johnke.meAlong with his other show, Hardcore History, Dan Carlin’s Common Sense is one of my favourite podcasts right now. In the latest episode, “The Very Velvet Fist”, he gives one of the best takes on the whole “Occupy” movement, especially given the whole UC Davis debacle last weekend.
Seriously, I hope everyone listens to this.
A while ago, I was banging on about the random events in the world of Red Dead Redemption and how they helped increase the sense of immersion and my fondness for that game (at least, the first time you encounter these random events. After six or seven attempted horse-jackings, it all becomes rote bullshit).
Skyrim, on the other hand, is genuinely amazing. There’s so much to do – not just story stuff, but random, one-off things – that you find yourself investing deeply in the characters. I found myself nodding along to John Walker’s story of “his” Lydia. It’s a totally accurate description of how this game gets its claws in you and you find yourself doing things (and enjoying doing things) in the game that sound completely cracked if you try to explain them to other people.
Okay, I’ll admit, I’m a little obsessed with Skyrim right now. But look at these landscapes and tell me they’re not amazing. Everyone gushed over how great the facial animation system was in LA Noire. I think the cloud generation system in Skyrim is even more impressive. This one is my favourite of the lot.
In Ireland, “bagels and garlic bread set for sharp price rise as VAT rules change”
The price of bagels, croissants, garlic bread and a range of other similar products is likely to increase significantly in the weeks ahead after Revenue decided they were not sufficiently bread-like to be exempt from VAT.
Meanwhile, in America, U.S. Decides Pizza Sauce Is a Vegetable
A joint Senate-House panel of American lawmakers has caved in to the frozen food lobby by voting to uphold school lunch regulations that stipulate that tomato sauce in pizza counts as a vegetable serving.
I never thought I’d say this, but maybe it’s time Pat the Baker and Mister Brennan got together to form a lobby group of their own.
Some of these are unfathomably beautiful.
from Laughing Squid Links
I do.
An ex-PM of Google Reader explains why the recent redesign/refactor is such a bad decision.
I’m glad to see someone with a bit of authority complaining about this a reasonable way. For the most part, the only comments I’ve read about the changes have either been from people saying “Eww, who uses Google Reader like that?” or from crazy people calling for an “Occupy Google Reader” protest. I was starting to feel like I was the odd one out.
Seriously, this is an actual fucking headline in The Guardian.
Someone should be ashamed about all this, but I’m not sure who.
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.