February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
3 posts
December 2011
5 posts
Now That Books Mean Nothing →
A beautifully written essay about a woman’s recovery after a double mastectomy, and her struggle to find something to keep her occupied when books have lost their appeal:
Just as the possibility of doing what you love for a job risks turning that love into a chore, doing what you love during a difficult time risks illuminating the shortcomings of that thing you love because it cannot solve...
November 2011
4 posts
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
3 posts
“If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy...”
– Haruki Murakami
WatchFog rolling in over San Francisco.
Every time I drive up 280N around sunset time, I wish I could make a similar video, or even take a photo.
July 2011
1 post
29 Life Lessons From Traveling →
Everyone just wants validation, love, security, enjoyment and hopes for a better future. The way they verbalise this and work towards it is where things branch off, but we all have the same basic desires. You can relate to everyone in the world if you look past the superficial things that separate you.
May 2011
13 posts
Intelligent Videogames →
Gaming’s ongoing push into the mainstream consciousness has entered a bold new phase – by appealing to the players’ intelligence and imagination, it’s starting to make Hollywood look embarrassing.
With Portal 2, LA Noire, and great TV series like Game of Thrones and Fringe, I’m feeling less and less inclined to watch movies these days.
“Studies show very clearly that in our country, in the college-educated part of...”
– Sheryl Sandberg
Beyond Happiness →
In his 2008 book, “Gross National Happiness,” Dr. Brooks argues that what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of “earned success” — the belief that you have created value in your life or others’ lives.
Seems obvious enough, but I think this accounts for more than typical happiness...
“Life, except for the obvious physical needs, is not so much defined by the...”
– Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life
Bookstore Compulsions →
An endearing list of strange things that the author does in his favorite used book store:
Suggesting books to strangers: This compulsion is linked to another urge, the compulsion to look at what people are buying. If I see someone picking up a Philip K. Dick novel, I nosily ask about China Miéville, because I know that there’s a copy of Perdido Street Station that still hasn’t found a home....
“If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they’d be...”
– Peter Collins, The Secret Life of Libraries
Lessons from Starcraft →
It’s not often that an answer on Quora ends up in the news, but this one was particularly good:
Long term success is usually achieved by getting a small advantage and then using that to get some other kind of advantage. In StarCraft, this can mean something like getting map control with a mobile army then using that to expand safely, which gets you an economic advantage, which then...
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
4 posts
Consumerism and Material Goods →
A striking conclusion to a Wired article about the Foxconn suicides:
Every last trifle we touch and consume, right down to the paper on which this magazine is printed or the screen on which it’s displayed, is not only ephemeral but in a real sense irreplaceable. Every consumer good has a cost not borne out by its price but instead falsely bolstered by a vanishing resource economy. We...
February 2011
5 posts
Things You'd Tell Your 20-year-old Self →
Someone wrote into Dear Sugar’s column to ask exactly that - what would you tell your younger self if you had the chance? What followed was a mix of advice, some that applied widely like:
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go....
Quality of Life →
From an interview with Bret Taylor, on his work at FriendFeed:
When we started that company, we were faced with deciding whether to purchase our own servers, or use one of the many cloud hosting providers out there like Amazon Web Services. At the time we chose to purchase our own servers. I think that was a big mistake in retrospect. The reason for that is despite the fact it cost much...
January 2011
9 posts
Roald Dahl on Writing →
When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest...
Working Hurts Less →
On procrastination and how to think about the substitute activities that we do instead of dong work:
When you procrastinate, you’re probably not procrastinating because of the pain of working, because on a moment-to-moment basis, being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.
That is pretty useful to remember. And another...