If there's a bug going round, the music has stopped and it's sat on me 
Just going to post these and then see about an early night:
Happy invoicing!
Just going to post these and then see about an early night:- The Making Of: Jet Set Willy - Matthew Smith, the creator of the classic Spectrum game, explains how it came to be, in great detail: "We wonder how pirouetting rabbits, wobbling jellies and the entire cast of inanimate objects brought disturbingly to life fitted into Smith’s everyday existence. 'That may have been the mushrooms,' he offers, helpfully."
- Golden Ratio in logo designs - "Beauty and aesthetics have been praised from time immemorial. But little did people know that the most effective, perfectly balanced, and visually compelling creations followed the tid-bits of mathematics. At least not until 1860, when German physicist and psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner proposed that a simple ratio, an irrational number defines the balance in nature." Saikat Banerjee takes a look at the ratio as it appears behind the scenes of some famous logos.
- Who's That Woman In The Twitter Bot Profile? - Jason Feifer tracks down a woman whose photo has been hijacked for use as an avatar by spambot Twitter accounts: "My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars--the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands' followers remain up to 48% bot--these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims."
- The Writing of E. Nesbit - Gore Vidal, who died a couple of weeks ago, writing in the The New York Review of Books in 1964 about children's writer E. Nesbit: "[Children] are forced to develop a sense of communality which though it does not necessarily make them any nicer to one another at least makes it possible for them to see each other with perfect clarity, and it is part of Nesbit’s genius that she sees them as clearly and unsentimentally as they see themselves, making for that sense of life without which there is no literature at any level."
- An Unexpected Ass Kicking - "...an elderly gentleman at least 80 years old sat down next to me with a hot coffee and a pastry. ...'I’ve done lots of things that haven’t been done before', he said half-smiling. 'I created the world’s first internally programmable computer. It used to take up a space about as big as this whole room and my wife and I used to walk into it to program it.'" Joel Runyon has a chance encounter with Russell A. Kirsch in a Portland coffee shop.
- “You will always have work, and it will be the best kind of work” — Richard Rhodes on writing - "Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and of 23 other books, delivered one of the keynotes at this year’s Mayborn Conference for Literary Journalism. Here are five top takeaways from that address, followed by an edited transcript of his talk and a snippet from the Q-and-A session that followed."
- Why I Quit Microsoft To Join A 5 Person Start Up In Toronto - Yet another examination of the dysfunctional nature of the management of Microsoft: "My first year at Microsoft was great!... Then I slowly became more and more unhappy with my life and the culture at Microsoft."
- Standing the test of time: the 'classic' British sitcom - "BCG reader David Allan offers some thoughts on why some comedies stand the test of time better than others." Or, just why does Terry & June seem so dated?
- Thank You for the Light - The New Yorker rejected this F. Scott Fitzgerald short story in 1936. They've finally changed their minds.
- The NeilInnes.org Section That's All ABout The Innes Book of Records - "The Innes Book of Records was Neil Innes' BBC2 TV show from 1979 to 1981." And now, over thirty years on, this new section of his web site puts together the stories behind the songs, the characters, and the guests
The perfect thing for the Bonzos/Python fan!
Happy invoicing!
Comment