Category Archives: Uncategorized

When the earthquake struck last week, it felt slightly disrespectful to write enthusiastically about anything else, let alone the little, joyful things in life, like food. In the face of such tragedy, they seemed so trivial. For a while I wondered: when is it OK to be happy again? To laugh? How soon is too… Read More »

Reading through my Google Reader backlog, I found this poem in a Thanksgiving post on Get Rich Slowly. I think it serves just as well as a Christmas sentiment, so here you go: Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (1927) Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.… Read More »

Took a break from running my Cthulhu game tonight to go see a presentation by Bill Buxton for the Puget Sound SIGCHI entitled “Natural user interfaces: What’s in a name?”. Here are the key ideas I took away from it: Know your history – Bill talked a lot about history in design, how many of… Read More »

I’ve been reading the “Hagakure”, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo1. The name translates as “In the shadow of Leaves“, but you might know it as “The Book of the Samurai”. It’s a distillation of commentaries made by Yamamoto between 1709 and 1716, mostly about bushido, the samurai’s warrior code, but also about a fairly wide variety of… Read More »

Like many, I’m pretty incensed at the passing of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act (CERRA) in the last 24 hours or so. For those who need context, please read these two posts, one from Idiot/Savant, the other from KiwiPolitico. Basically, the act allows the governor-general (at the request of Gerry Brownlee, a Minister… Read More »

If you’re a classical music lover, you owe it to yourself to spread this around. Musopen, a website offering public domain classical music, is raising money via Kickstarter to have the works of several composers recorded, then released into the public domain (hosted on their website, archive.org, and elsewhere). At this stage, at least the… Read More »

A most excellent animation borrowed from Mark Chen’s blog Fourth walls crashing down left, right and center, with a kick-arse soundtrack. It gets particularly excellent when the worlds start to merge.

So, I really need this book: Mad Science – Experiments you can do at home, but probably shouldn’t. I feel that it would be of great relevance to my ongoing research into unnecessarily hazardous fun.

I just want to quickly articulate the concept of suspended humiliation. Like suspended terror, where one is not presently terrified but well aware of the likelihood of a terrifying experience occurring at any moment, suspended humiliation is the sense that one might be called out and humiliated at any second. It’s the feeling you might… Read More »