Category: Links

7 A.M.

Wake up. You’ve set your iPhone alarm clock early because this is going to be a big fucking day. You are going to write so many fucking words. So. Fucking. Many. Like, tens of thousands of words. Hundreds of thousands? How many words did Kerouac write all hopped up on Benzedrine? You’re gonna, like, double that shit.

[…]

8 A.M.

Wake up again.

Link [bygonebureau.com]

Behold the Ploom, an amazing new device created by engineers, designers, and brilliant university people from San Francisco. It’s the cigarette, redesigned for a more elegant age. It’s the Nespresso of smoking.

A slender gas-powered tube heats (not burns) prepackaged foil pods of custom-blended tobacco – six varieties available now, with two others purely herbal –releasing only rich flavor and a light vapor. No smoke, no ash, no acrid smells. Just look at the thing, it’s beautiful. Unfortunately I don’t think this is due for export anytime soon.

One of the best animated shorts I’ve seen on YouTube: Dan The Man by Studio Joho of Brisbane, Australia is about the life of a 16-bit videogame character after he saves the princess. I laughed out loud.

Unbelievable work, with the appearance of real heft and presence. Some even have posable limbs.

I stopped watching Lost over a year ago for many of the reasons articulated in the rant linked below. Far as I can tell, there are no spoilers for the finale; it’s more of a general look at how the show’s writers don’t respect their own internal rules and disown association with SF when convenient.

I personally remember the time back in the first few seasons when they claimed all the island’s mysteries had logical, non-magical explanations. That was the hook. A few bizarre situations amidst the very real drama of being stranded on a desert island. The impossibility of reconciliation was an addictive drug, and like all drugs: a lie. Keeping an audience for six seasons demanded a ramping up of mysteries, each new one another obstacle between the current episode and a satisfying conclusion.

Laura Miller writes about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (those “The Girl With/Who…” books) on Salon.com, noting the ability of his curiously dry and overly descriptive writing style to drive some readers away screaming, while keeping others locked in for the course.

Whatever you may think, these books have become a phenomenal international success of Dan Brown-ish proportions in record time. The difference is that, having read two of them after seeing the film adaptation of the first, I can quite readily recommend them as fun and engaging thrillers. I haven’t read more than a few pages of a Brown novel and don’t intend to.

Link [Salon.com – minor spoilers]

Granted, it’s only the findings of one inconclusive study, but working as little as ten hours a day on a regular basis can increase one’s risk of heart disease by nearly two-thirds. The study was based on 6,000 British civil servants, a significant pool I wouldn’t quickly dismiss.

Most people I know work overtime on a regular basis; it’s fully accepted as a necessary evil to get all of the day’s work done in many sectors of Singaporean business. And as an article in the Straits Times [subscription required] today noted, wages are unfairly skewed towards what would be expected of a Third World economy, although the cost of living is firmly First World. I recall Chicago was named as a city with a lower cost of living than Singapore.

If there’s any truth at all to this study, the path we’re on is going to cost us dearly someday.