the word studio notebook

“Reblogs plus comments plus reblogs equals intercourse. (Not sexual, just intercourse.) So some days your dashboard really can feel like a bulletin board, with people reblogging each other, back and forth, adding new commentary, all throughout the day. This can be fine or it can be excessive, but for sure it whittles at the notion of the blog post as a publication and instead makes it feel transient, like a forum post. Which is also fine, but also changes the potential state of the post. A tumblelog is several things at once, for good or ill.

Tumblr posts are always subject to reblogging and commentary, but that commentary isn’t filed beneath the post like a blog comment is, it becomes part of the post, transforming the statement into part of something larger.

Except maybe transform isn’t the right word. Maybe the statement is dragged, cussing and spitting, into an argument or pushed out into the incoming traffic of withering jokes. The statement can be hoisted onto shoulders and paraded around the bar or it can be pantsed in front of the whole class.”

(from my post)

jaybushman:

Boing Boing is running a contest today: 100 words on the theme “Found in Space.” This is my entry:

Jane Austen’s Doctor Who —

It is a truth universally, multiversally and cross-dimensionally acknowledged, that a single Time Lord in possession of a good Tardis, must be in want of a Companion.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a star system or terrestrial body (especially Earth, for some reason), this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the indigenous peoples, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. Their sons, on the other hand, refuse to be his tin dog.

This is wonderful.

Sorkin uses “Okay” in a myriad of ways, I think maybe as a way to let the actor inject some of their own choices into the work here and there. Actors have a million ways to read such a line, and you can just look at the different ways that Martin Sheen, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, and the rest of the cast of The West Wing played their “okays” to see what kind of dramatic mileage they’re able to extract from that one, wonderful, dynamic word.