Category: Links

… fandom is not about loving something. I think fandom is a separate occupying experience more akin to obsession than it is to love. And I think that, you know, like, religions are fandoms because, like, most of the time you aren’t actually loving the details of the religion but rather obsessing about your version…

Peter Sagal is a radio host, writer, and humorist. Here are his ten rules of Twitter: Since tweets have a habit of disappearing, I’ve transcribed the ten rules below:

The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. Mere-Exposure Effect (Wikipedia) Whenever someone on the Internet says “things used to be so much better in my day” or…

Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth is not only my favorite book of 2020 so far, it has also become one of my favorite books ever. Since Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to Gideon, is coming out this month, I’ve been trawling the Web for news, interviews, AMAs, and anything else I can find about the…

I recently discovered several resources for learning foreign languages through Hindi, which I found intriguing. Some of these resources are decades old, others are from the Internet age. Mandarin: https://avtans.com/2020/07/04/learning-chinese-through-hindi/ Japanese: https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/hindi/ Russian 1: https://ia801603.us.archive.org/13/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.482818/2015.482818.Roosii-Praambhik.pdf Russian 2: https://ia801602.us.archive.org/15/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.482819/2015.482819.Roosii-Praambhik.pdf

In the vast desolation of the modern Web—now controlled entirely by billionaires, venture capitalists, and media conglomerates—there still exist a few noble souls who are keeping alive the spirit of the weird, creative, and human Web of the late nineties and early noughties. No maps will lead you to the Old Web, but these hyperlinks…

Aatish Taseer writes: By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools…

https://deterministic.space/secret-life-of-cows.html TIL that you can use Rust’s Cow for representing a type that can either be borrowed or owned. This can be useful when you want to, for example, return either a static string (&'static str) or a dynamically generated owned string (String) from a function.

Years ago, when going outside was legal and I still believed in Pitchfork scores, I started a music blog with a couple of friends. We eventually shut it down because reasons, but thankfully The Wayback Machine managed to capture a few snapshots. Here it is in all its glory, minus the CSS and media.

While reading Crafting Interpreters, I learned about something called the expression problem. It’s a problem I’ve run into countless times, especially in larger projects, but I never knew it had an actual name. As usual, Eli Bendersky has an in-depth article about the problem and its solution in C++ and Clojure. After reading Eli’s article,…