Today may be the day my new glasses are ready. Just sitting here, waiting for the phone to ring… waiting… 
Happy invoicing!
- I’m a nuclear armageddon survivor: Ask me anything - Rupert Goodwins on going underground: ”In honour of the launch of Fallout 4, set in the aftermath of virtual atomic conflict, we were about to be taken into an ex-government, ex-secret nuclear bunker and trained to survive the apocalypse. Not the zombie kind, which has of late spawned an entire industry of movies, games, and survival books, but the real thing, which hasn’t.”
- 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage - Parker Molloy tweeted about lipstick. Then a journalist based a clickbait article on her tweet, and left her to deal with the aftermath: ”With each of these new articles, a new stream of people came flying into my mentions to tell me how I was overreacting. They were so outraged about my (nonexistent) outrage… These people were very angry about how supposedly angry I was (which I wasn’t).”
- Is PlayStation 4 Network Traffic Especially Difficult to Decrypt? - Speaking of manufactured outrage, Ethan Heilman digs into a recent story: ”There has been much speculation in the media about PlayStation 4 (PS4) game consoles being used in the recent Paris terrorist attacks. However there is no evidence a PlayStation 4 (PS4) was connected to the Paris attacks… I examine the Belgian Minister’s statements, analyze the secrecy and anonymity provided by Sony’s PS4 to conclude that I was unable to find any evidence supporting Minister Jambon remarks.”
- Suspension Bridges of Disbelief - Structural engineer Alex Weinberg is annoyed with Hollywood: ”Suspension bridges are far and away the target of choice in America’s action blockbusters. In just the past three years, the Golden Gate Bridge has been destroyed by a Kaiju, Godzilla, a Skynet-initiated nuclear blast, and a tsunami… In all of the planning, storyboarding, rendering, and compositing of these special effects shots, nobody pauses to consider how suspension bridges actually behave. I can accept messianic alien orphan superheroes and skyscraper-sized battle robots, but I will not stand for inaccurate portrayals of structural mechanics.”
- English is not normal - John McWhorter explains why non-native speakers find English challenging: ”In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words… Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.”
- The Man Who Saves You from Yourself - Profile of David Sullivan, a private investigator in San Francisco who specialises in cults: ”I became disturbed by how dramatically they transformed people, and in such a short period of time. They could take some regular American kid and all of a sudden he’s wearing saffron robes, walking around barefoot, all painted up, with a tiny ponytail and shaved head, dancing for hours, selling flowers and incense, living on the floor and eating disgusting food… Next thing you know, they’ve lost contact with their family, they’re scrubbing latrines with toothbrushes and liquidating their personal savings.”
- The Surprising Truth About Pirates and Parrots - "What, exactly, about a classic pirate Halloween costume—the parrot, the peg leg, the eyepatch, the bandanna, the snarling vaguely Scottish accent—is actually real? Is any of it real?… The reasons why the parrot became associated with pirates actually give us a pretty good glimpse at the real, true-life existence of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.”
- The strange tale of a Cities: Skylines town with only one house - Another account of the strange things that happen if you play a game in a way that completely ignores the point of it: ”When there's tens of thousands of citizens, and you're swamped with the tasks related to building and managing a metropolis, it can be hard to keep tabs on a single person's life for very long, and difficult to find them again later. I thought I'd fix this problem by creating a city in which only a single home could be built. Then I'd see who moved in and keep track of their lives. Here's what happened.” (Irritating pagination on this one - it took me several seconds to realise the next/previous links are above the content, where your eye passes over them as it ignores the social media buttons next to which they’re placed, rather than at the bottom where you might expect them to be.)
- The Pigeon Movie Database - Well, somebody has to catalogue the appearances pigeons make in the movies: ”Source: Blade Runner. Starring moment: 1:41:56 Pigeon activity: A dove resting in Roy's hand. Symbolism: It is very interesting to see Roy's character: a replicant that is a soldier and a killer. A tough guy that chooses a pure dove during his final moments of agony. Just try to imagine Rambo doing the same.”
- This Guy Is Charting London's Drug Use with a Discarded Baggie Map - "Since January of this year, photographer Dan Giannopoulos has been taking photos of all the discarded baggies he finds throughout south-east London. He's also been jotting down their geographic coordinates with the aim of eventually mapping out all the bags he's found and working out whether any patterns emerge.” Even street dealers now appreciate the importance of branding, it seems
Happy invoicing!
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