In one of the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcasts, they briefly mentioned a book by Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes. [I guess the publishers are not Bob Dylan fans] Several of the doctors said they thought it was great, or it was on their reading list, so I added it to mine.
I’ve become fond of having an audiobook going while I work. It seems to help me focus, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense (I’d expect it to be distracting!) but it’s a great way to absorb new information. Perhaps it’s just a side-effect of how I work nowadays, but if I sit down and open a book, it usually turns into a nap pretty quickly.
Commentariat(tm) member invivoMark made a plug for this game, and I am very glad they did. [stderr] [This review/extended comment does not include spoilers.] [Read more…]
I’m a hoarder of certain things; I admit it. Somewhere I have source tapes for Peter Langston’s Empire game, just in case someone wants to reconstruct that piece of history for a modern system.
I’m not going to quote big swathes of this, because you should just give it a listen.
Lately, I’ve been playing The Outer Worlds and enjoying it a great deal. It’s the essence of a first-person role-play shooter. It’s also got great design elements, a certain hipsterish wry humor, and it feels slightly soulless.
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.