October 31, 2021
SFnal Coordination Mechanism Design, Path Dependence and Roads Not Taken
Glass: the most underrated medieval technology? (threadreader) - "Venice sought desperately to keep its monopoly. If a glassmaker left without permission, he would be asked to return. If he refused, his family would be imprisoned, and if he still persisted, an assassin would be hired to kill him off."[1] [more inside]
I, for one, welcome our new robot rock band overlords
Tip Top
"Aline", a delightful animated music video directed by Wes Anderson as part of The French Dispatch (Fanfare), featuring Christophe's Aline sung by Jarvis Cocker, and illustrated by Javi Aznarez.
"The music, at least, did not make me feel like an outsider."
Three short speculative stories about love, yearning, and relationships beyond the human boundary. "Cold Wind" by Nicola Griffith: "From the park on Puget Sound I watched the sun go down on the shortest day of the year." "Traveling Mercies" by Rachael K. Jones: "Sometimes you have to let people take care of you. That's the contract, the covenant of friendship." "First Dates" by Elizabeth Kestrel Rogers: "In retrospect, 'I’m dying' was a bad pick-up line."
Happy Halloween to Tim Curry only
Tim Curry explains why Halloween is great in “The Halloween Song” from the 1986 film adaptation of The Worst Witch.
The golem is the prom king of Jewish monsters, everyone knows its name
Some of the most frightening monsters in the Jewish imagination. Deuteronomy mentions that a prediluvian king named Og was the last of the giants, a species that thrived before the flood... but wasn’t all life not in Noah's ark destroyed during the torrent? How did Og survive? The answer is scarily simple. He hung onto the side of the ark for the entire storm, eating scraps Noah fed him through a hole in the wall.
A Week of Halloweens
"In such vast ocean of matter and tumult strange"
Christine Riding, "Shipwreck, Self-preservation and the Sublime": Being "a subject that encourages the spectator to imagine 'pain and danger' and 'self-preservation,' 'without being actually in such circumstances' may well be why shipwreck ... was suited to the sublime." Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator [PDF; chapter summaries: 1 + 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]: "Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage." Supplementing many previouslies, a number of shipwreck narratives offer further occasions for reflection. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »