I’m a big fan of cooperative computer games, but I’m not inclined to join guilds (aside from the Fuel Rats, but that was kind of an odd situation). So what do you do when your friends start playing Call of Duty?
Bulk mailing a big chunk of Pennsylvania has to be a bit expensive, right? Or maybe not. Perhaps I should write some of my own poetry and bulk mail everyone; then I can claim I am “widely published” or something.
This is a really fascinating, if highly specialized, book about an important topic.
I recommend Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People. [wc] It’s a valuable anodyne to all of the racist propaganda I have been ingesting and studying over the last few years. My approach to American racism has been to deconstruct its sources; Painter’s (in this book) is to demonstrate how it was constructed, and its sources. She puts the pieces together so you can see how they were assembled, and its an ugly picture.
This is one picture from the Saturn-V that I forgot to post. It’s worth it in its own right, in my opinion.
One of my favorite podcasts is the In Our Time BBC podcast. It’s Melvyn Bragg questioning a truly amazing collection of experts on a very wide range of topics, and having tea.
Spoiler zone below. I strongly suggest you don’t read this post if you think you might see the movie.
I enjoyed it and found it creepy and scary. If you like intelligent horror movies, this is one.
Sometimes I put really dark and depressing music on because, paradoxically, it cheers me up.
Despite of my sniffiness about AI, I have to admit that Amazon.com’s “books people like you liked” algorithm is pretty good. That’s not surprising, because they have so much data behind it, nobody has been arsed to spend the money to manipulate the reviews in my part of the market, and the algorithm is really easy to implement. I’ve tried to cut back on my purchases via Amazon, but sometimes I use the recommendations to search for the books on Ebay.