authenticityhoax:

Antti: “Drinking whisky and singing karaoke inspire me right now. My hat is from American Apparel, boots by Rick Owens, the rest is vintage.”

I actually don’t know if these are actual Helsinki hipsters, or of this is just what everyone in Helsinki dresses like. If the latter, it’s extremely remarkable. It is a profoundly insane combination of Guatemalan peasant worship crossed with Brooklyn hipster-mongering, with a healthy mix of Quebecois clown worship and even a dash of bureaucrat chic, all of which was seeded around 1984 and has evolved in complete isolation ever since, like Darwin’s finches.

[A]s I live my life I see that despite all the talk about how great it is to be outside, people don’t really put their money where their mouth is. Property owners are much more likely to build an addition to their house (thereby increasing the inside/outside ratio of their property) when they’re feeling flush than to orchestrate a subtraction in order to get more open space. Even in places like Southern California where there’s really great weather all the time, the landscape is covered with buildings and people spend a very large sum of their income on purchasing or renting inside space in which to live over and above the inside space in which they work.

—Eating lunch outside sucks: Stay inside.

kateoplis:

“Your protestations about ‘literally’ are literally wrong.

“Have we literally broken the English language?” asks Martha Gill in The Guardian today. The problem, such as it is, seems to be that the definition of “literally” has been updated in some dictionaries. “This might be the most unforgivable thing dictionaries have ever done,”says Samantha Rollins, anthropomorphizing bound stacks of paper, echoing the sentiments of literally 50% of Twitter. Well, let’s see about that.

It’s literally not “official”

Dictionaries do not dictate language usage, they describe it. When a dictionary adds a new word or definition to its pages, it’s because the lexicographers—those responsible for compiling dictionaries—observed it in “general use.” That is to say, a lot of people were using it that way.

You made it official, not the dictionary.

It’s literally been used that way since the 17th century

It’s not as though the lexicographers have made a mistake.

I remember seeing Mrs. Miller after one of those dreadful nights, when we had been literally rocked in our bed

Do you think anybody’s bed physically rocked in the wind in Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817)?

But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed…

Am I really expected to believe that Jay Gatsby becomes a source of light in The Great Gatsby (1925)?

A fun thing to do is to search the works of well-known authors for so-called “wrong” use of language and see how many times they broke the rules. By this logic, Jane Austen was a horrible writer. So was Charles Dickens. And holy shit, have you ever read Dawkins? Can’t use “literally” correctly to save his life. Horrible, horrible writer.

Seriously, people have literally complained about this for over 100 years

Here’s what Ambrose Bierce wrote about “literally” in Write It Right, a precursor to The Devil’s Dictionary, old enough to be in the public domain:

It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.

H.W. Fowler in his Dictionary of Modern Usage, published first in 1926:

We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression “not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking”, we do not hesitate to insert the very word we ought to be at pains to repudiate

There is literally a name for this

Linguist Arnold Zwicky calls it the Recency Illusion:

In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again — retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc. — the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It’s not just Kids These Days.

The truth of this, demonstrated above, is immediately clear.”

READ ON.

thought-palace:

I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from Stanford and from MIT.
But I was there.

I was there in 1979.
I was there when they demoed the GUI to Steve Jobs at PARC.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on Hacker News.
I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every feature of every good language from 1962 to 1998.
I’m losing my edge.

To all the kids at Facebook and Tumblr.
I’m losing my edge to the Mission startup hipsters in Commodore 64 sweatshirts and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

But I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on GitHub.
But I was there.

I was there in 1974 in the computer lab with Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Harvard.
I was working on the GOTO statement.
I was there when Eugene Jarvis was coding “Robotron: 2084”.
I told him, “Don’t make it so hard. You’ll never make a quarter.”
I was there.
I was the first guy showing microcomputers to the minicomputer guys.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.

I used to work at big companies.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there at Caltech with Steven Wolfram inventing Mathematica.
I was there at the Mountain View Byte Shop during the great Apple ][ - vs - TRS-80 clashes.
I helped Apple wreck a nice beach in 1992.

But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they’re actually really, really nice.

I’m losing my edge.

I heard you have a collection of every issue of BYTE Magazine and Creative Computing from 1975 to 1979. I heard you have copies of every Xerox PARC technical report including the one with the Dynabook in it. I heard you have autographed galley proofs of The Art Of Computer Programming volumes 1 through 3. I heard that you have the source code to the original Macintosh ROM on a 3 1/2” floppy disk.

I hear you’re buying an Arduino board and are throwing your overclocked quad-core Xeon tower out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make an Atari 2600 cartridge.

I hear that you and your startup have given up on OOP and switched to Haskell.
I hear that you and your startup have given up on functional programming and switched to Objective-C.

I hear every API that you know is more relevant than every API that I know.

You don’t know what you really want. You don’t know what you really want. You don’t know what you really want…

[with apologies to LCD Soundsystem]

In Ratatouille, the fantasy is that there’s this rat who’s really good at smelling and tasting, and he loves great food and wants to be a chef. That’s the conceit, and that’s the only conceit. The entire film proceeds from there, and if we’re on board for the idea that a rat can cook, then the rest of the film will basically make sense.

In the universe of Planes, the fantasy is that airplanes and cars and trucks are also people. But they’re basically still airplanes and cars, and they basically have to obey the rules of airplanes and cars as we understand them. Cars drive, airplanes fly, race cars are faster than jalopies, and jets are faster than everything. Given this conceit, there’s no reason to think that Dusty should be able to beat another, faster airplane in a race simply because he wants to. If he can, then what is the point of differentiating one vehicle from another, when apparently all it takes to go faster is to really really want to? The plot of Planes is in direct conflict with what we would conclude from the premise of its setting. Even the Cars movies did not make this error.

In short: Magic systems matter.

posted by Sokka shot first at 8:38 AM

bow wow wow

c30 c60 c90 go

After the Happy Mondays broke up, Bez became a member of Black Grape, a group founded by Mondays band-mate Shaun Ryder, but he left in 1997 over artistic differences.

—Bez “Bez” Bez

Edwards Air Force Base