Posts Tagged ‘Candy Crush’
Fall Break Links!
* CFP: The Fourth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 2017. CFP: The Marxist Reading Group 2017.
* Tolkien news! Beren and Lúthien coming in 2017. Elsewhere in things from my childhood that I’ll almost certainly repurchase: Inside the new D&D Monster Manual.
* “Whoa,” said the gangster/minotaur, awed at how close he’d just come to losing his forearm. He was beginning to understand that this wasn’t the relatively straightforward world of street-level dope dealing anymore; this was Dungeons and Dragons.
* I’m glad somebody finally paged KSR: “Why Elon Musk’s Mars Vision Needs ‘Some Real Imagination.'”
* Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies.
* “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions.
* TFW you cut down a 600-year-old tree.
* On translating Harry Potter. Harry Potter by the Numbers. And did you know Harry Potter was nearly a major cultural phenomenon?
* On The Strange Career of Steve Ditko.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Mistake on a Lake: In Michigan, privatization and free-market governance has left 100,000 people without water.
* One teaching artist sees it differently. “There will always be bad artists with a lot of money who want to go to art school,” she said. On the Future of the MFA.
* The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job.
* The Secret History of Leftist Board Games.
* There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: On Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning. Relatedly: The World’s Happiest Man Wishes You Wouldn’t Call Him That.
* Degree programs in French, geology, German, philosophy and women’s studies are suspended, effectively immediately. Eight additional majors within existing departments, six teaching programs and four graduate programs have been shut down. The university is planning a teach-out program for currently enrolled students. Tenured faculty members in affected programs will be reassigned to different departments. The future of the campus’s nursing, dental education and medical imaging programs is still under discussion. Degree programs in environmental geology and environmental policy were cut previously, in July.
* Advice for how to use Twitter as an academic. Of course, as everyone knows, the only winning move is not to play.
* From David M. Perry: “My non-verbal son communicates through ‘Hamilton.'”
* From Adam Kotsko: From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.
* Dylan, Christ, and Slow Train Coming. Teaching the controversy: Kurt Vonnegut in 1991: “Bob Dylan Is the Worst Poet Alive.” Imperialism-in-Artistry: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Win Is Proof Adichie Is Right about Beyonce. Local Boy Makes Good. But not too good: The Nobel Prize Committee Have Given Up on Trying to Get in Touch with Bob Dylan.
* Game of Thrones is even whiter than you think.
* The self-driving car, Baudrillard, and America.
* On the history of fantasy scholarship.
* David Letterman and his beard.
* The LSAT and class struggle.
* Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks. ‘What Kind of Mother Is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?’ No, There Are No Ninth Month Abortions.
* The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of “imaginative power,” and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.
* Another gerrymandering primer. I’m inclined to make a joke about Obama’s proceduralism even ruining his post-presidency but this really is a major issue worth throwing his weight against.
* Texas?
* In The Hollow: The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race.
* The Anthropocene and Empire.
* How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers out of Millions in Retirement Savings.
* Atlas Obscura: The Land of Make Believe.
* A People’s History of John Stewart, Green Lantern.
* And then there’s this one: Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.
* Breastfeeding as captivity narrative.
* I’ll allow it, but know that you’re all on very thin ice.
* Thank god the Mac version isn’t ready yet: Civ VI is out.
* A dark, grittier Captain Planet: Leonardo DiCaprio wants to make a Captain Planet movie.
* Hungerford makes Infinite Jest represent how commercial publishers and their enablers in the mainstream media engineer a novel into a canonizable success. The market is corrupt, she says. But is it any more corrupt or distasteful than the publication and marketing of her university press book? “Post 45” is a scholarly association; Hungerford is one of nine Board members. Two other Board members are the series editors for the “Post 45” imprint. The “Advance Praise” for Making Literature Now includes effusive comments by two people whom Hungerford praises in the book, a blurb by a former colleague at Yale, and other comments so hyperbolic that they appear to have been written under the influence of laughing gas. Hungerford put out a misleading trailer for the book in the Chronicle, excising the misogyny charge that’s essential in her closing chapter, perhaps because she feared anyone who had read Infinite Jest would see through that charge and not order Making Literature Now. Her title is grandiose because her data is extremely limited. Rather than the survey that the title implies, Making Literature Now is literary tourism combined with two takedowns.
* Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference.
* Student writing in the digital age.
* Live long and trick or treat.
* I’m telling you, the simulation is crashing.
* And ours is truly a fallen world.
Happy Happy Monday Monday Links
* I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it’s kind of depressing. TCJ: The Bill Watterson Interview (1989).
* “Nada”: The comic adaptation of the short story that inspired They Live!
* Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114. Taking the “over” on whether there’ll still be human beings alive in a hundred years, I guess…
* Anthropocene or Capitalocene?
* It was the final night of Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival’s midnight ritual to begin.
* Terrible New York Times article on a fascinating topic: the “year zero” project of cultural destruction in Mali.
* Aboriginal rights a threat to Canada’s resource agenda, documents reveal.
* In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught. Eighteen years later, his family, and the man who prosecuted him, are still working to set him free.
* Women prisoners sterilized to cut welfare costs in California. Of course it was illegal.
* Half of New York City Teens Behind Bars Have A Brain Injury, Study Finds.
* Every once in a while Matt Yglesias still writes something good: The case for confiscatory taxation.
* Carceral leftism: jail time for wage theft?
* Piketty reviews from James K. Galbraith and Doug Henwood.
* Synanon’s Sober Utopia: How a Drug Rehab Program Became a Violent Cult.
* Inside the “certified miracle” that will make Pope John Paul II a saint.
* The Case for Drawing and Doodling in Class. Can’t we just medicate this impulse away?
* The liberal version of unskewing the polls is declaring victory in election cycles that are years away. We’ve got them right where we want them!
* College is probably cheaper than you think, though that’s not saying much.
* I Ran the Pyongyang Marathon.
* Powdered alcohol: what could possibly go wrong?
* Your personal information is worth just $0.16.
* Coming out as a porn star. From Vox, the site dedicated to explaining the news with clarity and specificity traditional news outlets can’t afford.
* Meanwhile, at a traditional news outlet: Can the Klan rebrand? They’ve tried before. Kudos, CNN, you remain the absolute worst.
* Hugo nominees 2014. If you know who Vox Day is, you know how messed up things are about to get.
* Criminal Cab Driver Mastermind (Allegedly) Evaded 3,000 Tolls.
* Abandon all hope watch: “The Democrats have a mega-donor problem.” Why can’t these naive billionaires see that Democrats who won’t support good policy are better than Republicans who oppose good policy!
* On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
* There’s A Hidden Timebomb In The Senate Rules That Will Go Off If A Supreme Court Justice Retires. But don’t you dare suggest anyone retire now to avoid disaster.
* Life is not a game. Neither is Candy Crush.
* Tumblr of the week: They Get It.
* This was the story of the Hurricane. Hurricane Carter’s dying wish.
* Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
* I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load. If you can’t tell that an A+ student in anything is doing singularly impressive work I don’t think “rigor” is your strong suit.
* Beyond the quantum computer: temporal computing.
* Nebraska School Gives Most Idiotic Advice Ever to Deal with Bullies. Don’t defend yourself, don’t ask for help…
* Paging Margaret Atwood: Drug that wipes out vultures may cause an EU eco-disaster.
* The Farscape movie is happening.
* Why did the TV version of Game of Thrones change Jaime Lannster into a rapist? More here. I’d gotten the impression that Jaime’s arc in the novels goes from “does the worst possible thing imaginable in very first appearance” to “kind of heroic?”’; last night’s episode makes that reading seem impossible.
All of which is build-up to pointing out that in the book, the reunion between Cersei and Jaime is seen from Jaime’s point of view. And once we consider that, those moments when Cersei has questions of propriety in the middle of their love making can take on a more sinister tone. What if we’re being kept from the true horror of what Jaime’s doing because we’re inside his head?
* The politics of the liberal arts nanny.
* And the 26 Best Cities In The World To See Street Art. Below: Philadelpia.
gerrycanavan.com Is Pleased to Offer This Sunday Reading Experience
* The schedule for the final third of my Cultural Preservation course. This has been one of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had; I’m hoping things go as well next spring when I do it all again.
* Starting out with two strikes with this guy and he hasn’t even found out where I work yet.
* The institution of the faculty wife is alive and well in academic culture. She’s an adjunct.
* Nietzsche was right: it turns out without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
* Elsewhere in the American nihilism files: NASA study concludes it’s not just you, we really are doomed.
* Meanwhile, we can’t even agree on the incredible, undeniable, world-historical usefulness of vaccines. One map sums up the damage caused by the anti-vaccination movement.
* Surely we’ll start the school day later, when every bit of science backs this up… Oh.
* Unreal: Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked. Could the Passengers Still Be Alive?
* Don’t be evil: Google’s anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content.
* There’s no escape from the corporate-NSA surveillance network.
* Five Cops Beat Innocent, Unarmed Father to Death Outside Cinema.
* No one could have predicted a completely unregulated peer-to-peer hotel network would lead to bad outcomes. Next up: Hey, Uber, your unregulated taxi was just some random creep’s unsafe car!
* For the true believers: A Brief History of the Quidditch World Cup.
* It’s not Mortal Kombat we should fear; it’s Candy Crush Saga and FarmVille.
* 50,000 Activists Demand Sexual Assault Reform At Dartmouth After Student Publishes A ‘Rape Guide.’
* On the spell-binding catastrophic collapse of the Juan Pablo season of The Bachelor.
* If we make the world a paradise where everyone is immortal, will we still be able to have all these awesome jails? Aeon Magazine reports.
* Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes.
* Kim Stanley Robinson is all over the ASU “Thoughtful Optimism” project.
* As of 2010-2011, the most recent year with available data, recent humanities and liberal arts majors had 9 percent unemployment. That’s right about on par with students in computer and math fields (9.1 percent), psychology and social work (8.8 percent), and the social sciences (10.3 percent). And it’s just a bit above the average across all majors of 7.9 percent. The larger problem, as always, is that there’s still not enough work for young people post-recession.
* Pussy Riot launches a prisoners rights center in Russia, demands freedom in Wisconsin.
* Promisingly specific: Projecting ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ in Theaters Requires Special Instructions.
* Game of the Weekend: 2048, an addictive simplification of Threes!, in your browser.
* And good news for fans of medieval maps.
Wednesday Morning!
* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.
* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.
* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.
* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.
* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?
* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.
* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.
* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.
* Academic freedom with violence.
* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.
* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.
“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.
* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.
* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.
* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.
* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.
* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”
* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”
* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.
* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!
* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.
* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.
* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.
* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.
* How the north ended up on top of the map.
* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.
* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.
More Monday Links!
* Martin Luther King’s Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Restoring King. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” “Beyond Vietnam.”
* Jebediah Purdy: No One’s Job: West Virginia’s Forbidden Waters.
* Well, here’s something interesting from the entrance survey to the “It’s Not a MOOC, It’s a Movement” “History and Future of Higher Education” Coursera course: You are invited to take part in a research study conducted by your instructor, Professor Cathy N. Davidson, and a graduate student from North Carolina State University, Barry W. Peddycord III. The purpose of this study is to assess a tool developed to automatically assess the quality of peer reviews on writing. The tool, called “Automated Metareviewing,” reads the essay and a review of it, and then measures how relevant, helpful, and specific the review was.
* Adam Kotsko has a provocative post today on higher ed and masculinity, reframing the crisis of rape culture on campuses as a byproduct of the hypermasculine spaces of fraternity and athletics colleges nurture for development purposes. In the comments I felt the need to try to extend this observation a little bit to the toxic masculinity that sometimes dominates academic departments themselves.
* State Higher-Education Spending Continues Slow Recovery.
* The future, folks: Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It. Microsoft’s ‘smart elevator’ knows where you’re going.
* It turns out you can get fired as a cop.
* Science has figured out why cold air smells different.
* On Thursday, Seay received a $10 off coupon from OfficeMax that was address to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash, Or Current Business.”
* The Air Force has roughly 500 officers in charge of protecting and maybe someday launching America’s arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles. Nearly all of them cheat on every exam they take, at every chance they get, according to three veterans of the force.
* Candy Crush Saga studio claims to own the word “candy” the same way it owns your every waking moment.
* And Tom Tomorrow has your typical day in the governor’s office.
Fourth of July America Links USA USA – 2
* Once you have been accepted into the elite, it is considered perfectly normal for various elite institutions to just give you vast sums of money for doing almost nothing, for the rest of your life. And the idea that outsiders might find these arrangements shocking, corrupt or simply sleazy is totally baffling to the people in charge of elite institutions. They don’t get it, at all.
* America’s Left: Find it on Twitter. Warning: He names names.
* Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. The innocent have nothing to fear he swore an oath to keep us safe is this even really news &c.
* Killer Robot Won’t Stop Killing Itself.
“When we first turned it on, it just quietly looked around the room for several minutes, and then shot itself,” said Samsung engineer Do-hyun Gyeong. “At first, we thought there was just a problem with the battery. But when we fixed it up and took it out for its first flight, it just threw itself in front of a truck.”
* Good guy with a gun shoots and kills two innocent bystanders after suspect was already apprehended.
* Mavericky: McCain Slams Efforts To Curb Rampant Campus Sexual Harassment As Violating Free Speech.
* When the NSA came recruiting at UW Madison.
* On the merits, Snowden’s claim for asylum would not count for much in any country.
* It’s official: Military coup in Egypt.
* Obamacare’s going to be a complete debacle, isn’t it. Sigh.
* The Candy Crush Menace. Don’t let it happen to you!
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal discovers there’s just a man behind the curtain.
‘A Key Skill in Deploying a Coercive Monetization Model Is to Disguise Your Money Game as a Skill Game’
Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush Saga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a “river” that costs a very small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A player may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjoyable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guarantee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what is on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payment is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of the river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players.
Gerry Canavan 