Category: Microblog

Read The Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Book cover image. The silhouette of an Arabian city and a ship over the backdrop of a starry night. The title of the book, The Assassin’s Curse, overlays the illustration in swooping text.

Book cover image. The silhouette of an Arabian city and a ship over the backdrop of a starry night. The title of the book, The Assassin’s Curse, overlays the illustration in swooping text.

📚 I really disliked this at the start. The main protagonist was whiny and annoying; a privileged brat who – unfortunately – does not grow up much during the book.

Luckily once the story got going I enjoyed it well enough.

It felt like the author had a premise she liked but had trouble getting all the characters there (and that was a big chunk of the first book).
I’ve started on the second book already and either I’ve gotten used to the characters and her writing or it’s just better written so far.

Bookmarked I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe (The Atlantic)
The best strategy is blasting everyone you see—until it's not.

Is this too optimistic? Should we be more cautious when sending message out into space? Maybe, but I like the idea of starting off with a show of good faith than entering a room gun blazing.

Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

I’ve always been fascinated by one-handed keyboards. But they have a huge learning curve, so I want to find a system that I’m sure would work before I invest the time in it. My latest find is the Twiddler. Has anyone used this? Or have other recommendations?

I can’t remember now, but someone wrote about an app that stitched Live Photos together into a video.

Does anyone remember what the app was called?

Replied to Blogging in the Second Person: Open Correspondence for a Social Web? by James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)

@jamesshelley  Thank you for your post. I’m going to try to respond to you in the second person, as you suggested in your article. Let me say, it feels very strange and very informal. 😶

Here’s a couple of thoughts (in no particular order):
– comments are usually in 2nd person, whereas reply to blog posts are usually 3rd person (I’d have no qualms about responding to you in the 2nd person if I was replying to you in the comments section/micro.blog reply, but doing this in my own CMS is strange)
– love the idea of blog posts being like letters to each other
– would posts in the 2nd person restrict the conversation between the original poster and the responder? I’d feel rude butting in on someone else’s conversation.

I’ll need to think more about this.