Doug Campbell

By Doug Campbell
Published May 10, 2012

Copy editors: so important yet too often overlooked and unthanked. Be meticulous and exacting at your job day after day, and when will you finally receive recognition? Only when a front-page headline gets botched or an error like “Department of Pubic Works” creeps into a story. Imagine, then, the pressure that must be felt by the editors of Copyediting, a bimonthly trade newsletter for copy editors. The strain of achieving perfection for an eagle-eyed audience of one’s peers must be enormous. After all, what excuse can there be for a misspelled word or misplaced apostrophe when you run a publication called Copyediting? (Full article.)

“Do and Don’t for Love” by Kioki
Loved this in the early ’00s. Forgot the band name, title of the song, identifying characteristics of the video. But while a search for “Japanese stop-motion baby” didn’t net any results, it somehow dislodged the name “Kioki” from the recesses of my brain. Brains!

P.S. Considering the song is a decade old, it totally holds up! Autotune? Check. Subtle R&B changes? Check. Cloyingly twee music video? Check.

P.P.S. “Cloyingly twee” as an expression is kind of cloying and twee. (A word that describes itself is called an “autological word” or “autonym.” Like “short” or “noun” or “pentasyllabic” or “autonym” thanks Wikipedia.)

Puppets! See also.

New in “This is a thing?” news

Remember when Spore came out a few years ago and everyone was very excited? I only played it one time, but. But. I stumbled across an Internet trend of creepy, uncanny valley residing creations. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Banana

I had an article featured on one of the best websites on the Internet today.

awl yeah

When talking about Zuckerberg’s most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child’s ability to delay gratification—devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two—with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists’ subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He’d still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man, New York magazine

Much of the web is an endless array of little bites one after the other, a Tapas restaurant from hell.

The making of a brand-new iPad magazine that’s already sick of the Internet

agreed

#7: This sandwich.

Want to feign liver disease for a bunch of med students in Chapel Hill? This may be the gig for you.

Objective proof that I have the best parents.

puns in the family

#6: The time I got a record I wanted pretty badly. Click through for the full, mildly exciting Storify. (This is part of an ongoing series of things that I enjoyed/will miss about New York City now that I am moving to North Carolina after 6 months in the “Big Apple.”)

#5: Movie Premieres and Q&As with Don Hertzfeldt, Gary Hustwit, Punch Brothers

This is how we spent one of our first nights out in New York.

Don Hertzfeldt, of “I Am A Banana” fame, released his third film in a series. Heartfelt, intense, and for a movie about a terminal illness, hilarious. Here’s the trailer for part 1:

And I’d been waiting three years for this documentary about my favorite band to come out, and suddenly, it arrived! Glad I followed them on Twitter or I would have forgotten about it:

#4: I wrote for a cool, hyperlocal website a couple times.

I wrote two articles for Brokelyn.com while I lived here! Brokelyn is awesome, and even though I only went to one actual meeting, they kept me on the mailing list, and I occasionally snapped up an assignment.

I got to interview Michael Showalter about cheap gift ideas and told him how Wikipedia works. (Yes, you could go in and change something on your Wikipedia entry.) I also talked beekeeping with an extremely smart Brooklyn beekeeper.

#3: I watched two full series of Star Trek.

After we moved down, I was still working from Eagle, but spending entire days by myself in the apartment.

I “accomplished” something during those lonely days in my apartment: I watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. So here are several YouTube clips of Worf, by far the funniest character on the show.

#2: Ikea (continued)