last of the great linkdumps
Mar. 21st, 2012 01:43 pmIt seems that I'm able to get things done when I make a list of what I want to get done today. Bleh. Guess it's 'bout time to tackle my long-standing mental block against making lists of things I need to do. Such as a linkdump.
Have I mentioned Ask culture and Guess culture? I don't think I have. I'm Guess culture and I mostly hate it. Even knowing it's there I catch myself saying "Hey, do you want to X" or "We could X" instead of "I'd like to X" and similar.
Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up: a very funny edited-together vid of Mr Romney "rapping." ("My dog / is on / the roof" etc)
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code: "In reality, everything about the game has been carefully designed to control payouts and entice the consumer. Of course, these elaborate design elements mean that the ticket can be undesigned, that the algorithm can be reverse-engineered."
Tweet Directory. Via Jmac, who aptly called it "The Library of Babel, at Twitter-scale."
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74: "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate."
Six-legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years: I love just about everything about this story. (Trigger warning for, well, giant freaking beetles.)
Batman vs. the Pickup Artist: "And then there's what I have dubbed The Art Gallery Scheme, a con so sinister, time-intensive and Machiavellian that it's like a deathtrap the Riddler would build if he was trying to bang a sorority girl." This... is kind of astounding.
Forget Your Past: images of what ought to have been Ernst Stavro Blofeld's secret hideout.
Paris Review interview with John McPhee: "But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started [writing] you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going."
Also, holy cow there's an interview with Chip Delany, and John le Carré, and Haruki Murakami, Hunter S. Thompson, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino... okay, I'm officially impressed. And likely to spend a great deal of time sifting through these.
Have I mentioned Ask culture and Guess culture? I don't think I have. I'm Guess culture and I mostly hate it. Even knowing it's there I catch myself saying "Hey, do you want to X" or "We could X" instead of "I'd like to X" and similar.
Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up: a very funny edited-together vid of Mr Romney "rapping." ("My dog / is on / the roof" etc)
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code: "In reality, everything about the game has been carefully designed to control payouts and entice the consumer. Of course, these elaborate design elements mean that the ticket can be undesigned, that the algorithm can be reverse-engineered."
Tweet Directory. Via Jmac, who aptly called it "The Library of Babel, at Twitter-scale."
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74: "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate."
Six-legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years: I love just about everything about this story. (Trigger warning for, well, giant freaking beetles.)
Batman vs. the Pickup Artist: "And then there's what I have dubbed The Art Gallery Scheme, a con so sinister, time-intensive and Machiavellian that it's like a deathtrap the Riddler would build if he was trying to bang a sorority girl." This... is kind of astounding.
Forget Your Past: images of what ought to have been Ernst Stavro Blofeld's secret hideout.
Paris Review interview with John McPhee: "But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started [writing] you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going."
Also, holy cow there's an interview with Chip Delany, and John le Carré, and Haruki Murakami, Hunter S. Thompson, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino... okay, I'm officially impressed. And likely to spend a great deal of time sifting through these.