This changes everything.
Battery Movies
hat’s the benefit here? I’m not sure I buy the argument that long-form storytelling gives the material room to breathe, or even shows particular fidelity to the writings of Tolkien, Rowling, etc. I fear the real motivation is more cynical than that. It’s the movie equivalent of pumping chickens full of water – bulking out the produce to maximise revenue.
pulchritude
pulchritude
A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.
– David Foster Wallace, word notes in the Apple dictionary for “Beauty”
Making a video game without video »
There’s something truly wonderful about Johann Sebastian Joust. It’s a performance-piece that brings video games back to pure play. And it’s so beautifully simple. In the video, Doug Wilson talks about how he came up with the idea for the game and how it was an “oh!” moment.
Plus, now is probably a good time to pimp their Kickstarter, which will help release JSJ to a wider audience.
How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots) »
5 Whys are really useful for sorting out an issue in the correct way, but it’s hard to run a good 5 Whys. Dan Milstein’s presentation is a great starting point.
Two Things (Gibson TTS and Fictional Memory Palaces) | booktwo.org
If you play a lot of video games, or a lot of a video game, you slowly learn the map, it stays in your head. It doesn’t exist, it’s an imaginary place, but you can find your way around in it, even give directions within it.
A shared fiction is like a shared map, a space we can inhabit, a shared memory palace, even for a brief period.
10 ways to make Dublin better »
2 Elect a city bossDublin accounts for 40 per cent of the population, but nobody speaks for the city in the way Michael Bloomberg does for New York and Boris Johnson for London. Civic governance is incredibly weak, with an array of public bodies, from Dublin Port Company to the National Transport Authority, exercising power in the city. Any chance of metropolitan cohesion was squandered when Dublin was carved up arbitrarily between four local authorities in 1994.
These are some great suggestions. For whatever reason, the city seems to be experiencing an increased period of self-reflection. And that’s a good thing. Articles like these can only help.
John McAffee's insane life »
In the pre-dawn hours of April 30th of this year I woke to the sound of a bullhorn yelling un-intelligible orders. I ran naked outside and saw a military formation whose uniforms identified them as GSU, creeping slowly down my driveway. I laid down the pistol that I keep for protection and, contrary to Josh Davis’ assertion that I said “Motherfuckers”, said nothing and went back inside. I woke Amy, the 17 year old with whom I was living, and calmly told her to get dressed – that the GSU was invading the property.
Did you know John McAfee has a blog? Did you know it’s the most insane-slash-interesting thing ever?
Nike+ FuelBand micro-review
I picked up a Nike+ FuelBand in San Francisco a couple of months ago. It’s a nice piece of kit. On the wrist, it’s comfortable and, more importantly, unobtrusive. In black at least, it looks just like a charity wristband, so hardly anyone even notices it. The tiny little light-up display is both adorable and looks futuristic as fuck.
But I have a couple of minor problems with it.
-
What the fuck is Nike+ Fuel? I’ve set a daily goal of 2,0001, but what does that actually mean? Is 2,000 a little or a lot? If I’m using this as a way to track my activity or to lose weight, I’d love to know exactly what this is supposed to represent2.
-
This isn’t FuelBand-specific, and is more a problem with all phone peripherals, such as the Jawbone Up: If your peripheral has shitty battery life (the FuelBand gets less than a week per charge), can you not figure out some way to charge the peripheral off my phone? I’ve already have three things charging beside my bed each night, so if it’s between your stupid peripheral and my Kindle or my phone, you’re not going to win. Even some sort of pass-through between the phone charger and the phone that would siphon off enough to charge the peripheral would work for me.
Overall, it’s not bad. It would never replace my Nike+ app on my phone (I’ve logged 1,493kms run - I am locked in), but it’s a great supplement to it.
-
Sub-problem: how am I supposed to refer to these units? “Nike+ Fuel Units”? That’s a bit of a mouthful, no? ↩︎
-
This is like the problem when buying things off Xbox Live - the currency is “Xbox Points”, which doesn’t translate easily to euros, dollars or pounds. They’re obfuscating how much you’re spending. Why would Nike obfuscate the amount of exercise you’re doing? ↩︎