Weekend Reading

  • From Xena to Wonder Woman: The Physics of Female Fighters
    General Antiope (Robin Wright) moves seamlessly among the training Amazons, checking each move, giving directions for correction where necessary. The women’s moves are accurate and dynamic, often closely resembling contemporary dance or professional gymnastics.
    Yet another reason why WW is kicking ass (it’s also just passed Deadpool for highest grossing accolades)

  • Critic’s Notebook: The Post-Review, Post-Premiere, Post-Finale World of Peak TV
    I tried to take a vacation — well, more accurately, a “staycation” — last week. Pretty much any TV critic can tell you how that went. Badly. Unless you’re in the woods, on some distant island or in a foreign country, the remote is too close.
    Couldn’t agree with this more, and I think it’s odd when some shows are still ‘weekly episodes’ (hi American Gods, lookin’ at you!)

  • The Algorithms Behind Moana’s Gorgeously Animated Ocean
    Disney’s engineers used special software to make a magical, authentic body of water. In the early days, when motion pictures were still new, filming the ocean was a radical idea.
    Not seen this yet (not sure why not) but whoa how beautiful does it look!

  • Inside the extreme Facebook fandom for old rental VHS tapes
    Featuring a £360 Jaws tape, four rooms full of 10,000 videos, and a man known only as “The Mayor”. On a sunny September day in 2016, Scott Bates stood in a Doncaster parking lot, waiting for a delivery of 1,250 VHS tapes.
    I remember taking a couple of boxes of VHS tapes to the dump about 10 years ago…

  • Green Day Crowd Singing Bohemian Rhapsody
    Between the Foos covering Under Pressure at Glasto and stuff like this, a Queen renaissance happening? Miss you Freddie!

  • Whodunnits : Five Books
    Looking down your list, most of these books are more than half a century old. That’s true actually, now you come to mention it.
    Who doesn’t love a well curated list. This site has LOADS of them (but this is the link that took me to it in the first place)

  • Hollywood Has a Bad-Movie Problem
    Domestic audiences are rejecting this summer’s procession of tired sequels, and international grosses won’t be enough to keep studios afloat forever. Take a quick glance at the box-office returns for June, and you could draw an easy conclusion: Hollywood has a franchise problem.
    One word: Transformers.

  • Nest Founder: “I Wake Up In Cold Sweats Thinking, What Did We Bring To The World?”
    Tony Fadell’s wife likes to remind him when their three children’s eyes are glued to their screens that it’s at least partly his fault. Hard to argue.
    Realising I rarely link to articles on the flip side of this, the internet can be good!

  • If information overload is stressing you out, go on a silence diet
    In the beginning, there was the word. Now, there’s a deluge of language. On average, Americans consume 34 gigabytes of content and encounter 100,000 written words from various sources in a single day.
    Remember when this blog was called Informationally Overloaded? Was a drop in the ocean!

  • STOP SCREAMING IN MY HOME
    Creators of content on the internet are very commonly creators of community. Often times, this community is the most interesting and the most valuable part of making stuff, and many creators require that relationship to inspire them to make stuff.
    Dealing with hatred online is never easy because cattle prods can’t reach through the screen… yet…

  • The Hacker Who Cared Too Much
    One afternoon in a modest, hilltop home in West Hartford, Connecticut, Linda Pelletier, a sandy-blond mother of four, opened a greeting card from her 15-year-old daughter, Justina. To her surprise, a small, intricately folded piece of paper slipped out from inside. It was an origami fortune teller.
    This is not the story you think it’s going to be. Heartwrenching.

  • Mindfulness: It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it
    Here’s an old post on mindfulness, revamped now that I’m returning to the topic for the 2nd edition of my book Rewriting the Rules. What makes something mindful or mindless? I’ve been interested in mindfulness for many years now.
    Yes to this, many times over! Your mindfulness is not my mindfulness.

  • I reverse-engineered Buzzfeed’s most viral posts and the truth is shocking!
    Anyone who has ever produced content for the web knows how torturously tough it is to even get people to click on your post and read it; forget going viral, especially when you don’t have any furs in your content. (Read: Cats and dogs, who seem to have a god-given right to internet virality).
    Probably a ‘must read’ if you’ve used the internet at all in the last few years!

  • This app is trying to replicate you
    Hi Mike, how’s it going? Pretty good.
    The geek in me loves this. The paranoid sceptic in me is running away.

  • Toy Story lessons for the Internet of Things
    Have you ever thought of the Toy Story films as sci fi? I think they have many interesting themes that could apply to the Internet of Things.
    Bit of a stretch but hey, who doesn’t love Toy Story, right?

  • The case for taking forever to finish reading books
    For a long time I’ve been reading one book. It’s been five years since I started In Search of Lost Time, and I’m only two-thirds the way through. That’s fine with me.
    See also: the case for just stop reading that book if you aren’t enjoying it (hi there, The Sellout, looking at you!)

  • Why do we still insist on calling women “Miss” or “Mrs”? 
    “And is it ‘Miss’ Wilkinson or ‘Mrs’?” the woman serving me at my local bank asks. “It’s ‘Ms’,” I reply. She gives me a strange look, then responds coolly: “I’ll put ‘Miss’. ‘Ms’ is only for divorced women and you look way young to be divorced.”
    I did a learn (it’s what us privileged types should do).

  • The 100 Greatest Props in Movie History, and the Stories Behind Them
    They’re found on dusty warehouse shelves; buried under flea market knick-knacks; Googled, Ebayed, begged for; commissioned from blacksmiths, painters, and model makers for one-time use; and constructed out of whatever $5 can buy at the local craft store.
    Geek alert, geek alert! I FUCKIN LOVE THIS ARTICLE!!

  • Scientists teleport particle into space in major breakthrough for quantum physics
    Scientists have successfully teleported something into space for the first time ever. The experiment saw Chinese scientists send a photon up away from Earth, further than ever before.
    Whoa. Sci-fi is now just Sci.

  • Successful solo polyamory and control
    There are a few things to address here that have to do with what you’ve chosen and how you go about what you’re hoping to achieve. I’m assuming that by choosing to do solo polyamory that you have thought about why polyamory is the right approach for you and what it means for you.
    Breadcrumb for myself mostly…

  • This is the worst 20 seconds of soccer ever
    It’s “the beautiful game”—apart from those times when it’s not.
    Can’t stop watching! HILARIOUS BADLY!!