Ain’t no party like a no-party party

Sometimes indepenence isn’t enough. Want to make sure folks know you’re not a member of a political party? Here are 74 ways people have done this: Do not wish to specify dont have one Dont have one. dont know dont no DONT NO YET Dont want to say I am not affiliated with a party …

Declaring independence … from the dictionary

Be careful when you give people a freeform text field. They’ll get creative. Here are 28 — yes, 28 — ways people spelled “independent”: endapendent IDEPENDENT Ind. Indenpent indepant Indepdendent Indepedent indepenant Independance Independanr Independence Independent independiant independient independnt Indepenent indepent Indepentant indepented Indepentent Indepependent Indipendant indipendent indopenit indpendant Indpendent Indpndt undependent

Thirty-one ways to leave your lover

If you run any sort of text messaging service, you’ll have to process unsubscribe requests. The standard such messages is “STOP.” To make things easier for customers, in addition to “stop”, I wrote code that also looked for “unsubscribe”, “quit”, “cancel”, “end”, “delete” and anything beginning with the word “fuck.” (Messages merely containing the word fuck often wanted something …

Book publishers, infused with aggrieved privilege 

Clay Shirky’s essay on Amazon and the book industry is so full of great lines, it’s hard to pick just one. The fact that any bookseller ever “runs out” of a book is now ridiculous. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests …