Wirehead Wannabe

A Tumblr Worthy of Swine

40 notes

theunitofcaring:

Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week: 

what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock. 

Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.

Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count.  I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand. 

And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks?  I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable. 

I hope this improves once we finally kill off cable.

Filed under suicide cw

43 notes

Shakespeare in het Jiddisch: Sonnet XVIII

robertskmiles:

droomverloren:

Zol ikh dikh tsu a zumer-tog farglaykhn?

Bist milder, liblikher in yedn zin;

Durkh Frilings blitn roye vintn shlaykhn,

Un kurts iz fun dem zumer der termin:

Oftmol tsu heys dos oyg fun himl laykht,

Oft iz zayn goldener glants fartunklt gor,

Un oft dos sheyne fun der sheynkayt vaykht

Durkh tsufal, enderung fun der natur:

Dokh eybik lebn vet dayn zumers prakht,

Un vos du sheyns farmogst vet eybik vayln;

S’vet toyt nit hobn iber der keyn makht,

Vayl bist fareybikt in di eybike tsayln;

    Vi lang nokh mentshn otemen, oygn zen

    Lebt mayn gedikht, un du vest nit fargeyn.


William Shakespeare (1564-1616)


Vertaald uit het Engels in het Jiddisch door Abraham Asen


Sonnet XVIII


Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Never realised how much Yiddish looks like rot13

Yeah I was thinking either that or Dragon from Skyrim

15 notes

queenshulamit:

michaelblume:

I’m confused. Every time somebody embeds a video in a blog post, my browser still asks permission to run Flash. Every time I play music in Google Music, Flash. Wasn’t there a whole thing, like, years ago, with HTML 5 and VP9 and open codecs and stuff and we were going to eliminate Flash? What exactly happened?

Did you already post this yesterday or am I imagining things?

Huh. I just got a notification that Chrome’s latest update is phasing out plugins in general. I know that Java needs to be turned on manually now, and that the ability to use it at all will be gone sometime around fall.

140 notes

comparativelysuperlative:

davidsevera:

meaninglessmonicker:

davidsevera:

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my first book, Jesus Was a Less Wronger, a work specifically designed to annoy an incredibly small number of people.

“If your right eye causes you to lust, pluck it out, for it is better to send a costly piety signal than to have binocular vision, which may have been advantageous in the ancestral environment of Eden but is kind of redundant in a culture with such cutting-edge pastoral technology.” -Eliezer 5:29

“Oh wait, you can’t exist. Nevermind.” - First Epistle to the P-Zombies 1:1

“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the AMF. Thus can you fulfill your obligation toward the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness and whatever else contributes to QALYs. For while nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable.” —Codex 14:12-19

““Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ For the Lord desires obedience.”
And Saul replied to Samuel, “The Lord of hosts may have more moral weight than we, such that his desire for obedience outweighs all our preferences and precepts, but my prior for that is low. I’m not going to believe he’s a utility monster just because he says to massacre people.”
And Saul commanded the Israelites, and they copied the iron chariots from the people of the plains near Ekron so that they could drive off the hosts that the Lord is lord of in battle.”
—Yudkowsky 11:4


“God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, and will destroy whom he will destroy. Therefore work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, and you already know better than to two-box on Newcomb’s Problem.” —Yvain 1:21.


“You have heard it said, ‘Keep the vows that you make to the Lord.’ But I say unto you, make no oaths at all, for you cannot achieve infinite certainty, and zero and one are not probabilities.” —Sequences 13:15

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is BEING EATEN BY A GIANT DRAGON.” —Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp 273-277 (2005).

Filed under The craft and the community god bothering Big Yud