Month: October 2013

Fermat’s Last Linky

Yeah, busy busy, etc etc. [EDIT: so busy I wrote and published this on the wrong day. Genuinely confused that Friday didn’t follow Wednesday. Buh.]

That one time Homer solved Fermat’s Last Theorem – math geekery hidden in the Simpsons

BABY TEETH short story collection out now. Scary stories about scary children for scary charity. (Charity not actually scary.)

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars (thanks Billy & Jamie; delightfully, Ruth has scheduled reading this as a game session at Kapcon in January!)

Scroll down to Riker

Horror films reimagined as entries in the R.L.Stine horror-for-kids book series Goosebumps. Suspiria becomes “Attack of the Ballet Witches“.

The Thing on the Fourble Board – a lost classic of terror from the age of radio.

Necropants – surely this isn’t a real historical artifact?

My friend Ron has been conducting research into communal religious rituals. His reflections on some physically extreme ritual activity are interesting – warning, contains some unnerving photos.

The decline of wikipedia? For more insights into how the info-sausage is made, read Phil Sandifer’s examination of wikipedia’s awkward embrace of transphobia.

Amazing photography of miniature buildings and vehicles.

The DSM reviewed as a work of dystopian literature.

And finally, superheroes as manatees

To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf, 1927

Micro-review. We’ve had Woolf’s classic on the shelves in a 60s Penguin edition for years, and finally the time was right to pick it up. I knew virtually nothing about it, only that it’s often talked about as a partner to Joyce’s Ulysses as one of the milestones of early-20th-century modernism. (It’s also a fraction of the length.) Given how much I enjoyed Ulysses, I was looking forward to this.

But I nearly put it down and didn’t pick it up again.

I was enjoying the read, Woolf uses language beautifully of course, but I hit the half-way point and I just wasn’t *grabbed* by it. It seemed like one of those art milestones that you can’t read properly any more because all of its innovations have since become cliches. The stream of consciousness shifting perspective Woolf offers has become a commonplace stylistic trick. Heck, I’ve done it myself. Combine that with a busy run that saw days go by between chances to knock off a few pages, and I almost lost momentum entirely.

Then I hit the second phase of the book. I had no idea it was coming; a sudden change in tone and style and scope, crossing decades after spending dozens of pages in the minutia of a single day. Then the narrative eased into a third and final phase, another intense dive into character POV across the moments of a single day, a decade on from the first section.

And I *loved* it.

I can’t think of another time my reaction to a book changed so completely in the span of a few pages. The structural moves Woolf made completely won me over. Simple and powerful, retroactively making the first section seem fresh by the unexpected (to me) contrast with the final section. I think I’ll be going back to this one in a few years.

(Also: I imagine this book would be frequently studied in english lit courses. I am glad I never had to apply the scalpel of analysis to this – I doubt it could survive the experience. This seems to me a book to be felt rather than understood, even though there is so much in it to be understood. That’s a definite contrast to the cheeky gamesmanship of Joyce, who seems to be clearly writing with such analysis in mind.)

Fracture Linky

Typing carefully on account of the bright green cast on my left forearm. Scaphoid fracture, sport-caused. My first ever cast! But this linky will be brief as a result.

Beautiful Lego creations

Epic takedown of Columbus Day – complete with suggested alternative, Bartolomé Day

Don’t dress as a Pocahottie this Halloween – annotated!

Excellent – L.A. Times says it won’t publish climate denial letters. “Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.” The denial industry (like the tobacco equivalent that preceded it) has found an exploit in public discourse, and this kind of initiative is one of the only ways to counter it.

Freaks & Geeks – the online choose-your-story game!

Government shutdown bug report

And finally, Funky Imperial March. This really needs a video – get on it, internet:

Fortnightly Linky

It seems I’ve ended up on an every-two-weeks schedule for the linky. But stubbornly I refuse to stop blogging! I know my enormous* fandom needs me! That’s why they never comment, the emotional stakes are too high!

*I haven’t had any visitor numbers for this blog for several years, so I think it’s reasonable to presume that over that time my audience has grown ten-thousand-fold.

Huge numbers of us are now writing for an audience – thinking in public. And this is changing how we think. Svend sent me this noting it was part of why he writes up reviews of every film he sees at the film fest each year (he sees LOTS of films) – and it’s the same reason I [used to] use this blog to talk about things that bugged me or were on my mind. Writing for an audience here helps me think things through, to assemble a mess of thoughts into a structure and take it a few more steps than I can manage otherwise.

Oh man. A project set up so prisoners in long-term solitary confinement (in the US, of course) get to request a photo be taken just for them, of any subject they want.

Methods for fighting internet trolls (instead of just trying to starve them) (via Hugh Dingwall)

Lucha Libro! Competitive short-story writing, wearing wrestling masks, in Peru. (Harlan Ellison would destroy at this…)

In the buildup to the Breaking Bad finale, Dangerous Minds linked to “the best ever analysis of a scene in a TV show”. I only watched the first two seasons of BB so haven’t watched this, but I figure someone out there will be interested…

I am 90% sure that these dinosaur-human erotica books are a prank, and not a genuine expression of someone’s weird fetishes. They just seem a little too contrived. But still. [EDITED TO ADD: ayup]

Archive of classic comedy monologues, particularly lots of Vaudeville standards.

The great American novel has already been written, and it was the first 27 years of the Fantastic Four comic.

A plausible explanation for the origin of the Tarot? (via Allen Varney)

EW’s lengthy Joss Whedon interview

Bitcoin: super convenient if you’re homeless, apparently.

*sigh* The cast of Twin Peaks at the 1990s Emmys

The gender advertising remixer, Lego edition

Sugar association advertising madness.

And finally, via d3vo… the sea pig