Tag: Links

Monday Link Salad

The tomb of Alexander the Great might’ve been found – if that turns out to be true, that’s kinda cool 🙂

New game on the way from the guy who was lead developer for Civ IV, RTS and economics based rather than units/war based. Rock Paper Shotgun has part one of an interview up, they mention boardgames in it although not specific ones so that’s probably why the resource trading is making me think of Settlers of Catan.

TV I set recording this week:

Monday Link Salad

I’ve heard of “The Steerswoman” by Rosemary Kirstein several times and here’s another review – sadly not in the library, so this is as much a note to myself to buy it sometime as anything else!

Some amusing graphs and infographics – I’m particularly amused by the movie seats one with the relative heights of people around you, as that describes my gig experience too 😉

Ten facts about aphids – including cannibal aphids!

I’ve recently started following Crap Taxidermy on Twitter coz the pictures are normally worth a giggle (tho the captions can be a bit hit & miss for me).

TV I’ve set recording this week:

Monday Link Salad

J linked me to a story about this a little while ago but I didn’t properly look at it till just now – Getty Publications Virtual Library is a collection of 250 free art books from the publisher’s backlist available as pdfs. Quite a few things I like the look of in the list 🙂 Related are another couple of collections of books: MetPublications is the MMA’s project to offer their publications online for free (which goes back to 1964 so far I think). And the Guggenheim has put 99 catalogues from modern art exhibitions freely available (not so much my cup of tea).

Another link for a little while ago I forgot to put in last Monday’s post: tigers in the snow.

Here’s a review of a book from 1974 “How to Make Magic” – a children’s book about the occult. It’s really not a book that you would expect to find today (and maybe not then either, but I don’t remember much about 1974 myself 😉 ).

And no new TV to record this week – which is good coz there’s a few series ongoing and we need some time to catch up with how much we’re adding to the box!

Monday Link Salad

I think I’ve seen this before but any time you might feel like it would be nice to live in some other time, here’s a nice little list of all the ways Londoners died during one particular week in 1665. Even once you discount the nearly 4000 dead of plague there’s a nicely varied list of possibles, many of which are much less likely to kill you these days. Yay for modern medicine!

No-one knows what they’re doing except those who don’t know how much they don’t know, and they’re dangerous – a slightly different take on the causes of imposter syndrome.

“My Real Children” by Jo Walton is a book I want to read, based on that excerpt. According to amazon it’s not out over here till August tho. So I need to remember to either buy it or check the library nearer the time!

A new Civ game is announced for this autumn. I’m a bit conflicted here, it looks like it’ll be Civ 5.5 and I didn’t like 5 as much as 4, but the set in space thing might be rather cool. I’ll likely end up buying it despite any doubts – I did get a little over a hundred hours out of Civ 5 after all and that’s quite a long lasting game 🙂

TV I set recording last week:

TV I set recording this week:

Monday Link Salad

Perhaps the oddest taxidermy … thing … ever. There are no words to do it justice, there really aren’t.

Thankfully none of my experiments ever did quite that … (animated gif). And here are some awesome animated cat gifs.

Someone’s meditation on what it means to be a naturalist – it doesn’t so much remind me how nice it is to have time when walking somewhere to look at the critters & plants I see on the way, as validate my love of doing so 🙂

TV I’ve set to record this week:

Monday Link Salad

Apparently triops cysts (eggs, effectively) can last up to 18 months in outer space and still hatch once returned to their proper environment … other facts about triops in that link, too.

This is a synopsis of a proposed article looking at the history of US science fiction writers from a perspective of discussing the far right politics of several well known writers/editors. The intent, I think, is to contextualise the various clashes between more progressive (and mostly younger) parts of SF/F fandom and the (mostly older) rightwing parts that’ve been taking place over the last few years. Looks like it’s been funded (it’s a kickstarter-esque thing) so will be interesting to see the eventual article.

I’ve signed up for a couple more Future Learn courses – one on Richard III starting on 30th June, and one on the Roman port of Portus starting on 19th May.

We’ve just got a Chromecast, so I installed a new app on my phone – Dayframe lets you cast photos, you can link it up with flickr, 500px, G+, facebook, and so on as well as display photos off your camera. Not entirely intuitive interface for adding streams to the favourites (or at least I got a little tied in knots at one point when adding flickr) but does the job well.

TV I set recording last week:

TV I set recording this week:

Monday Link Salad

Those “something buried in the ice comes back to life” horror stories might not be so far fetched – so long as we’re talking about viruses anyway.

Suffolk Police warn, for the umpteenth time, about a current scam: the con artist rings up your landline claiming to be from the police or your bank telling you about suspicious financial activity on your account. They invite you to ring them back (using the 101 number or the number on your bank card depending who they’re claiming to be) but when you hang up they don’t – instead they play you a recording of a dial tone. When you pick up the phone and dial the new number you’re actually still connected to the original caller, so they then manage to con people into trusting them with financial info. So if you get that sort of call, ring back from your mobile or someone else’s landline (or leave it a while before you call from your own). People are scum 🙁

Cadence looks like an intriguing game, from the trailer.

“Generation V” by M L Brennan looks like an interesting book, sadly not in the library here tho.

And on the subject of books, I found an excuse for a notebook – I bought a book on Islamic geometric patterns and how to draw them with only a straight edge and compass (and pencil and pen). The first one I drew is this (photo on G+).

TV programmes/serieses I’m starting to record this week:

  • Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – three programmes about fossil beds, presented by Richard Fortey who did Survivors which we watched just recently (post)
  • How to Get Ahead – history series about how to get ahead at court.
  • The Plantagenets – three part series about the Plantagenet kings, presented by Robert Bartlett who’s done some other programmes I liked (and I have a couple of his books).
  • Hidden Histories – one-off programme about WW1 photographs taken by soldiers.

Monday Link Salad

This week I start my next Future Learn course – Shakespeare and His World.

I’m starting to quite look forward to Evolve (the new game from the guys who did the original L4D) … hopefully it doesn’t disappoint when it finally gets here 🙂

The Writ of Years is a delightfully creepy fairytale-esque short story.

I’m catching up (slowly, slowly) with reading at tor.com – Jo Walton’s post on if there’s a right age to read particular books caught my eye. I’m in agreement with Walton, I think. Even though I re-read less these days than I did as a kid, it’s odd to think that reading a book “too early” would do anything but mean you missed a bunch of stuff that you’d notice on a future read through (or fail to comprehend it entirely but understand it later).

More book stuff: I’ve set myself up an account on WWEnd which curates a list of authors & books who’ve won SFF awards or been on “must read” type lists. You can set what you’ve read and it gives you stats (like I’ve read 47% of all Hugo award winning books), they also encourage people to rate & review books. I’m about halfway through their list of authors marking what I’ve read that I remember (although only rating stuff I’ve read recently). (I was going to link to my account, but I can’t seem to find a way to directly link to it, oh well.)

Mass groups of whale fossils found in Chile – probably the result of at least four different mass strandings caused by a group of whales eating toxic algae then their dead bodies being washed up on shore.

10 Facts about Ichneumonidae describes these parasitic wasps near the start of the article as “think chestburster from Alien, but for insects.”.

Less creepily here’s 37 photos from history ranging from the moving to the “wtf?” (particularly the baby cage for ensuring your infant offspring get sufficient sunlight and fresh air if you live in an apartment block). Thanks to J for that link 🙂

I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s pretty striking – due to different streetlight lightbulbs you can still see the East/West divide in Berlin.

The only new TV programme I’m setting to record this week is When Albums Ruled the World next Monday – but the BBC’s schedule page was a little broken this morning and I’ve not been able to look at what’s showing on Saturday & Sunday.

Monday Link Salad

Mary Beard recently gave a lecture on the long cultural history of silencing women’s voices, the text is online. Which juxtaposed well (in the sense that it’s similar cultural roots) with the programme we just watched on how Greek attitudes to luxury still affect our own. And juxtaposed in a timely fashion with the bigotry in SFWA thing that’s been rumbling on for the last year – the latest iteration of which blew up just recently and includes someone critiquing a woman’s appearance as a part of a rationale for dismissing her. Having read the lecture just before I read about the SFWA thing it was interesting to see how many times I saw it linked in comments.

Ben Goldacre on the NHS data sharing plan – he says with well thought out arguments and evidence things that match my gut feel on it. Having the data available to medicine would be extremely useful and is a Good Thing, it’s a shame they’re botching the explanation and the regulatory side of it :/

Reshaping Reality has a post up on how science works, the fundamental uncertainties at the roots of physics & thus the whole of science and why scientific literacy matters which includes a list of blogs and books about science.

James Nicoll’s micro reviews of the Science Fiction Book Club books of July 2000 – the one that caught my eye was SUBURBAN GODS (2-in-1 of HOW LIKE A GOD and DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE) by Brenda W. Clough, that he recommends and I’ve never heard of.

Also from James Nicoll some potential reading list generators – list of women authors who debuted in the 1970s, and 1980s with recommendations from people about books of theirs to read. Mine are in comments on those posts. Lots of them I’ve not read anything by, gonna give the lists a little time to multiply then construct myself a list of books to look for.

Ever wondered what the cryptic spray paint marks are on UK pavements?

In the “OMG I’m old, how’d that happen?” department is this: Descent is 19 years old!! Not a game I ever really got the hang of, I remember J liking it a lot tho. While we were at uni. Which is clearly only yesterday.

Also off RPS (I’m a bit behind on reading it) is confirmation that Steam Tags really are as bad an idea as I thought they would be. They do seem to’ve added functionality so you can report tags but what rock have they been hiding under for the last decade or two to not realise that unmoderated open to all tagging on the internet was going to generate problems?

Chroma looks interesting, but a bit of an odd idea … could be good, could be terrible, have to wait & see. And Doom 4 looks like it’s going to be a thing … can’t work out if that’s exciting or not, I got more into Quake (3 and 4) than any of the Dooms.

Trying to read old Scottish documents? This might help – via my father, who managed to decipher the 17th Century marriage record that I completely failed to read 🙂

Cats taking selfies … because the internet is for cat pictures.

“The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North is a book I’d like to read – similar underlying premise as Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” (post) but goes in a different direction. Link via Lady Business.

Apps installed recently include Crowdsourced Weather which uses the sensors on your phone to detect local weather data. Doesn’t seem to have many people using it yet according to the map, but I now have on my phone something that tells me the barometric pressure, the magnetic field of the earth where I am, the temperature (using an algorithm to figure it out from battery temp, a little flaky) and how light it is. This may not be particularly useful but it makes me happy 🙂

Also using Muzei, which gives you a new backdrop every day or so, each one is a famous work of art. A little bit of art appreciation on my phone 🙂 There’s plenty of plugins for things like NASA’s APOD too.

And finally got round to installing Untappd, which lets you track which different beers you’ve tried. It also lets you spam facebook/twitter/foursquare with what you drink, but I’m not doing that 😉

The TV programmes I told the PVR to record this week are rather WW1 heavy: