An example page from Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence, part of a larger excerpt explaining sparklines.
I love this style of layout, with the footnotes slotted over to the side of the material. It means the book takes up more space, but visually illustrates how the text and annotations connect - as well as making it easier to write in your own footnotes.
I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm for a few weeks now, and part of the reason it’s taken so long is because I’ve been trying to underline and annotate the text as a way of grappling with its scope and scale. A book tasked with recreating the public sphere and political mood of the first half of the sixties, it’s so self-referential that I’m finding it hard to tease out parallels and even self-sufficient stories. Underlines are my way of carving out a lesser text, a facade to the relentlessly-rich book that birthed it.
I’m halfway through Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith, a collection of essays dealing with books and other things of interest.
The final essay examines David Foster Wallace through his brilliant (and horrifying) short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and is easily worth the price of admission alone. I started reading it in the drive-through lane of a local coffeeshop, and was so entranced as to forget little things like oh coffee is coming and I am sitting in a car.
Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday: Sunset Edition!
Literary guilt, quantified
Today I rearranged my library here in Michigan just so I could figure out exactly how much I’m slacking in my reading vs. book-buying habits:
Books read ≈ 20 inches
Books unread ≈ 40 inches
Uh-oh.
Pinball attracted a different crowd than video games like Defender and this is the fundamental theorem of pinball economics: pinball skill is transferrable. If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine. This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers. The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.
Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder. By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.
A Roland Emmerich Haiku
Rewatched Godzilla;
I found it strangely mundane.
Touché, Twenty-twelve.
Why yes, 2012 does have the most absurd song-over-credits and associated music video ever. We had to flee the theater.
2012 is easily the best comedy I’ve seen in theaters the last few years, eliciting giggles from the very first scene and escalating to a near-death experience during the California destruction sequence (viewable online as the “Extended Scene”).
I was really worried going in that Roland Emmerich’s drama wouldn’t be up to the high kitch bar set by the explosions, but the movie didn’t disappoint. 2012 takes careful care to set up each character, giving them scenes to stand and deliver their inner drama before gingerly sending them off to their death. But despite the time spent fleshing out every single character in the cast of dozens, none really advance beyond a caricature. Even the hilarious performance by Woody Harrelson as a conspiracy nut succeeds because it highlights the caricatured nature of it all. And the constant disaster distracts from any organized attempt to tell a story; as my girlfriend remarked afterwards, “the old guy trying to call his son was kind of sweet and made me sad, but then a tsunami went over the Himalayas.”
The one flaw to the film - keeping it from Best EVER status - is being a little overlong. The movie successfully invents and reinvents itself for the two hours or so, but the last chunk of the film changes John Cusack’s role from “barely outrunning disaster dude” to “possibly killing a significant chunk of the human race by accident until he makes it OK again by fixing his oopsie”. It’s a sequence that feels like it lasts forever, redeemed only by the deadpan, gravitas-laden delivery of the best line ever: “we’re on course to crash into the north face of Mount Everest.”
Oddly enough, we were the only pair laughing in the theater - which otherwise consisted of older couples. I think they were expecting a John Cusack movie, and were wholly shocked to find something different and better.
Learn random things via an automatically-generated Wikipedia quiz! (link via Andy Baio)
megamindy:
GPOYW: Yeah, I did it edition.
Fact: rays of light normally radiate from Mindy’s head. The ceiling fan is a mere coincidence.
