Link Dump

Time is short this week due to what’s know as Fat Weekend, an annual gathering of portly gentlemen that involves much merriment. For you, we’ve just got some links to tide you over:

  • Nightmare Photography – Nicolas Bruno is a photographer who suffered from sleep paralysis and started recreating his nightmares using photography, leading to some wonderfully ominous photos. There are more on his Instagram, too.
  • Finding the most depressing Radiohead song – Someone used Spotify and Lyrics Genius’ APIs to calculate a weighted average of valence (a measure of how sad a song sounds from a musical perspective) and lyrical sentiment, all to find out what the most depressing Radiohead song/album is…
  • The Myth of Apple’s Great Design – Ian Bogost challenges the conventional wisdom that Apple is great at design. Perhaps a bit too contrarian, but he does make some good points. On a personal note, the latest iPhone I got looks as great as ever, but the stupid lack of a normal headphone jack is annoying and iTunes is garbage. I mean, it’s always been garbage, but in this case, it had trouble recognizing the new phone, syncing, backing up, downloading pictures – all of these things were a disaster when the phone first came out. Some of these have been fixed by recent iOS upgrades, but it’s still janky. Now that Android’s pretty much caught up (and/or surpassed), I’m guessing my next phone will be one of those more useful devices.
  • Overwhelmed by Mutants – Interesting strategy for playing Defender:

    One day Burrell started doing something radical. He immediately shot all his humans! This was completely against the goal of the game! He didn’t even go after the aliens, and when he shot the last human, they all turned to mutants and attacked him from all sides. He glanced in my direction with a grin on his face and said “Make a mess, clean it up!” and proceeded to dodge the swarm of angry mutants noisily chasing after him. “Burrell’s not going to win this competition” I said to myself. “He’s not going to last long with a screen full of mutants!”

    Only he did. Interesting story about turning a weakness into a strength…

  • Riding Light – A 45 minute video depicting how slow light is. Of course, light is obscenely fast in terrestrial terms, but against the vastness of space, it’s awfully slow. (That’s why we need Ludicrous Speed!)
  • Why Does Your Sandwich Come With a Pickle? – The answer may shock you! Or probably not, but still a funny question.
  • Dénouement 2016 Part 1: It’s OVER! – Alright, I’m late to posting this link dump, so this two month old recap of 2016 video games from Kaedrin friend Shamus Young is a little old, but it has some nice insight on the year in general and video games in particular, like his take on VR:

    Some technological problems still haven`t been solved. For example, nobody can make a VR setup that won`t make you look like a giant dork when you`re using it.

    Nailed it.

  • Tasting Notes Through the Years – This is directed at beverage nerds (SKU is a whiskey guy, but it’s equally applicable with only minor changes to my preferred vice, beer, and I’m sure most others as well), but it’s probably broadly applicable to a lot of human endeavors.
  • 10 Halloween Urban Legends (Can You Tell Which Ones Are Real?) – Yeah, yeah, another link that would probably have been more relevant half a year ago, but still, this is a pretty great list of creepy Urban Legends…

And that’s all for now folks. Hopefully more substantial posting will resume next week…

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