Generally interesting links - Aug 2020
* “The truth is paywalled but the lies are free” * Blast-from-the-past for RPG gaming: the newer Baldur’s Gate * Bjarne Stroustrup on various things * Reviewing a scene in Predator (there is so mu…
Streaming posts
(FYI) Continuing my experiments in blogging patterns, I created https://cyberneticwords.com as a "stream of snippets" site. I will evaluate after a year if it's worth continuing it or no…
Thoughts on continuing to use Twitter
Context In a previous post1, I mentioned how my experience of Twitter is actually quite nice and I don’t encounter any of the craziness that other people report. Is that still true? Well, yes and no…
Thoughts on blogging (changes)
Status Looking at my “online activity” for the past 5 years, I’ve been writing at: 1. Twitter 2. Wordpress 3. A Static Blog Observations * Of these, (3) is basically dead, and is around merel…
My favorite year in movies- 2006
There are a bunch of movies I’ve liked, over the years, in different genres, from different times. But there is an unusually large cluster of them around a single year, 2006 (about fourteen years ago…
My history with computers, Part 2- “Mid 90s
Context Picking up where I left off last time: we’d got a first, new computer, the first set of simple games, and a first operating system (ye olde DOS). QBasic As I’ve mentioned, the only program…
Road to awe
Something I first came across about a decade ago, and then again every few years: this re-arrangement of scenes from The Fountain, set to (and titled after) one of the tracks from its soundtrack. htt…
Random reading extract
On "... the terrible beauty of maps"
This captures so well what I sometimes feel about visual note-taking (basic mind-mapping, as well as more flexible, powerful tools): (Source) I’ve gotten to the point where I generally use outline a…
On Narration, Tinderbox, and other things ...
It's hard to say what is so good about this video. It is many things. It is a generally well-made ensemble, a slice of art criticism, a slice of philosophical questions and concerns, it is a demo…
Lunchtime WSJ book reviews
I started a paper subscription to WSJ right as the pandemic started, and as we eat family lunch, with no phones allowed, I quickly skim the paper. I wish I had done this earlier, but also, I know I c…
A simple calculator in Scala
Here1 (credits to Ben Lynn2) is a simple calculator in Haskell. I decided to try porting it over3 to Scala. The original example also makes this work in Javascript using Haste; I’ve left this out for…