Category: Links

Heather Anne Campbell, Matt Apodaca, and Nick Wiger talk about online fandom in an episode of the Get Played podcast.

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 “why did they…

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…

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,…

tl;dr: everyone loves pattern matching.

What is the Morally Appropriate Language in Which to Think and Write? is one of my favorite pieces of writing on the Internet. At its core, the essay is about using translation as a primary form of literary creation in a country as linguistically diverse as India. Put another way, it’s about Arundhati Roy’s quest…

When I’m learning a new programming language, the biggest challenge I face is figuring out what to build with it. Programming challenge websites can be useful, but they rarely ever push you towards exploring real-world use cases for a language. Thankfully, there’s a variety of resources available on the Web that walk you through building…

I never thought I’d be moved to tears by a review for a video game I haven’t even played, yet here we are. Nathan Grayson’s review for Darkest Dungeon touches on issues of burnout and overwork that I’ve struggled with throughout my twenties. Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based RPG with an interesting mechanic: as you…