Attention grabbing
While I am apparently on a recommendation kick, let me share with you this essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. Have a handful of thought-provoking pull-quotes.
#recommendations
18 posts
- Read more → More from Duly Noted →
-
Fandom
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I’m not usually one for podcasts, but I discovered @fansplaining a few weeks ago and have really been getting a kick out of it. It is a “podcast by, about, and for fandom, hosted by Flourish Klink & Elizabeth Minkel” and it is fantastic.
-
Some Books
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I’ve been reading a lot lately, but slowly. My new note-taking system seems to double or even triple how long it takes me to get through a book. Part of me wants to say “screw it all!” and go back to flying through non-fiction like novels but I can already tell how much more I’m retaining now that I’m actually writing stuff down.
-
A Brief History of Humankind, briefer
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A few months back, a friend recommended watching the videos from a Coursera course, A Brief History of Humankind. I recently finished, and I second the recommendation. The lectures are engaging and encompassing without being overly shallow, and I like Yuval Harari's approach of describing theories while continuously pointing out their contradictions and uncertain nature.
-
Networks
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My sister came to visit this week and one of the places I showed her around was the Media Lab. She was curious about the display near the front door, which I had never really investigated. We ended up spending half an hour playing with it. It's called Immersion, and it's online as of today.
-
Pleasant Distractions
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I had a conversation with some of my housemates earlier this week about our favorite games, and I thought I'd expound on a few of mine for just a bit. These are all browser-based games, so they're only a few clicks away.
-
Psychology Links
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It's a good list, so I thought I'd also share it here.
-
The sopranos (and mezzo-sopranos, and contraltos)
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →For whatever reason, much of the music that I've found and liked has been by men. My favorite singers/bands/acts - Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Great Lake Swimmers, Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel - are all dudes. Not very cool. So half the purpose of this post is to get you all to recommend me some lady singers and songwriters.
-
You've Got a Song About Friendship
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I had friends over for Valentine's Day, as I frequently do, and this year I decided to make a playlist of songs about friendship, which were astonishingly hard to find. Although to be fair, I did exclude some songs 'cause I didn't like them, but I should have been overwhelmed by options! Anyway, here is the playlist:
-
Puzzled
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The Mystery Hunt was last weekend. It was unexpectedly musicals-themed and expectedly exhaustingly awesome. I wanted to briefly highlight my favorite puzzles from this year:
-
Such a Beautiful Way to Waste Your Time
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I'm in the middle of an incredibly busy month, so I thought I'd be efficient and document one of my favorite procrastination activities as a blog post. I call this activity "finding shiny things on the web". Today's theme is science and nature photos.
-
Stories for Days
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Story a Day projects frequently result in large clumps of dross - I should know, I've done one myself. So when I stumbled across Ommataidia, an archive of over 1000 bite size stories written daily for years, I expected the same.
-
Blog Note; Art Rec
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been sporadic about blogging lately, but that's all about to change: my friends/housemates Molly and Asheesh and I are doing "Iron Blogger". Basically, we try to post weekly, and for each week we miss we contribute \$5 to a communal pot. Once the pot's sizable enough, we split it three ways and go out drinking together. I plan to update with regularity and fervor, and laugh at Molly and Asheesh all the way to the pub. (It occurs to me that a *real* Iron Blogger competition would involve being given a random topic and 60 minutes to write a blog post. But it seems like the readers would be the real losers there\...) Anyway, on to the first blog post of a new era.
-
Totally Gay Fiction
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The blogs of my writing and editing friends have been buzzing today with the story of a YA author who was told by the editor of an anthology to change the romance in her story from gay to straight. It's satisfying to see the online community rally around the author, and I hope that something tangible comes out of this - say, a new commitment to encouraging work with gay protagonists. Perhaps an anthology!
-
Surreal Women
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've never really been a connoisseur of the visual arts. I'm not drawn to them the way I am to music or writing, so I don't really know much about them - any artists beyond the famous ones, the terms for techniques, movements, styles.
-
Swimming in Harmony
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The Great Lake Swimmers are one of my favorite bands, although I didn't really understand just how incredible they are until I got a chance to see them live. Sitting in the front row of a small theater is the best way to experience them - unless you can somehow convince them to play you a concert in the middle of the woods somewhere, or on a beach, or a mountaintop. Because the Great Lake Swimmers write love songs to, for, about nature.
-
Born Digital
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Found via a friend: the Electronic Literature Collection is a treasure trove of stories, statements, and pieces of art that use their electronic medium to confuse, provoke and entangle the audience.
-
A Recommendation
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Reading a novel or story by Milan Kundera is not like reading anything else: he has a languid style which slides imperceptibly from narrative to essay and back again. His books are full of delicate caged moments set side by side with off-hand philosophy. He's never made me laugh or cry, but sometimes when I read him I have to put him down and close my eyes and just swim in his words for a while.