interactive fiction in 2019 is wild

I just won a game by getting broken up with and then crying. Which ... I play games to escape from real life, not to recapitulate it.

The number of cheap Kindle editions of Ulysses continues to grow. None of them are perfect: so far the editions generally accepted to be most free of errors (like the Gabler edition) aren't available, and the typesetting and layout are often amateurish. On the other hand, you can get a copy of a marvelous and strange book for the price of a candy bar and carry it anywhere.

• 2019 update: there is now a Penguin edition on Kindle, based on the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which would seem to be the obvious choice. However, it looks like it was poorly digitized and is riddled with errors.
• The Shmoop study version seems to be the only one that breaks the book up into 18 episodes. It adds Cliff's Notes-style commentary, for good or ill. Typesetting is pretty basic.
• The free Kindle edition is free, has the most reviews by far, but is apparently missing text (The Ballad of Joking Jesus and any other verse printed centered on the page.) Might be badly scanned. No idea what printed edition this is based on.
• Ulysses Unabridged (Illustrated) has the text the other version lacks. It's $2.99. Has only has one review, which makes me a little uneasy. No idea what printed edition this is based on. (Update: I ended up buying this one. It doesn't have chapter breaks. Despite what the one review says, it is actually illustrated. "Proteus" has a modern-day photo of Sandymount strand.)
• Project Gutenberg has a Kindle version up that lacks chapter breaks, although it keeps the three-part structure. Based on the 1922 edition.
• epubBooks also has a Kindle edition. Good luck finding out anything about it. It's probably fine. Why do I have to do this? Why isn't the answer obvious?

Recommendation: get the Project Gutenberg edition. Free, better than the "free Kindle edition", as good as the paid editions.

If you thought that was nitpicking, Google "gabler kidd".

tfw the best explanation of the labor theory of value in Marx you've seen is in a ten-year-old blog comment.

And this, surely, is what Shakespeare also felt, because in one of his comedies there is a soldier, a cowardly soldier, the Miles Gloriosus of the Latin comedy. The man is a show-off, he makes people believe that he has acted bravely, and they promote him and he becomes a captain. Then they discover his trick, and in front of the entire troop they pull off his medals; they humiliate him. And then he is left alone and says: “Captain I’ll be no more; / But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.” “No seré capitán.” He says simply, “the thing I am shall make me live.” That is, he feels that above and beyond the circumstances, beyond his cowardice, his humiliation, he is something else, a kind of strength we all have within us, what Spinoza called “God,” what Schopenhauer called “will,” what Bernard Shaw called “life force,” and Bergson called “vital impulse.” I think this is also what was going on with Boswell.

Borges on Boswell

Oh man it's been WAY too long since I've read Shakes

Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this, for it will come to pass
that every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword? cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live
Safest in shame! being fool'd, by foolery thrive!
There's place and means for every man alive.
I'll after them.

"There's something here that really, I'd like to twist round a little bit ... because, narcissism, is a very sort of pronounced way of stating a relationship to the world, whether it's a man or a woman, isn't it. But this other question, which is contained within it, doesn't go as far as it as an idea - is this sort of self-delight of a person, whether it's a man or a woman, in life, in what they'e doing, in their relationships with men or women. And it's a thing that matters tremendously. And it's not only a sort of inner thing, by which you live, but it's a very outer thing by which you gain relationships with your own context in the world that you can't gain any other way. That it's when you have somehow been made so unconscious of yourself that you easily, naturally sort of compulsively go out to whatever is going on around you. Now, when [inaudible] a child, that tends, more than people, to be other things, doesn't it. Mountains, streams, wherever you go. And then, only gradually, as you go on, you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people. But I do think that the sort of essence of self-delight as a kind of possible thing in the modern world, and something which fewer woman have than men, and want, and must have ... is the power, the compulsion, not the power, the compulsion to make contact with the world as you are living in it. And when I say that I don't just mean the people next door, or your friends, I simply mean what is going on."

I don't buy what she says about the differences between women and men here, but

9128 ambient, downtempo etc from A Strangely Isolated Place, Mysteries of the Deep and friends.

Papers, references, books

Could have used this three years ago, but better late than never.

Sandspiel + Perfect Sound Forever

Reading Goethe's "Italian Journey". He hung out with a Frenchman, "a man of rank, who is well bred, but whose mind cannot go beyond himself and his immediate circle ... he is traveling through Italy for pleasure, but rapidly, in order to be able to say that he has seen it ... it caused me some surprise to think that anyone could ever travel in this temper, without a thought for anything beyond himself, and yet he is, in his way, a polished, sensible and well-connected person."

In Rome he is "oppressed and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape, forms of every kind and style ... by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring."

I'm finally an Aleksi Perala believer:

Visualizing sea level rise

Story time

"Don't you EVER say that to me!"

Hayabusa2NOW

I which I continue to post links to stuff I would have loved around the time I hacked together this blog.

• Sriracha, but a little bit spicier.
• Accessibility for software, but as a continuum instead of a few "accessibility features".
• Me, but with the benefit of having observed a few more cycles of my habitual reactions to things and how those are oftimes unhelpful.
• Now, but maybe paying attention to the meeting I'm in?

Coord

Someday I'm going to need this badly enough to sign up.

I'm going to need this some day. Data on busing homeless people from the Guardian

NASA FTW

Faster way to desktop wallpaper

Android Architecture Components hits 1.0 stable

I work with a great team.

Bowie 😭

Essays

Funny, well, written, it's a good blog. Say this one: Tracking friends and strangers with WhatsApp.

Paper

"Successful IT systems appear to play a major role in the recent increases in industry concentration and in profit margins, moreso [sic] than a general decline in competition."

A coloring book

Online version is beautiful, I assume the printed version is too.

Talk on Youtube

Recently got back into meditation after years thinking I just couldn't hack it. I only recently learned that meditation in many traditions actually follows a concrete series of stages, the later stages of which are apparently inexpressible experiences.

This talk has a very clear outline of the very first stages, and what it means to meditate.

Plus just listen to dude's voice and tell me you're not more relaxed.

Pink Floyd Songs Ranked. Wait, come back, it's funny and surprisingly affecting. Also, it's 19,000 words long, but unlike the subject there's not much wasted space here.

"When you walk up to the counter of your local Starbucks you are not asked, 'Would you like a large cup of our free coffee, or can I interest you in our paid varieties?'"

"Package it such that it shows off its craftsmanship" makes a lot of sense.

• How the tech industry sidelined women
• "this is written for people who are dismayed that Google fired the author of the recent diversity manifesto"
• An evolutionary biologist / psychologist comments on the memo
• Why people are outraged about the memo

Haven't read these yet. Having trouble seeing through the rage I'm feeling about acquaintances on Facebook posting "actually, the memo was thoughtful and well-argued".

Thread starts here:

story by @crosscut misses a few key points.https://t.co/3aPXPmdheI

1. vienna subsidizes social housing. it doesn't tax new housing (IZ)

— mike eliason (@bruteforceblog) June 29, 2017

of course ...

And not to be forgotten are - strong renter culture and social safety net. Part of the whole picture. (Along with transit, etc of course).

— Fernando Medrano 🙈 (@wisemonkeysblog) June 29, 2017

As a friend reminded me last weekend, everything is impossible until it isn't.

also check this, maybe better Vienna summary

Just realized I never posted my set from Lifted.

• Tabula Peutingeriana, a road map of Europe - a copy of a Roman original thought to be based on a map by Agrippa
• Guide to the Tablula Peutingeriana
• Visual guide to the map
• NYC subway map style
• Google Maps directions for the ancient Roman world

Creative Commons licensed images, public domain, etc. I wonder how to confirm that someone actually is the rights holder for an image, and they didn't just upload it to Wikipedia and claim it's public domain. Reverse image search?

• freeimages.com
• compfight - Flickr search
• Wikimedia Commons has a lot of public domain / CC stuff
• You can specify usage rights in Google Images

Well, maybe not cracks but at least evidence of limitations. Lisa Schweitzer

I am not suggesting that zoning is not a binding constraint in some locations. But there are parts of that map where there are big deficits in affordable units in locales where land is basically free. Zoning cannot be a constraint in those locales.

And ...

I’m not convinced by that all the arguments that came my way last night via Twitter that zoning is hamstringing the productivity in urban areas so that people in the countryside are suffering. Cities may boost national productivity numbers, but that is a function of aggregation, not necessarily of strong economic spillovers. It might be that lack of growth in cities ultimately dampens demand for whatever Iowa supplies to cities, but the regional distribution of economic growth over the past four decades suggests that whatever economic spillovers there might be are weak.

But then the Iowans could move to the city if the housing were not so expensive. And that’s true….and yet they have had fewer constraints on migration than people internationally have, and yet there they are, still in Iowa, while I have crazy people telling me we need a wall (even though we already got one) because California and New York are too full of immigrants. People should be able to move to where the jobs are, sure, but I also think David Imbroscio has a point: people should be able to stay home and live a decent life, too.

Although aggregation might be a big deal if you think return on investment in some industries is nonlinear. Say, winner-take-all industries like tech.

Unpaywall extension for Chrome

I know, it was more exciting when it was illegal.