Tag Archives: Tuesday Links

Tuesday Links (05/14/13)

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Haruki Murakami and the Art of Japanese Translations: “The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness—or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. . . . Alternatively, English is often lauded for its specificity. Henry James advised novelists to find the figure in the carpet, implying that details and accuracy were tantamount to literary expression. Is it possible that Japanese and English are two languages so far apart that translators can only reinvent their voices by creating entirely new works?”

15 Ways to Improve Winnipeg: From my first newspaper, U of W’s Uniter, a very well-done and thought-provoking special issue.

Tuesday Links (03/19/23)

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Canada Vs. USSR in Nintendo’s Ice Hockey: Damn it, Canada, I mean, what the hell!?

Interview Tips for When Someone Asks, “What Questions Do You Have For Us?”: Really some deceptively good questions.

Douglas Adams is still the king of comic science fiction: “[I]t makes you wonder why, 12 years after his death, no one has been able to supplant him from that throne.”

Who Will Be the Next Douglas Adams? Hopefully, Nobody: “Nor am I particularly concerned about taking science fiction’s humor crown from Adams; that’s like trying to take the melodic pop crown from Lennon/McCartney. You can try, but they’re just going to call you ‘Beatlesque.’”

Tuesday Links (02/26/13)

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Dinosaur Comics: “Alex Trebek announces his retirement from Jeopardy. . . Of COURSE the show ends with Trebek. It was always to end with Trebek.”

This Plastic Printing Pen Lets You Draw in 3D: How is it that we had 3D printers without first creating 3D pens? At least somebody’s filled in the gap.

More, More, More — How Do You Like It?: “The industry’s arms race with itself simply is not sustainable. Yet here’s Sony, blithely promising to build a bigger gun. They’d better watch out—the recoil’s a bitch.”

Tuesday Links (01/29/13)

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To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe (Dinosaur Comics): “Okay, so we start with a superheated and dense force-unified space–”

The dystopian future of casual games: personalized, targeted pricing and mechanics: “This sort of thing is already happening in retail. Where you are could determine how much an item you view online costs. ‘A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations. . . If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price.’”

Tuesday Links (01/01/13)

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The Ten Essential Genre Films of 2012: There are a few here I’ve missed. Time for a rental or two, mayhaps.

Art History Through Sci-Fi Coloured Glasses: Nothing to add.

The Offer on Old Man’s War: A Ten-Year Retrospective: “Patrick making an offer on Old Man’s War quite literally changed my life, and almost entirely for the better. The eight novels I have written since are because of that offer and everything that’s resulted from it. . . . Professionally, I have become who I wanted to be when I grew up. It’s amazing.”

Tuesday Links (12/11/12)

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Beautifully Geeky Book Sculptures: I wish I were a librarian so I could blow the budget on some of these. (For display purposes only — cannot be checked out.)

The Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe: Howard Andrew Jones: His newest book comes out today, and my review will probably run this Saturday. A pretty interesting new writer you may want to check out.

Tuesday Links (12/04/12)

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to be BBC Miniseries: At nearly 1000 pages, Susanna Clarke’s faux-Victorian alternate-history fantasy novel required a certain degree of stamina. Not everyone is willing to read the equivalent of a full-length novel while waiting for the story to get properly started, so a series might be quite nice for those who gave up before page 250.

Top five regrets of the dying:A palliative nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

Tuesday Links (11/20/12)

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 Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves: “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village … Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and [thie children] figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Tardigrades (or “Water Bears”); First Animals to Survive in Space: This is so cool, I’m just going to embed the video below. Some surprising evidence in favour of panspermia? Who’da thunk it?

Tuesday Links (11/13/12)

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The Hobbit In-Flight Safety Video: I want to fly New Zealand.

Sharknado!: Enough said, indeed.

Commodity Fantasy: “It’s important that such a work leave the reader a little unhappy, a little dissatisfied, a little edgy — and anxious to snatch up the next volume in the hope that it will provide the experience that the last book failed to.  The more like a pack of cigarettes (if you’ve never smoked, trust me — cigarettes temporarily ease the craving but they never quite satisfy it) a commodity fantasy is, the more successful it will be.”