Link Dump

As per usual, interesting links from the depths of the internets:

• How Far Was Rocky’s Famous Run in Rocky II? – Spoiler: 30.61 miles. And I think that’s a pretty conservative number. Dude is ping-ponging all over the city. Still good detective work here.
• Back to the Blog – Apparently there are some social-media-addled users who are attempting to “re-decentralize” the web, something that is easier said than done, and yet somehow already here (and always has been). I mean, nothing forces you to spend all your time on Facebook and Twitter but yourself.
  

  It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

  A lot of the things that blogging relied on have disappeared or fractured though, so there’ll need to be something else to help us along…

• The Platform is the Message (.pdf) – James Grimmelman’s essay starts with Tide Pods and ends with Fake News, with stops at kayfabe and Peppa Pig along the way, and is well worth reading.
  

  All of these videos, and all of these links, everything going back to the

  Onion is both a joke and not a joke. It’s easy to find videos of people holding

  up Tide Pods, sympathetically noting how tasty they look, and then giving

  a finger-wagging speech about not eating them because they’re dangerous.

  Are these sincere anti-pod-eating public service announcements? Or are they

  surfing the wave of interest in pod-eating by superficially claiming to denounce

  it? Both at once? Are these part of the detergent-eating phenomenon

  (forbidden), or are they critical commentary on it (acceptable)? Online

  culture is awash in layers of irony; there is a sense in which there is no such

  thing as a pure exemplar of eating a Tide Pod unironically or a critique of

  the practice that is not also in part an advertisement for it. All one can say is

  that the Tide Pod cluster of memes and practices attract attention: the controversy

  only adds to the attention.

  The difficulty of distinguishing between a practice, a parody of the practice,

  and a commentary on the practice is bad news for any legal doctrines that try to distinguish among them,18 and for any moderation guidelines or

  ethical principles that try to draw similar distinctions. I cannot think of any

  Tide Pod content that could not make a colorable claim to be a transformative

  use; I cannot think of any Tide Pod content that would not be at least

  marginally newsworthy.

  Great essay, a little on the pessimistic side, but I can’t dispute anything either…

• The Battle of New York: An ‘Avengers’ Oral History – There’s a lot of sloppy stuff in the first Avengers movie that I don’t like very much, but I still love that movie and rewatch it often because of the finale, one of the great extended action sequences of our time, and it really sends you away on a high that most movies cannot manage.
• Jones BBQ and foot massage – It’s so disappointing that this isn’t a real establishment.

That’s all for now…

As per usual, interesting links from the depths of ye olde interwebs:

• Glas – Oscar winning short film from 1958 about glass blowers in the Netherlands juxtaposed with a modern factory manufacturing glass bottles. No dialog, just strangely evocative glass blowing and manipulation. Work dat glass.
• Water droplets create amazing human-like animations in this Gatorade​ ad – The things we do to advertise sugar water. Pretty cool though.
• NASA’s Voyager probes at 35: listen to the music of the planets – Freaky and ominous, this needs to be the soundtrack to a space-based horror film.
• Three Pendulum Rotary Harmonograph – Father of the year.
• Movie Geometry – Shaping the Way You Think – Shapes have meaning, and filmmakers know it. At least, good ones do.
• Editing: Creating the “OH F**K” Moment – Cuts have meaning, and filmmakers know it. At least, good ones do.
• Spritz – I’m always fascinated by the concept of speed reading. Anything that will let me shovel more words into my brain faster is worth looking into. Not sure if this one would really catch on, but brief experiments seem to work well.
• How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer – Perfectly encapsulates the current trends in trailers; hilarious.
• How David Fincher Hijacks Your Eyes – More movie obsessing, but it’s a good observation about how Fincher works…

And that’s all for now.

Things seen on the internets:

• Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly – There’s a community of farmers who trade John Deere firmware hacks… just so they can perform basic maintenance and repairs. Fascinating mini-documentary.
• Someone Put a Statue of Jason Voorhees in a Minnesota Lake For Divers to Stumble Across – It’s been there for a few years and isn’t doing so well, so clearly not the real Jason.
• Groundhog’s Day Fan Theory – Yeah, fan theories are generally boring, but this is a pretty funny one: “Ned Ryerson is the devil, and he imprisons Phil Conners in the time loop when Phil refuses to purchase Ned’s insurance. The only way Phil escapes is by finally agreeing to buy it.”
• The existential chatroom app you can only use when your phone is dying – It’s called Die With Me, and it only works when your battery has a 5% or lower charge. Sounds cool, but I’m not willing to let my phone get that low.
• How is this speedrun possible? Super Mario Bros. World Record Explained – Extremely detailed dissection of the record holding SMB speed run, which shaved 4 frames off the previous record. It’s like in the Olympics and some annoying commentator says “ohhh, that’s going to cost him a point” or something,

  but this time it’s frames. Then again, at least it’s measurable.

• Wolfenstein 3D but you just pet dogs – Clever…
• This is terrifying – It’s like Mirror’s Edge, but in real life?
• How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends – One of the more innocuous takes on the matter.
• Hi, welcome to Chilis – Genius.

That’s all for now…

As per usual, interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• How Boilo Became a Coal Country Obsession – Forget mulled wine,

  do it like Pennsylvania’s coal country and make a mulled whiskey for the holidays. Traditionally served hot in “anything that will hold liquid”. I love Wikipedia’s notes:

  Attend Christmas Eve Mass prior to drinking. Christmas day mass is generally out of the question.

  Heh. The recipes seem to mostly be kept under wraps, but the one referenced in the article was posted on twitter by the author…

• Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years – Amazing. Also of note, a documentary about the Voyager program called The Farthest has just been added to Netflix streaming. Well worth a watch.
• Report: Quentin Tarantino’s STAR TREK Will Be R-Rated AF – I don’t think I’d ever have picked Quentin Tarantino to direct a Star Trek movie, but somehow, he’s interested. And Paramount might let him. This is, well:
  

  Remember last week when we learned that Quentin Tarantino and JJ Abrams were teaming up for a new Star Trek movie and we all assumed we were hallucinating? Well, that actually happened, and now there’s a new update on the situation.

  I still think I might be hallucinating. This can’t be real, can it? Do I even want it to be real?

• Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting – One of the best Movie-related channels on YouTube is finishing their run.

  I can’t believe that I’ve never linked to any of the videos, but they are great (this one about Jackie Chan is great), and this postmortem goes into how the channel was created and just how much work it takes to make even one of these short videos (i.e. an obscene amount of time).

• The 25 Best Films of 2017: A Video Countdown – David Erlich does these every year, and they’re amazing even if, as a critic, he can sometimes be an insufferable snob and many of his choices reflect that. Still, always interesting…
• This interview with a zamboni operator is brilliant. Not quite badminton rant brilliant (watch the whole thing), but still worthy.
• PoLaR bEaR mAsCot SLiPs On Set ANd SuFfErS dEvAsTaTiNg PoLaR bEaR iNjUrIeS – This might be the dumbest thing I’ve seen all week. I love it.
• Tucker Carlson looks at all his guests like they’re eating mayonnaise straight out the jar – Ok, no, this is the dumbest thing I’ve seen all week. Sometimes I love the internet.
• The God of the Snooker Table – I always find it amusing when something obscure, like Snooker, has some sort of bizarre underground following with magazines and millions of dollars of prize money, etc… To be sure, I know almost nothing about Snooker, but I do know this article is great.

That’s all for now…

As per usual, some links I found interesting whilst perusing the depths of ye olde internets:

• Teller Reveals His Secrets – Always fascinating to see what the guy who doesn’t speak has to say. Some neat observations about misdirection and magic, this one being my favorite:
  

  Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.

  This sort of thing doesn’t just apply to magic. How many people assume security in situations when someone could painstakingly figure out a workaround? Think about those tedious CSI recreations or even how the Allies were able to identify German radio operators based on each operator’s distinctive style of transmitting Morse code. It seems like more trouble than its worth, but it turns out that such machinations are worth quite a bit.

• Why is there cardboard in Dracula? – I never noticed this before, but there’s an ugly piece of cardboard attached to a lamp in a series of shots in the movie. It was always assumed to be a mistake, but it’s hotly debated, and there’s a surprising amount of discussion about why it would or wouldn’t be a mistake…
• Matt Talbot’s Horror Movie Posters – Every year for Halloween, this artist does a bunch of alternate movie posters for horror movies, and they’re fantastic.
• Come on, Stranger Things, no one ever got that far in Dragon’s Lair – This is so very true:
  

  In a premiere episode that saw titanic hellbeasts looming over a fire-choked horizon, a young boy perilously trapped between reality and a grim alternate dimension, criminal teens evading the cops with their psionic abilities, and a high schooler driving a bitching Camaro, Stranger Things’ second season has already strained credulity with a single, ludicrous scene: There is no fucking way anyone ever got that far in Dragon’s Lair.

  Damn straight.

• Why I keep being concerned about the rise of streaming services – MGK went through Edgar Wright’s list of his 1000 favorite films to see how many were available on streaming services. Spoiler, only 200-300 are available on a service, with another 400-500 or so available for “rental”, leaving a couple hundred completely unavailable. A couple of caveats:

  This is in Canada, and things are a little better in the US. And it’s worth noting that Wright’s taste can be somewhat… eccentric. I’m sure some of those movies aren’t even available on DVD. However, none of this changes the original point: Streaming services are nowhere near comprehensive, even when you add them all together (and trust me, the fragmentation and difference in quality between the top tier of these services and the rest is pretty high). We are still a long, long ways off from a comprehensive service.

That’s all for now…

After months of Hugo recapping and Kung Fu, the links have been piling up, they have. Enjoy:

• Carmageddon is Coming – Angus Hervey forecasts the convergence of mobile tech, electic cars, and self-driving software:
  

  Within a few years, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper, more durable and more reliable than petrol powered cars, autonomy will be good enough that you don’t need human drivers and everyone will be able to hail a car on their phone (or their voice-activated Alexa spectacles). The cost of taking a car trip will become cheaper than getting a coffee, which means it will be accessible to everyone. Overnight, we’ll see a mass defection to mobility as a service.

  This is the real kicker: we don’t have to wait for people to get rid of their old cars; one morning, they’ll sit down and do their monthly budget, and realise it makes more sense to hail an autonomous, electric vehicle. Given a choice, people will select the cheaper option.

  The predicted timelines are a bit aggressive, but I think this gets the general shape of things right, including all the non-obvious impacts (to things like healthcare, etc…) I’m at the point right now where I would normally be thinking about getting a new car, but if these things actually do progress this quickly, that might not be a wise choice…

• Meet the Artist Using Ritual Magic to Trap Self-Driving Cars – On the other hand, these guys trapped a self-driving car using a salt-circle, just like the frigging Winchester brothers use to fight demons. (In all seriousness, this is the sort of thing people point to as a silly failure mode of self-driving cars… that will obviously be solved quickly and quietly, until such failure modes become vanishingly rare, which won’t take too long…)
• Pharma Bro claims he can’t get a fair trial because of Post’s coverage – The story is fine and all, but this is worth clicking through just for the courtroom sketch, which makes Martin Shkreli look like an orc. Well played, courtroom artist, well played.
• How a Minor Character from ‘Taxi Driver’ Influenced One of the Most Iconic Scenes in ‘Pulp Fiction’ – Neat story about how the character Easy Andy (the guy who sells DeNiro guns in a hotel room) was played by an actor who basically inspired one of Tarantino’s famous scenes from Pulp Fiction.
• no feelings may be hurt – Generalizing lessons from disputes over sexuality:
  

  demand for the affirmation of sexual choices may simply be an example of a greater demand, that for the affirmation of all the self’s choices. The real principles here are (a) I am my own and (b) the purpose of society is to empower and affirm my claim that I am my own.

• Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit – Innocent people so thoroughly bamboozled that even after they’ve been exonerated by DNA evidence, they still feel guilt and can recall the crime they didn’t commit. It’s an incredible story.
• “I Just Wanted To Survive” – Another crazy story, this time about a college football player who was abducted and tortured for 40 hours.
• The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything – Worth keeping in mind:
  

  The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers.

  … there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

  Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time.

  … Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

  What I’ve observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, “All genre fiction is trash.”

  With apologies for chopping up my quote so much, this idea that people are obsessed with culling is definitely a thing that spreads across broad spectrums. No one wants to build towards expertise, they want to know what the best such-and-such thing is so that they can immediately become an expert. I see this pattern all over (to pick a non-obvious example, beer is filled with dorks who are obsessed with only drinking walez, bro). But you need to know the bad before you can realize what the good is really doing. For skills, you need to learn to fail and learn from your failures before you can really achieve something. There was a computer programmer who got fed up with the preponderance of “Learn to program in 24 hours” style books, so he wrote a book called “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”. Back to books and movies, I recapped a fairly wide swatch of martial arts films last week, but I’ve only really scratched the surface. Many of these movies aren’t “great” in a broad sense, but even some of the bad ones have important or interesting elements that I’m really glad I caught up with…

And I think that’s enough for now. Stay tuned, but I, um, don’t know what’s coming up next. This is both nice and also somewhat troubling.

I’ve run across some links of such importance that any and all other thoughts had to be postponed so that I could just point to them:

• Things full of beans that shouldn’t be full of beans – Um, ignore the intro above.
• If Guardians of the Galaxy was DC – Marginally better than beans, but still completely frivolous. A fun takedown of DC’s humorless approach though.
• Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing – This one is actually a pretty useful list of writerly tidbits:
  

  A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

  My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

  If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

  Man, I’m really going to fall back on this when reviewing Hugo finalists that are “perpetrating hooptedoodle” (of which there seems to be a lot).

• The Conceptual Penis as Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies – These stunts are anecdotal, but remain a little troubling anyway. The reference in the subtitle is from physicist Alan Sokal’s famous nonsensical parody “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. Sokal was pretty thorough, but this most recent effort should have been embarrassingly easy to spot. For example, their references were mostly fake:
  

  Not only is the text ridiculous, so are the references. Most of our references are quotations from papers and figures in the field that barely make sense in the context of the text. Others were obtained by searching keywords and grabbing papers that sounded plausibly connected to words we cited. We read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by intention, as part of the hoax. And it gets still worse…

  Some references cite the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmodern Generator liberally; this includes nonsense quotations incorporated in the body of the paper and citing five different “papers” generated in the course of a few minutes.

  Five references to fake papers in journals that don’t exist is astonishing on its own, but it’s incredible given that the original paper we submitted had only sixteen references total (it has twenty now, after a reviewer asked for more examples). Nearly a third of our references in the original paper go to fake sources from a website mocking the fact that this kind of thing is brainlessly possible, particularly in “academic” fields corrupted by postmodernism.

  Again, it’s anecdotal, and there’s plenty of pay-for-play type journals out there that don’t have any integrity (see this guy who got an article published in a medical journal about Seinfeld’s fictional urology disease “uromycitisis”), but that this seems to keep happening isn’t exactly encouraging…

• Ever wonder what happened to Kirk Van Houten right after he was fired from the cracker factory? – An excerpt that didn’t make it into a Simpson’s episode… Very funny. Introduction above reinstated.

That’s all for now.

As per usual, interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• The Stats of the Furious – A thorough accounting and visualization of a series that only kinda-sorta-deserves this kind of scrutiny. Also of note, Sonny Bunch’s ranking of the Fast/Furious films. All of which is to say, these are fun films, but let’s not overthink it.
• The Silence of the Lambs as a Romantic Comedy – This sort of thing is old and I don’t think anyone will ever approach the already-produced Platonic ideal of Shining, but this one works pretty well.
• seriously, the guy has a point – You know that “Fearless Girl” statue that appeared in front of the famous “Charging Bull” on Wall Street? It turns out that it’s a cynical advertising ploy, while the original “Charging Bull” was actually guerrilla art.
  

  In effect, Fearless Girl has appropriated the strength and power of Charging Bull. Of course Di Modica is outraged by that. A global investment firm has used a global advertising firm to create a faux work of guerrilla art to subvert and change the meaning of his actual work of guerrilla art. That would piss off any artist.

  Indeed. This is one of those questions that has many answers, all right. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but you can detach it from its context to interpret it in interesting ways. The “Charging Bull” is an interesting example, most people interpreting it in ways the original artist didn’t intend. Similarly, the “Fearless Girl” seems to have taken on a life of its own. But origins are origins, and I don’t think either piece should ultimately be able to shake their context completely, which is a good thing.

• Dyatlov Pass Incident – The mysterious unsolved deaths of nine ski hikers in Russia under suspicious circumstances.
  

  One victim had a fractured skull while another had brain damage but without any sign of distress to their skull. Additionally, a female team member had her tongue and eyes missing. The investigation concluded that an “unknown compelling force” had caused the deaths. Access to the region was consequently closed to amateur hikers and expeditions for three years after the incident (the area is named Dyatlov Pass in honor of the group’s leader, Igor Dyatlov).

  As the chronology of events remains uncertain due to the lack of survivors, several explanations have been put forward as to the cause; they include an animal attack, hypothermia, an avalanche, infrasound-induced panic, military involvement, or a combination of explanations.

• The Incredible Intuition Of Professional Chicken Sexers – Some professions are weird:
  

  …the strange nature of chicken sexing. This is the valuable process of separating female and male chicks as soon as possible, because each sex has different diets and endgames (most males are just destroyed). The mystery is that when you look at the vent in the chick’s rear, some people just know which are female. It is impossible to articulate, so the Japanese figured out how to teach this inarticulable knowledge. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into a bin. The master would then say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ based on his generally correct observation. After a few weeks, the student’s brain was trained to masterful levels.

  A lot of what we do comes down to intuition, and I’d be curious how much of it could actually be more formally defined. This is going to be a thing in the next century, as we all start training our robotic AI overlords how to do stuff like chick sexing. Or maybe our intuition can’t be replicated. Only one way to tell, and I guarantee someone will do so in the nearish future…

• The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory – I’m generally not too keen on conspiracy theories, and this one doesn’t exactly change my mind, but it’s a pretty fun one. Basically, there’s a satellite in a near-polar orbit of the Earth that UFO enthusiasts believe is of extraterrestrial origin. Tons of stuff out there about this, most of it unconvincing… but fun! At the very least, a good way to see how conspiracy theories work…

And that’s all for now…

Well, the weekend just sorta got away from me, so here, enjoy some links culled from the depths of ye olde internets:

• The Food Lab’s Top 30 Hot Sauces, in No Particular Order – Absurdly comprehensive guide to hot sauces, it doesn’t have a couple of my favorites, but I discovered some new ones here too…
• The Internal Monologue Of A New Mom Making Mom Friends – I don’t really know what to say about this, so I’ll just pull a quote for you:
  

  What I need is a Grindr for moms. Oh, wait, that got weird. That’s not what I mean! Grindr without the sex part; just the proximity part. So, like super-boring Grindr. Stick with me. I need an app that’s like, “There are 3 other moms within a 4-block radius whose children are in bed and have a spouse or sitter on duty and could walk to your house to split this bottle of Cab.”

  Heh.

• Bizarre Paintings Of Mecha Robots And Werewolves Attacking East European Peasants Of The Early 20th Century – The niche-ification of culture continues unabated. These are great though…
• The Economics of Suspense – Interesting angle for discussion on suspense:
  

  It’s a lesson that the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, for one, seems to have missed. Once it’s common knowledge that your movie will have a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end, then your movie no longer has a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end.

  I’ve been saying that particular thing for years…

• A Q&A With the Creator of a ‘Fallout 4’ Mod That Flips the Toilet Paper Around – Everything about this is great/terrible.

That’s all for now!

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…