Linked List: December 2024
Tuesday, 3 December 2024
- Ko-fi tips ✶
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Things have been getting more expensive as I now need to pay for caretakers for my mom, so I’ve set up a digital mug for tips, after researching several options.
Ko-fi is a nice company, I receive 95% of the amount given, and appreciate anything received very much.
Monday, 2 December 2024
- Dying is a form of education ✶
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Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing about Elden Ring at Harper’s Magazine:
One of the insights underpinning FromSoftware’s games is a recognition of the opportunity that the medium presents—an opportunity not for narrative simplicity, as it has been seen in the past, but for a new kind of complexity, a centerless, centrifugal form of storytelling, defined by discontinuity and uncertainty and yet, at the same time, propulsion and accessibility.
Sunday, 1 December 2024
- Brain rot ✶
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The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”