Blog – page 58 of 75

Flavorwire has a collection of 30 of the harshest author to author insults. My favorites are the ones where I’m familiar with both the insult-or and the insulted. This one on Don Quixote is my favorite:

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, discuses the use of the word relationship to describe the everyday interactions with the people in our lives:

My problem with “relationship” is that it means whatever anyone needs it to mean. It doesn’t denote a specific act–like, say, “falling in love” or “getting married.” Those bold leaps of faith have long been sung by poets and troubadours. But nowhere in bardic lore is there any word of Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra, or Tristan’s relationship with Isolde, or Romeo’s relationship with the girl on the balcony. Cole Porter didn’t write “Let’s do it, let’s have a relationship.” He wrote “Let’s fall in love.” That’s what people used to do.

This is a simple game that won the grand prize in the 10k Apart contents, that challenged developers to come up with a web-app that took less than 10 kilobytes.

Sinuous is game built using canvas and JavaScript - no external libraries. The game requires only mouse movement or swiping (iPad/iPhone/Android) as input. Total size: 6.9KB. The goal is to avoid colliding with red dots while looking for green ones. The longer you can stay alive, the higher you will score!

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill

(by theroyaltyclub)

Sad Vador

“An actor dressed as Darth Vader waits for tourists who want to be photographed with him, in front of the Brandenburg Gate during a thunderstorm in Berlin, Germany, on June 14.”

Coffee vs. Tea Infographic

This up to 1000 years old snow has metamorphosed into highly pressurized glacier ice that contains almost no air bubbles. Thus it absorbs the visible light despite the scattered shortest blue fraction, giving it its distinct deep blue waved appearance. This cavity in the glacier ice formed as a result of a glacial mill, or moulin.

Rain and meltwater on the glacier surface is channelled into streams that enter the glacier at crevices. The waterfall melts a hole into the glacier while the ponded water drains towards lower elevations by forming long ice caves with an outlet at the terminus of the glacier. The fine grained sediments in the water along with wind blown sediments cause the frozen meltwater stream to appear in a muddy colour while the top of the cave exhibits the deep blue colour.

A group of pranksters in Bulgaria painted a statue of soviet soldiers to look like a group of All American Superheros.

Twenty years ago you would have been shot for stepping too close to this monument in Sofia in Bulgaria.

But after the smashing of the Berlin Wall, statues celebrating communist rule appear to be fair game to the graffiti artists of the former Soviet block in Eastern Europe.

denverpost:

New Dietary Guidelines

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— Mark Twain

Either you negotiate to make the whole bigger, to have both sides benefit–or you negotiate to have the other side lose. Winning by punishing the other side isn’t a particularly long lasting or satisfying strategy.

— Seth’s Blog: The last minute (a case against brinksmanship)

Today’s Daily *ism is another artistic (revolutionary) movement that came out of the modernist period:

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers[who?] regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

They’ve made it 100 years, so must be doing something right. Here’s the flash notes, click through for the details:

(via 5 lessons from IBM’s 100th anniversary - Fortune Tech)

DVDLater - Save Theater Movies to your Netflix Queue

Here’s the most recent edition of my reading highlights, passages of posts and books that I’ve highlighted on my Kindle.

Kevin Kelly – Chapter 8: No Harmony All Flux (kk.org)

Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed. The first level—changes in the game—produces the kind of changes now visible: new winners and losers. New businesses. New heroes. We see the rise of Wal-Marts, and of Nucor steelmaking. The second level—changes in the rules of the game—produces new kinds of business, new sectors of the economy, new kinds of games. From this type of change comes the Microsofts and Amazon.coms. The third level of change, which we are now entering, whips up changes in how change happens. Change changes itself. While the new economy provokes change in the first two levels—all those new business and business sectors—its deepest consequence is the way it alters change. Change accelerates itself. It morphs into creative destruction. It induces flux. It disperses into a field effect, so you can’t pinpoint causes. It overturns the old ways of change.

We are not running out of space. (via If the world’s population lived in one city… « Per Square Mile)

Super Cut: Other actors being Woody Allen. NOTE: This is only funny if you love Woody Allen.

A Retrospective of Woody Allen Surrogates (by FilmDrunkDotCom)

(via Quasi-Fictional Stand-Ins for Woody Allen: A Retrospective)

Here’s a political system that’s bringing down many parts of Europe. It’s also one that has to go by many other names, since its popularity is sagging, and its accomplishments leave such carnage in its wake.

Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are publicly or commonly owned and controlled co-operatively, or a political philosophy advocating such a system.[1][2] As a form of social organization, socialism is based on co-operative social relations and self-management; relatively equal power-relations and the reduction or elimination of hierarchy in the management of economic and political affairs.[3][4]