Hot Links, Cool Treats (in no particular order)

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

- Bill Watterson's "SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED"

No, we Erisians seldom pray, it is much too dangerous. Charles Fort has listed many factual incidences of ignorant people confronted with, say, a drought, and then praying fervently -- and then getting the entire village wiped out in a torrential flood.

- Malaclypse the Younger's and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst's "Principia Discordia"

But voting with your dollars has some obvious deficits. The first one is that you can't shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. [...] The next one is that dollars are not evenly distributed.

- Cory Doctorow's "Amy's Kitchen, a case-study in the problems with consumerism"

Official MW2 literature is full of quotes from Martin Luther, Aeschylus and even Albert Einstein on the horridness of war. [...] But this ironic self-awareness is as vapid, as platitudinous, as passive, as the myth of duty the game itself propounds.

- Joshua Casteel's "Gaming and Reality in Modern Warfare"

Things like math and logic and writing and physics and drawing and all kinds of things got way easier after I had started learning to code. The same goes for the spiritual or psychological experience. Coding (probably better known as meta-thinking, thinking about thinking) is an amazing foundation for other fields.

Everyone, learn how to code

The biography is, of course, a very old form. It is a long and often gruesome tradition. For most of the history of the genre, biography was usually a way of writing less about life and more about death. [...] But this is what happens when we start writing the lives of the living. We become sycophants. ...

Very Ordinary Men