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A spreadsheet cataloguing all of "wallflower"'s episode-by-episode guide to The Shield – his writing on it is so, so good.
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Rather wonderful interview with J G Ballard in 1984, in the Paris Review; effusive, head-screwed on, but god, his working process is hardly something you can emulate: such absolute control and certainty!
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"WordPerfect was always the best word processor. Because it allowed for insight into its very structure. You could hit a certain key combination and suddenly the screen would split and you’d reveal the codes, the bolds and italics and so forth, that would define your text when it was printed. It was beloved of legal secretaries and journalists alike. Because when you work with words, at the practical, everyday level, the ability to look under the hood is essential. Words are not simple. And WordPerfect acknowledged that." I grew up on WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, and Reveal Codes. Some days, I wonder if it's why I got on with markup so well.
I went to Australia
17 November 2014
People will ask me what’s the most exciting wildlife you saw, and I suppose I could say the ibises, or the pelicans, or the field full of kangaroos, and those were all pretty special, but you know, it was the sea.
Soft in the bays and inlets; warlike on the rocky coasts; broad and grand at Bondi. Every wave is new; every iteration unique. I could watch it roll, listen to it roar, taste the salt sprayed into the air for hours.
And gosh, the colour; they really don’t call it the Sapphire Coast for nothing.
Wild, untamed; not like the Pacific on the West Coast, not like the Atlantic. Something else. My favourite wild thing.
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This is a good list, from Toby Litt, and clearly one earned many times through fire.
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"The constant bolstering of the “world” _constantly reveals it not to be one_, ie never to be complete the way the world is. This seems to say more about the limits of writing & the act of suspension of disbelief (an immersion which can clearly be brought about in other ways) than it does about the actual need for a world to seem to be present in front of the reader. Also, it strikes me as a bit mad to be a fiction writer if you have to struggle desperately with the pretence that you’re not." MJH on world-building again.
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Oh, awesome: a Pinboard Share extension for iOS 8.
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New Danny Macaskill video: off-road (off ALL the roads) in Skye. Remarkable. Also: so much dronecam in biking videos now. (Nicely shot, thoguh).
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Really, really useful: a tool from @mnot to test headers, caching, and responses to webpages. Will be using this a lot in future, am sure.
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"The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time." A truly lovely short story from John Chu.
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The most useful tips in here: set the right headers; set the body of the response to an enumerator and it'll iterate over it, streaming it.
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Some great Chess writing from Slate.
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"‘If all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip, archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we deserve,’ the design critic Owen Edwards argues in his book Elegant Solutions." An excerpt from a Joe Moran essay on the paperclip.
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"pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors.
Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal." That looks great.
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"Something that journalists sometimes do is publish a disclosure statement. It’s sort of like an About Me page except it’s a listing of all their conflicts of interest—all the areas of coverage where you might have good reason to think they should not be trusted. It’ll say things like I once worked at Google or I’m married to an employee of Microsoft. I have never written one of these but I have fantasies about doing a comprehensive one. It would be the length of a novel, I think. An endless and yet incomplete litany of all the blood, privilege, history, and compromise on my hands." I could have quoted lots of this, but I chose this. It's good. It encapsulates the beginnings but not ends of lots of thoughts, and reminds me why, right now, I'm afraid of assuming anything about anything, why stereotyping "big companies" as being identical isn't just inaccurate but also unhelpful, and why the point of boundaries is that they always exclude _somebody_.
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"Hatoful Boyfriend is the Fifa of pigeon romance and you should buy it for that reason alone." I'm loving the attention Hatoful Boyfriend is getting in the media; this review by Grant Howitt is charming, informative, and on the Guardian website. Brilliant.
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Cracking interview with George Saunders, from 2011 (so pre-Tenth of December). Lots about the craft of writing, and about what Just Turning Up looks like. Also, his imaginary writing class in which Hemingway punches everybody out made me laugh out loud.
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"Of course this is pure anthropomorphization. Bits don’t have wills. But they do have tendencies." This piece by Kevin Kelly is great – though this line neatly explains my suggestion that 'things' sometimes have 'desires' better than I ever have before.
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Good to know SES can just be integrated as an ActionMailer delivery method.
The Shipping Forecast
16 September 2014
I worked there from 2009-2011 – employee #1, really. It’s a time and place I am hugely fond of. I learned a lot there.
I wrote something on a train last week after Matt’s post for week 483. I think it was mainly for myself; maybe I’ll publish it sometime. But then I found something better to share.
Warren Ellis’ The Shipping Forecast is a story in this year’s MIT Technology Review SF special, Twelve Tomorrows. On morning.computer, Warren explained his story thus:
When Bruce Sterling commissioned me to write a piece for MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, he had a specific brief: imagine a future where BERG won, and launched the future from the back of their Brutalist gulag in Shoreditch. I dragged Schulze and Webb into the pub — Jones was gone by then, in his constant search for the next new thing, off to Google to direct larger launch facilities — and poured beer into them in an attempt to get them thinking about what was next.
I read the story last Friday morning; I had just got up to it in the collection. Over lunch, sat in the office canteen, I read the story. And this passage stopped me, entirely, in my tracks:
“We were very wonky back then. Everyone else was talking about drones and smart glasses and brain scanners and god knows what else, and we were trying to get washing machines to talk to the world. We got laughed at a lot. ‘Internet fridge’ was the punch line. We put the lamps and the early versions of the senders into people’s houses and people thought we were making toys. It took a while before people got what we were doing.”
“Well, you were inventing a business, right?” Emilija wasn’t sure where this was going and wanted to move it along.
“No,” said Signy, raising a finger. “Same mistake everyone else made. What we were doing was launching political probes into people’s homes.” She looked into her coffee cup and sighed.
“I’m not following,” Emilija said. “Political?”
“The personal is the political. Our social choices are political choices. We didn’t do the things that tech companies were supposed to do. We didn’t move fast and break things. We didn’t disrupt and abandon. We didn’t do moon shots. We created a future by sitting the world down with a cup of tea and a bun and asking it some questions.”
It’s just a story, about fictional companies and people, but reading it in week 483 winded me a bit; made me sit up sharply. And then breathe out, and remember to keep striving to achieve exactly that: a future that’s gentle, human, considered.
Thanks for the story, Warren. Thanks for everything, Berg.
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Paul is right. And: I will endeavour to remember his point about holding off talking about jobs (or yourself) as long as possible. I keep working on this stuff, because it's important and makes the world easier, so often. Listening first is always a good start.
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"Arrive early. Arrive early? Sounds simple. It is — let me show you.
Arrive so early that a friend will text you, What R U sixty years old? No, you’re not sixty, you’re much older, because the wisdom of the early arrival seems to have eluded even most sixty-year-old travelers."