Hello, everyone! Without further ado, here’s #11. Also, if you’ve subscribed recently, and want to read the older mails, you can find them here.
- Nothing Good Gets Away - If you liked last week’s one about Alan Moore’s letter to a fan, you’ll like this one too. From the same source, Letters of Note, which is absolutely AMAZING, this one is a letter by John Steinbeck to his son talking to him about love, puppy love and how he can expect full support from his mom and his dad. Made me like Steinbeck a lot lot more (He’s already one of my favourite authors). Very nice people.
- Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine - Brilliant! Richard Feynman is without doubt my favourite physicist of all time.
After a hurried private discussion (“I don’t know, you hired him…”), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.
“That sounds like a bunch of baloney,” he said. “Give me something real to do.” - Inside the Internet’s Unending Quest to Kill the GIF - The history of the GIF. If you’ve ever been enchanted by one of these lurking around the internet (and you most probably have), you need this smorgasbord of information about the internet’s most loved and most hated medium. Fun images promised.
- Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act. - Enough said. Daring. Wish I’d ever have the guts or the gall to do something like this
- Immigrating Into English -
I had read books that weren’t books, and I had read them using everything but my eyes. From that invisible “reading,” I had pressed my world onto paper. As such, I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer. I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me. - I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists -
Sean David Morton, whom AM radio host Art Bell called America’s Prophet, vowed to help us get out of debt while sticking it to the American court system. (He did not mention that in 2010 he was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for telling a group of investors that he could psychically predict the stock market or that he tried to escape fraud charges by declaring himself the ambassador of a nonexistent country called the Republic of New Lemuria.) - The World’s Fastest Falafel Wrap Maker Doing What He Does Best - Superb video that I watched for far longer than I should have.
- My Toxic ‘World of Warcraft’ Relationship Made Me Who I Am Today - Very nice article about what video games mean to people in the modern world. Knowing a lot of people who spend (what I feel are) disproportionate amounts of time on games online, these have got to mean something to the players playing them, right?
- The invisible women of videogames - Nice. Gives perspective, and again, considering how much video games affect people in this age, something that’s pretty important.
- Meet India’s reluctant space hero, Rakesh Sharma - A little old, but am sharing anyway.
“When I saw the adulation, it angered me,” he says softly. “I found the reaction to be totally disproportionate to the event as I saw it. There was a massive disconnect in terms of my appreciation for what I did, and the country’s appreciation. I was having a problem dealing with that. One half of me wanted to lash out and tell them… I mean, please.
“Remember one thing,” Sharma says softly, “a movie star, a sports star, thrives on all this. For a movie star, it’s part of his job to be known, loved. It enhances him. For a sports star, fans pull his advertising revenue up. But for a military man, I was given a job.” - The Teen Who Made Millions Selling Rare Sneakers - This is brilliant. A 16 year-old who’s selling sneakers and making lots and lots of money. What do you call him? Benjamin Kickz. Read for the kix.
Have a great Sunday!
Cheers
V
PS. If you enjoy reading this, do forward it to somebody who’ll like it too. It’ll make my day!