May 2013
10 posts
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State bird improvements: Replace cardinals and... →
Thanks, Texas, the birdiest state in the entire country, for reminding me that this civilization we’ve built and work our fingers to the bone trying to perfect is as meaningless as a sand castle in the tide.
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Ken Levine: I won't give Zach Braff one dime →
Zach Braff is trying to raise money on Kickstarter to fund a movie he wants to make. Zach Braff is a good actor and a fine filmmaker. GARDEN STATE was a terrific movie. But I wouldn’t give him a dime.
Why?
Because it defeats the whole purpose of Kickstarter.
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HERE IS TODAY →
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Sad Bad Sex →
Negative chastity, the kind of chastity that limits itself to saying “Thou shalt not,” has consistently failed to persuade the postmodern world because it is madness.
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What happens when pirates play a game development... →
The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers.
April 2013
15 posts
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Team Sapsucker Will See More Birds Than You →
Noah Davis talks to “Team Sapsucker” about their Big Day. They ended up seeing 294 species (more than I’ve seen in my career as a birder) and broke their own record of 264 that they set in 2011 and tied last year.
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Signaling singleness: mating intelligence and... →
From the perspective of mating intelligence, following mating-relevant customs that are specific to one’s culture is crucial in mating. Knowing the rules and showing others that you can play by these rules is a signal to others that you have your stuff together.
In South Korea, donning all black clothing and going out to share the traditional comfort-food meal of noodles and black bean sauce...
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“[W]hat if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all...”
– Just Asking - David Foster Wallace - The Atlantic
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Why have we stopped seeing UFOs in the skies? →
UFO sightings reached their spate roughly within a decade of the release of Steven Spielberg’s spellbinding film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One good reason to believe there were never any UFOS is that nobody sees them any more. Once, the skies were refulgent with alien craft; now they are back to their primordial emptiness, returning only static to the radio telescopes, and...
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2013 National Magazine Awards Finalists →
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How Far is it to Mars? →
The distance to Mars, if Earth were 100 pixels wide
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“I would rather be ashes than dust!”
– Jack London Credo
March 2013
18 posts
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Hashtags considered #harmful →
Daniel Victor, regarding the hashtags-increase-audience voodoo:
[Are] the millions of Twitter users who deploy such hashtags to increase their reach wrong? Well…yes. We certainly have a history of carrying out myths in technology. Shaking a Polaroid picture didn’t make it develop any faster. Blowing on Nintendo cartridges didn’t help, either.
Perhaps more importantly, hastags are ugly:
I...
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How to deal with bad code →
If you must write a blog post about a topic that annoys you so, please remember to inject parody and hints of self-deprecation so as to to disguise your ego’s intent. If you were to write an article you should title it genuinely though, so as to entice the stubborn programmer to read your post… something like “how to deal with bad code” would work well.
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Diving Deep into Danger →
A look into the dangerous and brutal job of being a commercial diver, who work at depths of up to a thousand feet for as long as a month at a time.
Today it is an economic and even geopolitical necessity for oil companies, in order to maintain pipelines and offshore rigs, to send divers routinely to depths of a thousand feet, and keep them at that level of compression for as long as a month at...
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De Nimes: The Long Journey of Blue Jeans →
Before we had low-rise, straight-leg, skinny, selvage, stretchy, resin-coated, lotion-infused, or mom jeans, there was simply jean—the fabric. The name likely originated from gênes, referring to Genoa, Italy, where sailors wore a twill blend of cotton, linen, and wool that came in a variety of stripes and colors.
This is my favorite type of magazine journalism. You dive deep into a very...
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Tom Bissell interviews Ken Levine, the mind behind... →
Being an adult is realizing that there’s no Mommy and Daddy. I think, to have [villans] who fill that role of Mommy and Daddy — there’s something very appealing about it. It takes so much of the burden away from you. But with that burden goes a lot of other things.
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The Touch-Screen Generation →
Hanna Rosin reports from Dust or Magic, a gathering for developers of children’s phone & tablet apps. Many of these developers were parents themselves.
[T]hese parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and...
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Can a Video Game Ever Be a True Comedy? →
The question is: why aren’t games funnier? Put another way, why hasn’t there been a Hangover for video games? The simple answer: If dying is easy, and comedy is hard, then creating comedy in video games is exceptionally difficult.
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WatchCan anyone deny how awesome flame throwers are?
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The Good Man →
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WatchJust so we’re clear, I’m going to share every single video Kilian Martin is featured in for the rest of my life.
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The Plight of the Gunnison Sage Grouse →
SEVERAL springs ago some friends and I arose before dawn in Moab, Utah, to witness the sunrise mating dance of the Gunnison sage grouse: a surreal display of nine ornately plumed, chicken-size birds tottering about amid the sagebrush like windup toys, fanning their spiky tails and uttering a magical sound — “pop … pop-pop!” — as they thrust yellow air sacs out of their snow-white chests.
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DUCKSARETHEBEST.COM →
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Audubon Magazine: Jonathan Franzen talks about his... →
When you’re a teenager and suddenly sex hits you, it’s like, Oh, there’s this other thing in the world, which is completely unlike anything else, and there’s more to life than I would have guessed. I think I had that experience when I started to understand what was going on in literature, and probably the revelation of birds in the world was the third major revelation of my life.
February 2013
13 posts
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The Smitten Word →
Sam Lipsyte, discussing how to write about sex:
Sometimes, though, you have to face the multi-spined beast head on. Be brave, and trust in your love of language and your love of sex. (Or lack of it.) Trust in the modern gods who guide your hand: Sad and Funny. Like it or not, these are the twin poles for most of our tiny thoughts and doings. Sad and Funny are both the world and how we withstand...
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