queenlua | Entries tagged with linkspam

Just cleaned out, uhhh, a lot of months' worth of links from my phone. Here's the ones that seemed fun enough to share:

* Outhorse your email. Iceland's tourism marketing team remains utterly undefeated, lol

* Behold Sovereign Chess, the most ridiculous chess variant since Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess! (And another review of the same.)

* Lo, someone made an "existential horror phone sex hotline" and it's good fun. Call the Bureau of Telephone Fornication today!

* What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." Warm, human, lovely little piece.

* On a less heartwarming note: The Cruelty of the Adjunct System. Some of this was already familiar to me via friends in academia, but the stark and thorough way it lays bare just how crushing and precarious adjuncting is—and how much universities rely on it—is really effective. I think the bit that stuck with me most was the observation that this overreliance on adjunct labor really distorts tenured faculty's understanding of what their students are actually struggling with, and what the "typical" student looks like—because they only have to teach upper-level courses! with students who survived whatever 100-level class meat grinders were there! and then often have the gall to say the most out-of-touch stuff as a result... yeah.

* Your goofy viral music video of the day, featuring a bizarre yet charming German guy

* Did you know you can watch the first two seasons of Iron Chef (the OG version), on Youtube, for free? And yeah it absolutely holds up. You're welcome :P

* Did you know: mergansers can run REAL fast

* Home Sweet Homepage. A nostalgic lil' web essay thing about Growin Up On The Internet.

* All 50 US state logos, please argue over Best State in the comments

* A tour of the computers used to do 3d animation for Final Fantasy VII! Came for the ye old computers, and also learned (1) apparently Square did a tech demo at SIGGRAPH in 1995 that feature FF6 characters???, and (2) Intel used to manufacture RISC processors??? Like, for a niche use case, but still, feels like I should've stumbled over that before I stumbled over (oh god) Itanium? Anyway, beep boop

* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. This is just messy internet drama, haha. Concluding sentence: "The internet was always awful, and I'm never leaving." same, girl, same

* The Video Game History Foundation's blog has some neat lil stories in it. (Though whenever game history comes up, I feel obliged to shill the No Don't Die interview series, which is truly fantastic; Rebecca Heineman's interview is a standout if you don't know where to start. SORRY IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS PITCH BEFORE YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO HEAR IT AGAIN) (But yeah, I saw one of these game history museums give a presentation at Magfest a few years back, in the before-times, and one of the most fascinating bits was the efforts they've gone to to retrieve source code. Sometimes you call a guy up and he's like "oh yeah I think I have all that stuff, somewhere, in my attic," and the museum sends out dudes to scour through the dude's attic and scrape bits off some ancient disc and get some lil high school intern to annotate the whole thing. Based.)

* Two dope sculptures: Serpent d'océan (doper pics here), and Jatayu, the world's largest bird sculpture (doper picture here).

Most the rest of the links lean kinda techy; I've put them on a cut:

( filthy hacker shit )

Here, have a very interesting story by Elon Musk's first ex-wife, where she talks about how she fell in love with the to-be uber-jillionaire & what caused them to grow apart.

I like it because it's not a "wow this guy was an A+ raging asshole" screed, and is more about how a young, ambitious woman fell in love with a young, ambitious man, the only man who seemed to respect and admire her ambition. And yet, as the man became more and more successful, he became more and more wrapped up in work, expecting her to take up more domestic responsibility, expecting her to be blonde like the wives of all his friends, showing more and more disdain for her "books," until one day she realizes she's been slowly turned into the trophy wife she never thought she'd become.

Read it a while ago, but posting it now since a friend brought up an interesting question this morning—if you had the opportunity to marry a fabulously wealthy person, e.g. a Saudi prince, would you go for it? (I answered, first I need to love them and have compatible goals for our future, and if that hurdle's cleared even then I'm a little nervous. Most marriages end in divorce, so you can't just be "now I've got it made"; I'd want to continue having my own money and my own career. Friend seemed more optimistic about the idea, saying it'd open huge opportunities for him and his potential kiddos. idk. interesting stuff.)

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/154268.html

linkspamming without comment

(normally i'd wait to aggregate a few links and then make a post, but this one's been particularly pesky in the back of my brain the past couple days so i thought i'd go ahead and share)

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/90145.html

The Night Watch (pdf). I'm not sure how well the humor translates if you're not a programmer/compsci-sort, but this article's been making the rounds in my tech circles lately and it's the funniest thing I've read in ages. "The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says 'DOES THIS WORK LOL,' and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang."

Winning Candy Crush. It's not quite a layperson's guide, though it's close—I like clear, accessible explanations for straightforward hacks like this one.

Together and Alone, Closing the Prime Gap. I remember reading about the hubub over the University of New Hampshire lecturer who came kinda out of nowhere and published a major result relating to the twin prime conjecture; however, I hadn't known about all the awesome progress that's been made since. This article is accessible to non-math folk and is pretty interesting stuff.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/71613.html

Why Malcom Gladwell Matters (And Why That's Unfortunate). Amusing takedown of that Blink/Outliers/etc guy. See also Culturalism, Gladwell, and Plane Crashes, featuring Gladwell himself arguing on the internet :P

The Banality of Genius—at first I wasn't sure I really wanted to spam this, as the author's biases are pretty transparent if you've read his other stuff—but I've been turning this one over in my head from time to time for the past couple weeks so I figured it's interesting enough to share.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/67693.html

My hobby: going through all the things I've tagged as "marked to read" on Pinboard (there is a fuckton of them, oops). Some of the better things:

Did Antidepressants Depress Japan? Interesting (though older, 2004) NYT bit touching on cultural issues, the (pretty sketch) pharmaceutical industry, and all that jazz

McAfee on How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus. Lulziness. See also his flight from South America due to murder charges, and basically any recent interview with him if you want to see the epitome of the modern eccentric millionare

The Lost Art of Final Fantasy IX. High-res scene renders that didn't make it into my favorite Final Fantasy <3

I Was a College Newspaper Advisor. Interesting (and sad) look into one school's journalism department

Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator. Making fun of Thomas Friedman is kind of too easy but it's also great so

The Wolf Man. THIS BITCH BE CRAZY (but the photos are pretty neat)

The Internal Memo that Allowed IBM's Female Employees to Get Married. lolhistory

Ho There Jim Lad: Ferretbrain piece offering a relatively fresh perspective on the effect of filesharing/piracy on the music industry: "When they closed down the pits in the 1980s we were told that it was just the nature of progress. When a changing global economy puts thousands of ordinary working men and women on the poverty line, we're told to suck it up and accept the harsh realities of the free market. But when it makes exciting, sexy people make less money at their cool high-profile jobs, suddenly it's a tremendous injustice. If factories get closed because people have stopped buying cars – sorry, just the cost of doing business. If record labels make less money because people stop buying albums – oh my God the world is ending."

The Cult of Bayes' Theorem. While I find Less Wrong to be very very occasionally interesting/amusing place, for the most part I think they're kind of batty and this guy states my feelings rather well :P Though, speaking of Bayes, Bayesian Inference with Tears is (a) how Bayes's theorem is properly used, and (b) hilarious to boot. Also the writer's homepage is one of the more amusing academic homepages I've ever seen.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/61106.html

Cleaned out my bookmarks. Some good ones I rediscovered:

A letter of advice from Fitzgerald to a young writer. Excerpt:
...I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell...
Magic: the Gathering is Turing complete

"Mrs. Sinclair Lewis to You". Heh.

Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists. Very interesting essay.

Aisle, an interesting one-turn interactive fiction thing

hey look yet more interactive fiction

Also, I briefly felt enough faith in the opinions of strangers on the internet to play To the Moon, a recently-hyped indie art game. It was disappointing and I do not recommend it. See also Passage, another overhyped indie art game that at least had the decency not to charge money for the experience, and the far-more-amusing parody of Passage on Kongregate.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/26148.html

Once again, Hacker News is discussing an oddly artsy article: The Importance of Being Prolific, which discusses the differences between prolific and non-prolific artists in various mediums (filmakers, novelists, etc). Pretty good read.

Some random related thoughts: while it's certainly not unheard of for a famous writer to publish only one or two books in their lifetime (To Kill a Mockingbird is the canonical example, but there's also Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man), as far as I know this is not the case for visual art—for a visual artist to be considered famous/well-regarded, they almost always need to have a large body of work. Part of this is probably due to the nature of the mediums—a piece of art is quicker to digest than a whole novel—but I still find this rather interesting.

Also, it's interesting to consider how the age of an artist factors into their work. I'm mainly thinking of music here—when you look at the romantic era of music, all the famous composers either (a) died young, or (b) produced their best work while they were young. (I remember when my piano teacher first told me this, I didn't believe her, so I went home and looked up all my favorite romantic composers—and, yup, nearly all of 'em kicked the bucket early.) Other eras of music have favored older composers, but it seems youthfulness was inextricably linked to the sound of romanticism.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/12841.html

Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote a very nice blog entry, "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum," talking about the (uneasy) distinction between fluffy, fun-to-read, addictively readable literature, and "good" literature:

I read a book last winter that does an absolutely smashing job of story-telling, a compulsive page-turner from page 1 on. The writing is competent at best, rising above banality only in some dialogue (the author’s ear for the local working-class dialect is pitch-perfect.) Several characters are vividly or sympathetically portrayed, but they’re all stereotypes. The plot has big holes in it, though only one of them really damages credibility. The story-line: an ambitious white girl in her early twenties persuades a group of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, to tell her their experiences with their white employers past and present, so that she can make a book of their stories and share them with the world by selling it to Harper and Row, and go to New York and be rich and famous. They do, and she does. And except for a couple of uppity mean white women getting some egg on their face nobody suffers for it.

All Archimedes wanted was a solid place to put the lever he was going to move the world with.

Same with a story trajectory. You can’t throw a shotput far if you’re standing on a shaky two-inch-wide plank over a deep, dark river. You need a solid footing.

Or do you?

All this author had to stand on is a hokey, sentimental notion, and from it she threw this perfect pitch!

Seldom if ever have I seen the power of pure story over mind, emotion, and artistic integrity so clearly shown.

I don't really have much to add to the original entry, other than to say it's worth 100% worth reading (seriously, go read it now). And, if you like it, she's written a lot of really excellent entries there—Papa H, Uniforms, and The Death of the Book all come to mind.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/9163.html

So there's this blog called Letters of Note that's been popping up on Hacker News lately (I have no idea why it keeps popping up on Hacker News, as it has nothing to do with hacking, but whatever). Basically, the blog posts various interesting letters and notes—mostly letters written by famous folks, but there's a few cute randos in there as well.

Anyway, today's letter of note is a fantastically blunt letter Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald—evidently Fitzgerald asked what he thought of Tender is the Night, and boy did he ever tell him:

[...] Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples' pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but to do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.

The full letter is here, and if this is your sort of thing I highly recommend following the blog. He posts lots of writers' letters—the most interesting ones I recall being posted recently are from Jack London, C.S. Lewis, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/6727.html

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Entries tagged with linkspam

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who wants to be a (spouse of a) millionare

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The Importance of Being Prolific

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