Month: November 2014
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I stared at the Jackson Pollock painting for hours, thinking it was a Magic Eye image and I wasn’t getting it
I like writing in numbered lists. But when my blog posts get sent to Goodreads, they strip off the HTML numbering, and that makes it look like a jumble of loose paragraphs. I take albuterol for allergies, and the smell of it is a very direct reminder of my childhood when I took it. They…
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This week in data hoarding
I’ve been busy scraping stuff from open directories and dumping them onto this RAID array. Some of this week’s finds: The complete run of Omni magazine, in CBR format. I wasn’t familiar with CBR files, because I don’t read comics, but they are essentially a collection of lossless images in a compressed container, along with…
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Interactive fiction versus games
I’ve been thinking a lot about interactive fiction, trying to find good examples online and learn how to turn existing books into games, or write new hybrid game/books, and it’s made me consider the definition of the two. First, I’ve been playing with this tool called Twine. It reminds me a lot of the old…
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Unreliable narrators and autobiographical fiction
This Lena Dunham book has been huge in the memetic ten-second news cycle lately. I haven’t read it, but the gist of the argument is that her autobiographical(-ish) book has some stuff in it about how she used to share a bed with her sister and various things may have happened (or not, whatever.) There’s…
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More on this “return to blogging” thing
Okay, so Marco Arment says this: http://www.marco.org/2014/11/01/short-form-blogging And I agree, on a few things. First, I never understood twitter. It’s a good format for telling a fast dick joke, or dumping a link to a news article with no comment. But it’s not a good way for me to communicate. I can’t even start to think…