Links
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Scarfolk Council
“Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979.” Very nicely done tone and artefacts. Hauntology as fictional blog kind of thing. (via @harikunzru)
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A Tailor Made It: Shirt Rant
On how a shirt should fit. I’ve seen some horrible, figure-hugging shirts on men. Don’t do it!
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Hands On: SimCity | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
The new SimCity can only be played if it can connect to EA’s servers. This review (towards the end), and many of the comments, worry about that. The original SimCity and SimCity 2000 can still be played, but when will the new one become unplayable, a never-to-be-seen-again experience? (via @D_Nye_Griffiths)
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Lonely Tweets :’(
Nicely done, and pretty sobering. (via @annegalloway)
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Discourse
New open source discussion forum type software. Brilliant that people are doing this, given how old-fashioned forum software still is. Requires IE 10 and similar though. (via Tom Taylor)
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Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers • Articles • Eurogamer.net
On the licensing deals between gun makers and video games. “We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light… Such as the ‘good guys’ using the rifle.” (via @matlock)
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‘Not believing in God makes life more precious’: meet the atheist ‘churchgoers’ | World news | The Guardian
A few years ago I was wondering what an atheist Sunday “service” would be like. here we are.
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The stupid cookie law is dead at last | Silktide blog
“History has shown us that whenever a law opposes the will of the people, it doesn’t tend to do much. It may have been illegal to tape songs off the radio, but there’s little appetite from police officers to cart schoolchildren off to prison for it. And so it is here.” (via @tomskitomski)
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Cross Browser Testing Tool. 100+ Browsers, Mobile, Real IE.
Sounds good. Jude said it was good, which is good enough for me. Good. (via Dotcode)
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I just got this email at work. I have no idea what is going on. : WTF
I’ve been getting these occasionally, for quite a while, too. Very odd.
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The Quiet Ones - NYTimes.com
On the Amtrak quiet carriage. I’ve almost given up on UK quiet carriages as they never are, and are therefore extra annoying. Also, the New York Times is apparently “regrettably” unable to print the word “assholes”?! (via Kottke)
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The Last Places
Henry VIII’s wine cellar, once part of Whitehall Palace, still exists under the Ministry of Defence. Although the entire cellar was moved, in one piece, when the MoD was being built. (via ?)
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Short Cuts (London Review of Books)
Paul Myerscough on Pret a Manger. 91% of employees are immigrants. Social security as a subsidy to companies whose products would otherwise be too expensive for their non-social-security-receiving customers.
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Let’s Call it Failure (London Review of Books)
John Lanchester on good, if depressing, form on the state of the UK economy and “austerity”.
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TV Networks, Algorithms and the Demise of HMV
I’m not sure i buy all of this, but some interesting thoughts in there. Almost says that without better discovery tools, Spotify is like HMV, huge but daunting and soulless. (via Paul Mison)
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Atheism Should End Religion, Not Replace It - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com
Brief bit by Penn Jillette, very good. (via Kottke)
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The joy of Essex | Rationalist Association
Jonathan Meades: “To look down onto the Walton backwaters is equally to look down on the Walton backlands. Such a sense of impermanence and of susceptibility to powers beyond our control is rare in these islands.” (via @antimega)
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Responsive Design Bookmarklet
Very nicely done bookmarklet to view a web page in iPad/iPhone sizes, with and without onscreen keyboards. (via Brett Terpstra)
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Max Sebald’s Writing Tips - Richard Skinner
W.G. Sebald. I love tips on how to write, and the illusion they give me that I’ll write something great one day. (via @HariKunzru)
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Evening Edition
Daily summary of the news. I couldn’t remember what it was called, so into the outboard brain it goes.
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Barbican, 1969 - YouTube
Documentary about the Barbican, including footage of the then nearly-completed buildings, and (at 15:40) a look inside one of the show flats.
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The Technium: Pain of the New
I haven’t seen ‘The Hobbit’ and its HFR, but most of the complaints about the 48fps do, as Kevin Kelly says, sound like people preferring vinyl over digital music, black and white film over colour, etc. Anyway, a good description of why HFR currently looks odd. (via Kottke)
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Django Class-Based-View Inspector — Classy CBV
I usually have a tab open to look through the class-based-views on Github. This might be better.
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A rundown of Handbrake settings (0.9.6) - mattgadient.com
Handy stuff because none of these settings make any sense to me and I just want to make video files that look fine and don’t take up GB.
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Turnover
The third manual tool for tapping out BPM data with iTunes I’ve used over the years, and by far the best.
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fberriman » Conferences aren’t the problem
Yes, this is the thing. Our entire industry is not at all diverse, so blaming conference organisers is, often, just avoiding the actual issue. No one’s said “I’m never using [company]’s website/product because they’re nearly all white men.” Because then they’d hardly have any websites/products to use.
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The ‘Whoa’ Business Model
Yes, this, a thousand times. Every time I go to the cinema and have to sit through loads of ads, I hate cinemas. (via Daring Fireball)
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Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins — Remains of the Day
An interesting look at Amazon’s business, low margins. stock turnover, pricing strategies, competitors, etc. (via Migurski)
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London Centre for Book Arts
New, in Hackney, devoted to artists’ books. They do classes on printing, binding, etc. (via the Guardian)