Velociraptors, killer gorillas, chip-headed cyborgs, gunslinging robots, cannibal Neanderthals, Demi Moore—these are the sort of things Hollywood knows how to make frightening.
I’ve never read any Michael Crichton. I doubt I ever will. But I liked Oliver Morton’s appreciation. At least I liked what I could read of it. Morton has those cool Snap Preview thingies on his blog, and it seems to me that they’re always in the way of the really cool stuff there, which is his writing.1 So I said so and Oliver, democratic to the end, said he would, if other people felt strongly.
So go ahead, make my day, vote against little preview windows, wherever you may find them. Heliophage is just the start.
Footnotes:- Previews are a perfect example of something being done because it could be. They serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and are an abomination on the site of usability. If I want to know where a link goes, I’ll glance down at the bottom left corner of my browser and see. A tooltip isn’t quite so objectionable, because it doesn’t take up quite so much real-estate. [↩]
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I read The Andromeda Strain as a teenager and in made me want to be a biologist.
@luigi – I didn’t, and yet here I am, biologist to the core.
Crichton could tell a story. I tend to resist throwing money at bazillionaires living or dead and I don’t think I ever bought one of his books but AIRFRAME wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was rather good.
I’ve never read Michael Crichton either, but I do have cause to thank you for posting this.
Those Snap Preview things drive me nuts. Pointlessly springing out of nowhere, unbidden, to clog up my browser every time I accidentally mouseover something. I hate them.
My main blog on clunky old Blogger isn’t afflicted by such fancy technology, but I have a “secret” WordPress blog which includes Snap Previews by default. Until I read this it never actually occurred to me that I could do something about them. So I went and had a good rummage and there, deep in the bowels of the WordPress dashboard, is a not-very-obvious checkbox which turns them off.
Hurrah! Thanks very much, you’ve saved me a lot of bandwidth and swearing. And brought one more blog to preview window emancipation.