Link Dump

Assorted and sundry links for your enjoyment on this fine holiday weekend:

• Selections From H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter – Luke Burns channels Lovecraft rather well, to humorous effect:
  

  Peanut Butter Cup

  In 1856, a fisherman from a tiny hamlet on the New England coast made a terrible pact with serpentine beasts from beneath the sea, that he might create the most delicious sweet seen upon the Earth since the days of the great Elder Race. Thus was forged the satanic pact between peanut butter and chocolate that resulted in the mutant offspring you see before you!

  Chocolate Cherry Cordial

  You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

  Yum. (via file 770)

• Breaking Down the Hugos: Careful Like – Justin Landon has the most thorough breakdown of the Hugo Award results, complete with statistical analysis and general commentary.
• Detecting the Writer – An intriguing post by Doctor Science about the tropes and patterns of mystery novels. The title of the post is derived from this Dorothy Sayers quote:
  

  The mystery-monger’s principal difficulty is that of varying his surprises. “You know my methods, Watson,” says the detective, and it is only too painfully true. The beauty of Watson was, of course, that after thirty years he still did not know Holmes’s methods; but the average readers is sharper-witted. After reading half a dozen stories by one author, he is sufficiently advanced in Dupin’s psychological method to see with the author’s eyes. He knows that, when Mr. Austin Freeman drowns somebody in a pond full of water-snails, there will be something odd and localised about those snails; he knows that, when one of Mr. Wills Croft’s characters has a cast-iron alibi, that alibi will turn out to have holes in it; he knows that if Father Knox casts suspicion on a Papist, the Papist will turn out to be innocent; instead of detecting the murderer, he is engaged in detecting the writer.

  (Emphasis mine). It probably has a broader application, but anyone who watches any of the gazillion police procedurals out there (Law & Order, CSI, Bones, etc…) will be intimately familiar with what Sayers is talking about. Also of note in this post is the excellent “One Body Test”, and something close to my own lament that so many mysteries are so focused on murder. As Doctor Science mentions, “death isn’t the only thing worth investigating.”

• The Great Unread – Joseph Luzzi explores that age old question: Why do some classics continue to fascinate while others gather dust? To do so, he looks at two Italian classics Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed, popular in Italy, but not anywhere else, and Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, which is universally beloved and continually referenced all over the world.
  

  Manzoni’s novel promotes a Christian faith whose adherents are rewarded for submitting to God’s providential wisdom. Collodi’s story, beyond exploring the plight of Italians in their newborn nation, describes how children learn to make their way in an adult society, with all its strictures and codes of behavior. Manzoni’s legacy in Italy is so strong that his book will always be read there. But outside of Italy, those same readers curious about Collodi’s star-crossed puppet are likely never to give Manzoni’s thoroughly Christian universe a second thought.

  This contrast, between a celebrated and largely unread classic and an enduringly popular classic, shows that a key to a work’s ongoing celebrity is that dangerous term: universality.

  Interesting stuff.

That’s all for now…

It’s been a while since my chain-smoking monkey research squad’s research efforts on ye olde internets was posted, so enjoy some interesting links:

• Gareth Evans’ Top 5 Action Scenes – In case you don’t know, Gareth Evans is the guy who directed The Raid: Redemption (and its sequel), two of the better action movies of the past few years, so this is actually a really fantastic video. A little heavy on the Jackie Chan, but hey, it’s not like Jackie Chan didn’t do some fantastic action stuff…
• “I can’t even.” – An appreciation of H.P. Lovecraft’s ability to be able to not describe the indescribable. Or something like that.
• We go forward. – A comic that acknowledges the profundity of side scrolling video games.
• Game of Thrones – VHS Intro – Man, if Game of Thrones was made in the 78s, it would have sucked hardcore. But this is still pretty awesome!
• The First Image Of The Paddington Bear Movie Has Inspired A Delightful Horror Meme – This is absolutely, 100% brilliant, and totally justifies what is, for sure, a complete waste of a movie.
• Star Wars First Impressions – 19 year old punk watches Star Wars for the first time and liveblogs the whole thing.

And that’s all for now.

You know the drill, yet more links uncovered by my chain-smoking monkey research squad. Enjoy:

• Entertainment Weekly, the genesis – Jeff Jarvis writes about the need for EW back in 1984: “Today, there is simply too much to choose from”… It could very well have been written last week, except that there’d be a whole lot of other things to choose from.
• Process Stories – Joe Reid (of Extra Hot Great fame) has basically turned his tumblr into a place to recap West Wing episodes, and they are great. Excerpt from “Five Votes Down”:
  

  Team Toby: The cold open sees Toby neurotically reacting to the President’s speech. In a classic West Wing walk-n-talk, Toby harps on Bartlett for screwing up “the D section.” He says the words “D section” literally nine thousand times (literally!), because Aaron Sorkin read that chapter about repetition in his screenwriting textbook a loooooot. The Bartlett/Toby banter is far more lighthearted than it will be in subsequent episodes, but it’s nice to see that particular character runner to get started this early.

  It’s great fun, and it kinda makes me want to watch The West Wing again…

• The Funniest, Angriest Comments On The FCC’s Proposed Net Neutrality Rule – The FCC seems shocked that people are up in arms about this, which is weird. “Hey everybody, we want to make the internet slower and/or more expensive.” Thanks a lot FCC.
• The 100 Most-Edited Wikipedia Articles – Perhaps unsurprisingly, politicians and religious topics are the most edited articles, with lots of pop culture sprinkled in for fun.
• Perfidy Beyond the Gate of Water – I don’t know what this is, but it’s amazing:
  

  Grandmaster of the Swaying Snake style, Nixon had defeated many foes. He was known for his innovation on the tournament ground, for subtle feints and devastating flurries from unexpected directions. Though the Golden Child had defeated him in the last decade, Nixon remained resilient, eventually wresting control of his school from his rivals and rising to become President.

  Nothing stood in his way to challenge for the position of Sifu-Sai-Sifu, Master of Masters.

  Lord Buddha, though, is unequaled in sagacity. He had decreed that the title of Sifu-Sai-Sifu could only be held by one who had tasted the Fruit of Compassion, which grew in the Vineyards of the White Plains, beyond the Gate of Water. These grapes were said to hold the wisdom of Lord Buddha himself, and would bestow upon any who tasted them the wit and skill needed to rule as Sifu-Sai-Sifu.

  I don’t even, um, what is this?

That’s all for now. Hugo blogging resumes on Sunday with a look at the Short Story slate.

It’s that time again, and yes, I guess it’s been that time a lot lately, but links are fun, so enjoy them why don’t you:

• Law and Order: GOT – Pitch perfect. I saw this before last week’s episode and felt a pang of sorrow when I saw Oberyn.
• Fitness Crazed – It turns out that the latest scientific approaches to exercise are generally inferior to the simplicity of old timey weightlifting routines.
  

  The program sounded like an unscientific joke. It called for exactly three workouts per week, built around five old-fashioned lifts: the squat, dead lift, power clean, bench press and standing press. But the black-and-white photographs were so poorly shot, and the people in them were so clearly not fitness models, that it seemed legit.

  … Now for the astonishing part: It worked. I was able to lift a tiny bit more every single time, like magic – or, rather, like Milo of Croton, the ancient Greek wrestler who is said to have lifted a newborn calf and then lifted it every day thereafter, as it grew, until Milo carried a full-grown bull.

  Personally, I have a couple sets of dumbells in the basement and an elliptical (my workouts also usually include old standbys like pushups and situps), and I seem to be doing alright for myself.

• The ghost in the machine – As Kottke predicted, this hit me right in the feels. It’s a touching story, but the biggest shock is that it turns out that sometimes Youtube comments actually contain something worthwhile.
• The Age of Instant Backlash – Outrage happens at the speed of Twitter, but I think Shamus has a good point here:
  

  …if you’re unhappy that someone, somewhere is having an apoplectic freak-out over entertainment news? You might as well get mad at the weather. You might have a point, but there’s no fighting human nature.

  Perhaps the problem is that we’re taking Twitter too seriously. I’m very optimistic about technology, but not every sentence uttered in haste into a social network is cause for panic. Just because someone cracks wise about the new Batman v Superman title doesn’t really mean all that much, but everyone seems in a rush to put out think pieces wondering why some people don’t like the title and what does it all mean? Characterizing that as backlash is probably jumping the gun a bit. The same could be said for just about any other topic, including more serious ones.

• Everything Is Broken – Hey look, more tech pessimism:
  

  Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.

  Now imagine billions of little unknowable boxes within boxes constantly trying to talk and coordinate tasks at around the same time, sharing bits of data and passing commands around from the smallest little program to something huge, like a browser -that’s the internet. All of that has to happen nearly simultaneously and smoothly, or you throw a hissy fit because the shopping cart forgot about your movie tickets.

  We often point out that the phone you mostly play casual games on and keep dropping in the toilet at bars is more powerful than all the computing we used to go to space for decades.

  NASA had a huge staff of geniuses to understand and care for their software. Your phone has you.

  Plus a system of automatic updates you keep putting off because you’re in the middle of Candy Crush Saga every time it asks.

  Because of all this, security is terrible.

  Hardware has improved pretty reliably over the past few decades. Software? Not so much.

That’s all for now!

We’re through the looking glass here people, more links from the depths of the internets. Fear them.

• Twitter Tsunamis – In response to two floods of tweets last week, one heralding a well written essay, the other in response to this weekend’s tragedy, Alan Jacobs laments:
  

  This kind of thing always makes me want to flee Twitter, even when I am deeply sympathetic to the positions people are taking. It’s a test of my charity, and a test I usually fail. To me these tsunamis feel like desperate signaling, people trying to make sure that everyone knows where they stand on the issue du jour. I can almost see the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads as they try to craft retweetable tweets, the kind to which others will append that most wholehearted of endorsements: “THIS.” I find myself thinking, People, you never tweeted about [topic x] before and after 48 hours or so you’ll never tweet about it again, so please stop signaling to all of us how near and dear to your heart [topic X] is.

  So, you know: charity FAIL. I know that most – well, anyway, many – of the people tweeting about what everyone else was tweeting about were sincere and expressing genuine interest. It’s just hard for me to handle such exaggerated and repeated unanimity.

  This is a failing of twitter, a platform that was never meant to host these sorts of conversations. Twitter is supposed to be inane and snarky. There are some wizards who are able to pack a lot of meaning into 140 characters, but they are rare. The Ta-Nehisi Coates essay at least prompted tweets with links to the article (along with some obscenely hyperbolic praise) which is long and detailed and worthy of discussion – but discussions accomplished through bursts of 140 characters are not going to get it done. Twitter is great for short back and forths, but have you ever tried to follow a back-and-forth conversation that goes on for more than 5 tweets? Even with Twitter’s improving ability to group this stuff together, it’s annoying as hell, and I’m talking about nerdy debates about movies or beer. Imagine debates about racism or abortion happening on twitter. Can you really accomplish anything in 140 characters? Get a blog, people!

• Calling Kids Out – Now here’s someone doing it right. It’s a guy who got drunk and decided to mock lame child fashion designers. Here’s a man who knows that 140 characters just won’t do. (In case you were wondering why the crazy tone and rhythm sounds familiar, this is the same maniac that’s behind the Don’t Drink Beer blog)
• How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star – An excellent long look into the career of Tom Cruise and that fateful moment when he “jumped” up on the couch on Oprah. Perhaps related to the distortion effect caused by condensing complex debates into 140 characters on Twitter, this is a situation where no one ever watches the full 40+ minute interview with Tom Cruise, just the one time he stood up on the couch. And most likely, you only get a screenshot, which distorts things even more.
  

  Like Humphrey Bogart saying, “Play it again, Sam,” Tom Cruise jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. But there’s a difference. Bogart’s mythological Casablanca catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay the video and fact-check. Thanks to the Internet, we have video at our fingertips. Yet rather than correct the record, the video perpetuated the delusion.

  It is perhaps going a bit far to say that the couch jumping “never happened”, because Cruise did end up standing on top of a couch, but there’s definitely a lot of distortion and exaggeration going on here, and this article covers the whole thing, and Cruise’s career in general, very well.

• H.R. Giger’s to-do list for Alien – Giger has always been a favorite, largely because of Alien, but even just in general. RIP…
• Spurious Correlations – It turns out that correlation does not imply causation. We’ve all heard that aphorism, but it’s always nice to see it in action. (h/t Heather)

That’s all for now. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

Just some links culled from the depths of the internets:

• The art of anticipation – In this day and age of binge-watching television, it’s worth considering what the scheduling of a show isn’t just a commercial decision, but a creative one. Even something like House of Cards, which is ostensibly “designed” to be binge watched all at once, has episodes and cliffhangers and even something akin to a commercial break. Why? Because that stuff matters:
  

  Delay, withhold, restrict, release: This is storytelling 101, Scheherazade stuff, and it’s deeper than marketing and distribution. We bring all of our creative talents to bear on matters of plot and character; the anticipation that precedes and interpenetrates a story deserves no less. More than ever, the shape of a season can be designed and managed. More than ever, anticipation can be art-directed.

  It’s exciting that TV has come alive to these possibilities. Such ingenuity is not necessarily what you expect from a format insulated by layers of MBAs with a fiduciary duty to say “no” to weird ideas—but here we are! For once, it’s the complex, expensive, high-stakes medium that’s leading the way. There’s an opportunity for other formats to follow.

  It’s an interesting take…

• Hacks! An investigation into aimbot dealers, wallhack users, and the million-dollar business of video game cheating – I’m fond of video game cheating for reasons of “probing” but I don’t think I’d ever actually pay for it and use it against other people in competitive play. Yet, there is quite a market for cheating in exactly that field. Perhaps that’s why I stink at all the FPS multiplayer modes (or more likely, I’m just plain terrible).
  

  As long as there have been video games, there have been cheaters. For competitive games like Counter-Strike, battling cheaters is an eternal, Sisyphean task. In February, Reddit raised concerns about lines of code in Valve-Anti Cheat (VAC), used for Counter-Strike and dozens of other games on Steam, that looked into users’ DNS cache. In a statement, Gabe Newell admitted that Valve doesn’t like talking about VAC because “it creates more opportunities for cheaters to attack the system.” But since online surveillance has been a damning issue lately, he made an exception.

  This winds up being a fascinating article, not least of which because of the folks who are constantly getting caught, yet continue to jump through complicated hoops to get their cheat on…

• Twenty Things About Bones That You Didn’t Know and Also Probably Don’t Care About But Here I Go Anyway – In the whole Golden Age of TV thing that we’re in, it’s easy to forget the weekly grind procedural shows that don’t feel the need to shoehorn continuity into it, and Bones strikes a pretty good balance. Characters have lives, there are a handful of multi-episode arcs, but the grand majority of episodes are standalone, and it’s a great TV comfort food. This list explains why:
  

  One of the characters is named Angela Montenegro, and she is an artist who is magic and owns a magic computer that can do anything. Like, Cam will say, “Angela, can you show what it would look like if a ferret ate the victim’s genitals and then burrowed through his genitals-hole into his chest cavity and then exploded out his face?” And then Angela is all “beep beep boop” and then she makes a computer animation that looks early 2000s of that thing happening. She is magic.

  Heh.

• Tiny Hamsters Eating Tiny Burritos – The lighter side of my idontknowwhatthefuckisgoingoninthisvideo tag.

And that’s all for now.

A regular old link dump, interesting stuff from the depths of the internets:

• Advice to Young Critics – Matt Zoller Seitz (who writes at Roger Ebert’s site) lays down some pretty common sense advice for young critics, though I’d argue that it’s pretty good advice for fans as well:
  

  2. Learn about TV and film history beyond your date of birth. Go back as far as you possibly can. Seek out the past because it informs the present.

  … 6. Read about history and psychology, because so much art draws from those two areas. If you don’t have some passing familiarity with history (recent and ancient) and psychology, your inferences about an artist’s point-of-view will draw almost entirely upon second- or third-hand attitudes: i.e., you’ll be critiquing film and TV based mainly on what film and TV you’ve seen. This will make your work shallow and prevent you from connecting the art to life.

  Actually, this is probably just good advice, period. (Of course, some of the other suggestions are very specific to critics and writers, but still.)

• The Poetry of the Trading Floor, Going Beyond Bears and Bulls – I had no idea where half of these terms actually came from:
  

  Once upon a time, for instance, all that you needed to start a bank was a bench. You put your bench up in a square in medieval Italy and sat down behind it to do business. The Italian for bench is banca, and hence our modern word bank.

  Sometimes, of course, bankers would run out of money, and when they did – in an age before the invention of TARP, bailouts and Ben Bernanke – their bench would be ceremonially smashed in front of them. It was then a “broken bench” or “banca rotta” or “bankrupt.”

  And there’s lots of others, too.

• Why The Idling Mind is the Mother of Invention – Clive Thompson on the benefits of letting your mind wander:
  

  Granted, most scientists think that if you really want to let your mind roam, you need to engage in a nondemanding task, like going for a three-hour walk.

  Most jobs don’t allow that, of course. That’s why I’ve begun to think that the “social” Internet has become a rough substitute. If your boss is trying to force you to focus on PowerPoint and Word documents, you might gravitate to mentally discursive, floaty experiences — the idle surfing of Facebook updates, Wikipedia entries, YouTube videos, casual games like Bejeweled. Maybe these things aren’t so much time sucks as desperate attempts by our brains to decouple from the go-go-go machine and head off on its own.

  Wishful thinking, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.

• The Expert – Haha, they made a funny.
• The Case For Going to the Movies Alone – She had me at alone. In all seriousness, it was a liberating revelation when I started going to the movies alone. Of course, I still go with other people (often, even), but it’s nice to know that if I want to watch something weird or at a weird time, I can do so with no problems.
• A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross – From the Some people have too much time, but that’s ok because they make stuff like this file.

That’s all for now. Go forth, and be merry.

More links from the depths of the internets:

• The bones of old decisions by Clive Thompson – Or: why we’re still using a qwerty keyboard, despite the fact that the original reasons for laying our keyboards out this way have not been relevant for, like, 50 years. This is not a unique twist of fate either, it’s a common issue. Technological lock-in is a bitch.
• I’m Sorry – An apology by an awesome person.
• It’s a Sarlaac in your Toilet – Mother of God.
• Trolls are People Too – This is a neat story about someone who engaged with a troll rather than write them off or castigate them (the two typical responses). I don’t know the details of the particular situation other than what’s in the linked post, but I’d wager that this dude isn’t what I’d consider a troll. Perhaps I have an overly specific version of a troll (friggin’ jokee, amiright 4kers who read this blog? (apologies for the near incomprehensible inside joke, but there’s like two people who are either laughing or getting ready to punch their monitor right now…)) It’s probably something I should dedicate a full post to, but most of the people we call trolls these days don’t seem like the trolls of yore. I’d just call them assholes myself, because “Don’t feed the trolls” doesn’t really apply to anonymous drive-by lackwits posting on some random blog. Terminology evolves over time, but if you’re going to make troll mean something different, you need to also make sure you change up the way you deal with trolls. Like I said, fodder for a longer post that I’ll probably never get to. You’re welcome.

And that’s all for now.

Yes, again, links from the uncharted depths of the internets:

• What Is the Time Signature of the Ominous Electronic Score of The Terminator? – I love the score for The Terminator. It’s one of my favorite movies, and the score is a big part of that (the pop music hasn’t quite aged as well, but Burnin’ in the Third Degree brings back some memories). Composer Brad Fiedel intentionally used all electronic instruments for the score, thus emphasizing the artificial nature of the threat. I have no real formal knowledge of music, but I know I like weird, and this score really hits that. Apparently one of the things that drives that weirdness is the time signature:
  

  As the score kicked in, I immediately recognized it was in a strange time signature. I’m a (very) amateur musician, and my ears are attuned to bizarre beats. This was as jarring as it gets. A disorienting rhythm – in particular the driving, industrial-sounding beat that gets louder and more prominent as the opening theme progresses. It wasn’t in 5/4 or 7/8, both of which I can generally suss out with not much difficulty. I tried to count the beat in my head, and by tapping on my thigh: “DAH-doonk, dah-doonk, dah-doonk, gonk gonk.” But for the life of me I couldn’t make anything fit. My world had been ripped apart, much like Sarah Connor’s when she discovered she was being hunted by an implacable killing machine from the future.

  I won’t tell you the time signature, but I will note that there actually is an answer in the article (I was a little worried at some point that it wouldn’t be solved).

• Shot: The Wolf of Sesame Street
• Chaser: The Worf of Starfleet (thanks Don)
• The amazing invisible spacer GIF hack – Flashbacks. Not to the horrors of 1×1 gifs, but rather the horrors of converting 1×1 gif layouts to CSS. Incidentally, Kaedrin is still partially on 1×1 gifs. I’ve slowly CSSified things, but the bulk of this design was done in 2001 and used tables and spacer gifs. I actually did find a way to convert the layout to CSS, but I never went through the trouble of updating it in my templates. Someday? Probably not anytime soon. Everything here is custom built, so updating the templates is a pain. But perhaps someday I’ll hook into the newer templates that are out there (and that would allow me to switch up designs on a whim – I can kinda do that with the beer blog, it’s just that MT has so few designs available)…
• Warner Bros. Logo Design Evolotion – It’s a thorough recap, and it’s funny how often the design changed, sometimes dramatically. And it’s funny how even movies from 2012 would use “throwback” logos.

That’s all for now…

I feel like I’ve been doing these more often lately, but nevertheless, more links for your enjoyment, with some shot and chasers embedded in shot and chasers.

• Shot: America’s Angriest Store: How Whole Foods Attracts Complete Shitheads. – I’m sympathetic to this cause, but the funniest part of this article is the inherent irony. Embedded Shot:
  

  I’ve shopped at Whole Foods in every time zone, in at least 10 different cities: LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Austin, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, DC and Richmond, VA. I love Whole Foods.

  Embedded Chaser (from the same article):

  The problem with Whole Foods is their regular customers. They are, across the board, across the country, useless, ignorant, and miserable. They’re worse than miserable, they’re angry.

  Heh. Still a fun article though

• Chaser: Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience – Who’d have thunk that Whole Foods was so divisive:
  

  From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

  Heh.

• Shot: Headshots – Photos by an awesome person.
• Chaser: As a European this is how I imagine Americans have breakfast – Another photo by an awesome person. However, this is, of course, completely inaccurate. Normally there are two eggs, half of the bacon is substituted for sausages, and if you’re in Philly, Scrapple is involved.

And that’s all for now. See you soon suckers friends!