number of demo EPs you must receive. Knowing that you are a busy person who does not have time to listen to even a fraction of them, I submit this proposal in order to not waste anyone’s time. Please note I have not yet produced these in any musical form. I leave the decision as to whether these tracks should be produced to your discretion.

> The first thing you remember writing was a five-page short story about a turtle that left his bale to try to understand life away from other turtles. It was second grade and you weren’t as well read then so you drew upon the only two literary influences you knew: Yertle the Turtle and The Stranger. You entered your story in a school-wide contest. Some fifth-grader won the grand prize with a story about a unicorn that lost his horn and went to live with the horses. You learned a valuable lesson that day about marketability. People love unicorns.

We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.

We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Found in actual student papers.

E.g.: 3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.

With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it— playing it down.

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

WODEHOUSE

I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “Which are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

1. Witty & Charming
2. Rich and Powerful
3. Benevolent
4. Clairvoyant
5. Fuck Dinner
6. Patriotic
7. Crank up the Enola Gay
8. Witty & Charming, Part II
9. Invisible
10. Bulletproof

What's on the back of a web page?

There are many different ways to cook eggs but most of them are purely of interest to invalids, children and the feeble-minded. The correct or 'proper English egg' is fried with lightly browned edges in the fat left over from the bacon. At the last minute, oil is flicked over the top of the yolk to seal it. This dangerous procedure causes the yolk to form a perfect, golden, viscid capsule, the violation of which with a rough shard of toast, is the nearest that an Englishman will permit himself to unbridled sexual ecstasy.

"Maintain a sense of bafflement, as if you’ve been immersed in a glorious world of music way better than the Beatles": http://bit.ly/e9G7EX

This book is perhaps the funniest book I have ever read. Stewart Lee has consistently been one of the funniest comedians in the country and his apparently arrogant yet always self-deprecating style has been brilliantly realised on the page. He shows a thoughtfulness and integrity that puts previous controversies about his work into context and also provides a fascinating peek behind the subjects of his stand-up set to reveal complexity, planning and yet more humour behind them.

RT @incanus77: Laughing so hard: http://damnyouautocorrect.com/1120/the-big-d/

Gifs—"graphics interchange formats"—are unique to the internet, in that they utilize a short loop of soundless video-like motion to convey thoughts, feelings, memes, or retorts. While a picture says a thousand words, a gif gets the point across much more succinctly.

Gangsta Lorem ippzle dummy text generator: http://bit.ly/bSsTRo

Let the reader do some work. Humor works best when the reader has to connect some dots. Early in my story I made you connect the golf story to the playground story. The smarter your audience, the wider you can spread the dots. I used this method again when I said of my aborted spit-take, "I don't remember much after that." Your mind might have filled in a little scene in which, perhaps, my eyes bugged out, my cheeks went all chipmunk-like, and I fell out of my chair.

Figures. http://twitpic.com/2sxesp
– Cameron Kenley Hunt (camh) http://twitter.com/camh/statuses/25837025979

Jason Schwartzman introduces the New Yorker iPad App. Great video: http://bit.ly/94Pvwt

At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction.

What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?

Beach reads don’t have to be new best sellers or formulaic romances. In fact, summer is the perfect time to dig deep into books, classics and otherwise, you’ve missed. We asked exemplary authors in particular fields to recommend the books that matter most to them—the ones they keep going back to and, in many cases, that made them want to write. Their literary mix tapes, of a sort.

The 2⁴ Most Romantic Stephen Malkmus Lyrics, In Ascending Order (A Listicle With A Little Bit Of Commentary) http://t.co/7K7mXp0

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"?

RT @aral: Best 404 page evar*? http://blippy.com/404 /via @timwhitlock, @FintanCostello, @sweena (* i.e., this week or till the next meme)

RT @rob_schmitt: This is fun: Pixar's in-jokes and easter eggs - http://bit.ly/cyRSIm

Nice. http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/

RT @tcarmody: A 21st century Ezra Pound could reinvent epic poetry by judiciously incorporating these autosummarized piths/gists: http:/ ...

RT @tcarmody: Lovely video from the digital marketing team at MacMillan on how books are REALLY made (via HarperStudio): http://j.mp/bhvpWl

"Slate has asked me to offer you a few words of advice—as I, too, am a procrastinator. Always have been. In college, I'd start 10-page papers after midnight on the day they were due. Half my memories of this period involve screaming at my printer to print faster, ripping the pages from its maw, and then sprinting to my professor's office with moments to spare, sweat streaming down my face."

"Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it."

"The merry month of July 2009 had barely witnessed the spectacle of Al Franken eventually taking his seat as the junior senator from Minnesota when, immediately following the death of Walter Cronkite, Time magazine took an online poll to determine who was now “America’s most trusted newscaster.” Seven percent of those responding named Katie Couric. Nineteen percent nominated Charles Gibson. Twenty-nine percent went for Brian Williams. But the clear winner, garnering 44 percent, was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Either I missed it, or the poll failed to specify, in that wonderfully reassuring way that polls purport to do, what had been its 'margin of error.'"

Interesting things on Twitter.