2 minute read

Not a lot of links in this list today, partly due to RSS feed cleanup, partly due to not-as-interesting-to-me stuff crossing my radar.

Fiction

I’m still working on Ship of Destiny. Not very much progress has been made, but we’re getting very close to a resolution now.

In TV land, I finished season 3 of The Magicians. So angsty! And magicians truly can be shitty people too… even if they pulled a Supernatural with the finale and leading into nesxt season.

Queer Eye has a new season out, and it is still very good. Confident men who wish to empower everyone to be their best selves? Awesome!

Actually got some things from the library read. The initial Batman from DCs Earth One setting (apparently, some sort of althistory take). Interesting, if maybe a little bit eehh…

But the other pick-up was explicitly up my alley: Don Rosas collected works, volume 4 (vol 1-3 were, sadly, not available). Leafing through those stories is reading excerpts from my childhood, cliché and all.

Nonfiction

I’ve been spending rather more time than probably wise on (neo)vim threads, procrastinating writing my exam papers by making my editor of choice more better-er. I’ve still got work to do, though:

  • I don’t like autocomplete having no delay at all. Should set one at hmmm, 1 secondds or maybe 2. Also, SuperTab trips me out when I actualy want to tab sometimes.
  • vim-pencil does nice things for my writing environment, but having to tur it on and off for lists, YAML frontmatter and end-page link sections is annoying. That toggle needs a hotkey combo, too.
  • I need to revisit my keymaps - I have a few I forget to use.

But I have found some interesting stories this week. My brother pointed me to a scathing disassembly of a Danish anti-cheat system. Le sigh. Pointless venality, placing everyone under suspicion to catch, seemingly, 0.5 cheaters per thousand student? Grossly incompetently done? Yup. Seems like the Danish governing mentality the past decade or so.

Fabio Rojas points to an article (from 2014, no less), about hermeneutic institutionalism . The basic gist seems to be, that sociology should, or only could, seek to uncover processes of meaning and understanding.

Archim Zeileis writes about ditching the default rainbow color palette for data vizualisations. The examples illustrate quite well how ill-suited the ever-ubiqutous RGB full saturation approach is. Neither readability nor accessibility are served many favors.