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Microserfs
''Microserfs'', published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of ''Wired'' magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length. Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. The novel is presented in the form of diary entries maintained on a PowerBook by the narrator, Daniel. Because of this, as well as its formatting and usage of emoticons, this novel is similar to what emerged a decade later as the blog format. Coupland revisited many of the ideas in ''Microserfs'' in his 2006 novel ''JPod'', which has been labeled "''Microserfs'' for the Google generation". Plot The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project. The novel begins in Redmond as th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller '' Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture'', popularized the terms ''Generation X'' and ''McJob''. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the ''Financial Times'' and a frequent contributor to ''The New York Times'', '' e-flux journal'', ''DIS Magazine'', and ''Vice''. His art exhibits include ''Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything'' which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, (now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto) and ''Bit Rot'' at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck. Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of Brit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
JPod
''JPod'' is a novel by Douglas Coupland published by Random House of Canada in 2006. Set in 2005, the book explores the strange and unconventional everyday life of the main character, Ethan Jarlewski, and his team of video game programmers whose last names all begin with the letter 'J'. ''JPod'' was adapted into a CBC television series of the same name co-created by Douglas Coupland and Michael MacLennan. It premiered on January 8, 2008, and ran until its cancellation on March 7, 2008, leaving the series with a permanent cliffhanger. The first thirteen episodes of the series aired in the United States on The CW. Plot ''JPod'' is an avant-garde novel of six young adults, whose last names all begin with the letter 'J' and who are assigned to the same cubicle pod by someone in human resources through a computer glitch, working at Neotronic Arts, a fictional Burnaby-based video game company. Ethan Jarlewski is the novel's main character and narrator, who spends more time invo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded in 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded in 1819), acquired in 1989. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray. HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints. History Collins Harper Mergers and acquisitions Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Life After God
''Life After God'' is a collection of short stories by Douglas Coupland, published in 1994. The stories are set around a theme of a generation raised without religion. The jacket for the hardcover book reads "You are the first generation to be raised without religion." The text is an exploration of faith in this vacuum of religion. The stories are also illustrated by the author. Several critics have suggested that this publication marks an early shift in the stylistic vocabulary of Coupland and, according to one critic, he was "excoriated presumably for attempting be serious and to express depression and spiritual yearning when his reviewers were expecting more postmodern jollity". However, the short story would later come to garner more praise (see below) though critics and academics have paid little attention to the publication in terms of academics' articles and commentary. Stories These are the stories that appear in the book, in the order of appearance: (Note: All stories are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polaroids From The Dead
''Polaroids from the Dead'' is a collection of short stories and essays by Douglas Coupland. The theme is that each story is written from a collection of old Polaroid photographs that Coupland found in a drawer. It is an attempt to describe the 1990s, a decade that "seemed to be living in a 1980s hangover". Topics of the stories include a Grateful Dead concert (source of "The Dead" in title), a post-mortem letter to Kurt Cobain, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, and an homage to James Rosenquist's painting ''F-111''. The book's ends with a longer essay on Brentwood, California, home to Marilyn Monroe's grave, and the O. J. Simpson murder case. The essay is in part a collage of menus, scraps of conversation, and postings from bulletin boards. Synopsis The book is split into three parts. The first part is Polaroids from the Dead, which is a collection of short stories inspired by a series of Grateful Dead concerts. The second is Portraits of People and Places, which is a collectio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Legoland Billund
Legoland Billund Resort, the original Legoland park, opened on 7 June 1968 in Billund, Denmark. The park is located next to the original Lego factory and Billund Airport, Denmark's second-busiest airport. Over 1.9 million guests visited the park in 2011, and since the opening more than 50 million guests have visited the park. This makes Legoland the largest tourist attraction in Denmark outside Copenhagen. The Legoland parks that have since been built are modelled upon Legoland Billund, most noticeably the Miniland area, which is made up of millions of plastic Lego bricks. History The Lego company, led by Ole Kirk Christiansen, introduced plastic toys alongside their existing wooden toy line in 1949 after purchasing one of the first injection moulding machines in 1947. One son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (GKC), was named the managing director of the family business in 1957 shortly before his father died and just two years later he bought out his three brothers. In the 1960s, GK ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lego
Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things. The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. , 600 billion Lego parts had been produced. History The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be cal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minecraft
''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released in November 2011, with Notch stepping down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten taking over development. ''Minecraft'' is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players , and has been ported to several platforms. In ''Minecraft'', players explore a blocky, procedurally generated 3D world with virtually infinite terrain and may discover and extract raw materials, Glossary of video game terms#Crafting, craft tools and items, and build structures, Earthworks (engineering), earthworks, and simple machines. Depending on their chosen Game mechanics, game mode, players can fight hostile Mob (video games), mobs, as well as cooperate with or c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denmark
) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , established_title = Consolidation , established_date = 8th century , established_title2 = Christianization , established_date2 = 965 , established_title3 = , established_date3 = 5 June 1849 , established_title4 = Faroese home rule , established_date4 = 24 March 1948 , established_title5 = EEC accession , established_date5 = 1 January 1973 , established_title6 = Greenlandic home rule , established_date6 = 1 May 1979 , official_languages = Danish , languages_type = Regional languages , languages_sub = yes , languages = GermanGerman is recognised as a protected minority language in the South Jutland area of Denmark. , demonym = , capital = Copenhagen , largest_city = capital , coordinates = , ethnic_groups = , ethnic_g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coming Out
Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBT people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. Framed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of the closet is experienced variously as a psychological process or journey; decision-making or risk-taking; a strategy or plan; a mass or public event; a speech act and a matter of personal identity; a rite of passage; liberation or emancipation from oppression; an ordeal; a means toward feeling gay pride instead of shame and social stigma; or even a career-threatening act. Author Steven Seidman writes that "it is the power of the closet to shape the core of an individual's life that has made homosexuality into a significant personal, social, and political drama in twentieth-century America". ''Coming out of the closet'' is the source of other gay slang expressions related to voluntary disclosure or lack thereof. LGBT people who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stream Of Consciousness (narrative Mode)
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver in 1840 in ''First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine,'' when he wrote, Better known, perhaps, is the 1855 usage by Alexander Bain in the first edition of ''The Senses and the Intellect'', when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness–on the same cerebral highway–enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense". But it is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his '' The Principles of Psychology''. In 1918, the novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's novels. '' Pointed Roofs'' (1915), the first work in Richardson' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding is the use of progressive resistance exercise to control and develop one's muscles (muscle building) by muscle hypertrophy for aesthetic purposes. It is distinct from similar activities such as powerlifting because it focuses on physical appearance instead of strength. An individual who engages in this activity is referred to as a bodybuilder. In professional bodybuilding, competitors appear in lineups and perform specified poses (and later individual posing routines) for a panel of judges who rank them based on symmetry, muscularity, size, conditioning, posing, and stage presentation. Bodybuilders prepare for competitions through the elimination of nonessential body fat, enhanced at the last stage by a combination of extracellular dehydration and carbo-loading, to achieve maximum muscular definition and vascularity; they also tan and shave to accentuate the contrast of their skin under the spotlights. Bodybuilding takes a great amount of effort and time to r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
