December 2014 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "The contribution of de novo coding mutations to autism spectrum disorder", Iossifov et al 2014 (media: 1, 2; discussion; excerpts)
• "Cloning Cows From Steaks (and Other Ways of Building Better Cattle)"

Politics/religion:

• "Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists", Horowitz et al 2014 (media; excerpts)
• "Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt"
• "The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations"
• "Aum Shinrikyo and a Panic About Manga and Anime", Gardner 2008 (excerpts)
• "A Few Bad Men: Why America doesn't really have a terrorism problem"
• "Bottom of the Barrel: Today's terrorists aren't "sophisticated." They're stupider than ever."

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "What's to know about the credibility of empirical economics?", Ioannidis & Doucouliagos 2013 (excerpts)
• "The Ironic Effect of Significant Results on the Credibility of Multiple-Study Articles", Schimmack 2012 (excerpts)
• "Bayesian data analysis", Kruschke 2010 (excerpts)
• "What Teachers Should Know about the Bootstrap: Resampling in the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum", Hesterberg 2014 (nice comprehensible discussion of various kinds of bootstraps and resampling which helps put together everything I'd learned piecemeal)
• "The harm done by tests of significance", Hauer 2004 (how p-values increase traffic fatalities)
• "The Mind of a Con Man": Stapel
• Stein's paradox
• "Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Unpaired Socks of Karl Broman" (demonstration of ABC)
• "A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science's Aversion to the Null"
• "Unreliable neuroscience? Why power matters: Small studies with low power undermine the reliability of science and new evidence suggests that low power is the norm in neuroscience"

Psychology/biology:

• "Is Psychometric g a Myth?"
• "Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help", Gottfredson 2005 (excerpts)
• "Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators", Kell et al 2013 (excerpts; does IQ cease to matter past 130? No.)
• "Life Paths and Accomplishments of Mathematically Precocious Males and Females Four Decades Later", Lubinski et al 2014 (graphs)
• "Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists"
• "Studies Highlight [Futility] of Early Education"
• "Don’t Know? Or Don’t Care?: Predicting Educational Attainment Using Survey Item Response Rates and Coding Speed Tests as Measures of Conscientiousness", Hitt & Trivitt 2013 (excerpts)
• "Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science", Duarte et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar: The synthetic drugs being invented, refined, and produced today-and often shipped in from China-would have blown Timothy Leary's mind. Who knows what they're doing to the brains of users."

Technology:

• Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like "qeadzcwrsfxv1331"; For Ars, three crackers have at 16,000+ hashed passcodes-with 90% success.
• "Crypto Rebels: It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century"
• N-body choreographies
• "How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 'moon rocket' engine back to life"
• "A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene"
• Reimplementing "git clone" in Haskell from the bottom up

Economics:

• "Of Frightened Horses and Autonomous Vehicles: Tort Law and its Assimilation of Innovations", Graham 2012 (excerpts)
• "The death of peak oil"
• Survivorship bias in equity returns

• disability, immigration, globalization, and technological unemployment:

  • "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America"
  • Murray's Coming Apart
  • Autor on disability
  • "Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets"
  • "The Effect of Intelligence on Job Performance is Intuitive"
  • "Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature", Borjas 2013

Philosophy:

• "Bayesian Informal Logic and Fallacy", Korb 2003; "Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence"
• "Privileging the Question"
• "Be Specific" (if you make an abstract claim, can you give at least 3 specific examples? if not, maybe you need to think about it more)
• "Taking Charity Seriously: Toby Ord talk on charity effectiveness"

Misc:

• Taikyoku shogi
• "Try To Praise The Mutilated World", Adam Zagajewski
• "Morning Song of Senlin", Conrad Aiken
• "When Dickens met Dostoevsky"

Gerontologist Stephen Coles, M.D. Ph.D., went into cryo at Alcor, after going to a hospice nearby to "clock out," as Mike Perry says:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/tephen-coles-1941-2014

Eric S. Raymond on his relationship to LessWrong and the rationalist community (Including some friendly criticism).

An article about cryonics and Alcor which interviews Max More:

The Art of Not Dying

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-art-of-not-dying-or-being-frozen-until-you-can-come-back

Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist, criticizes transhumanism as a new religious movement here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/393646/give-me-new-time-transhumanism-wesley-j-smith

I suspect some of the resistance to transhumanism by conservatives, Objectivists and secular humanists derives from "Not Invented Here" thinking: The "wrong" sorts of people from outside their respective tribes came up with this idea, instead of the ones who already held high status in them. Ironically many of Alcor's early participants shared conservatives' belief in limited government, admired Ayn Rand's Objectivism and agreed with the basic principles of the philosophical materialism underlying secular humanism.

For example:

Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen

http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=&url=humanist.html

How Ayn Rand Didn't Get Frozen

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/HowAynRandDidntGetFrozen.html

Slate on killer robots.

Astrophysics:

The failure of the standard model of cosmology by Pavel Kroupa - strong support for MOND physics and no dark matter.

The PUA blogger Roosh Valizadeh explains his:

Cultural Collapse Theory: The 7 Steps That Lead To A Complete Culture Decline

http://www.returnofkings.com/49185/cultural-collapse-theory-the-7-steps-that-lead-to-a-complete-culture-decline

Apparently a French talkshow host has found readers for his similar analysis of the situation in France:

French Curtains

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/french-curtains_820204.html?nopager=1#

I find it fascinating that men who claim to have become skillful as PUA's, like Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day, have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism. After exploring the dysfunctional world of female sexual freedom, they realize that our allegedly unenlightened forefathers had good reasons for keeping women under male authority.

• The Wire

  Lives up to its fame (as long as you watch with subtitles), more than 12 years later. Satisfyingly intricate and intelligent police drama delving into the War on Drugs from a realistic point of view not blinded by idealism or unfounded confidence in police, courts, or governments like so many other shows which are based more on what writers think the audience wants to be true. Better than any other cop show I've watched. The filming on location in Baltimore helps realism for me, since I've wandered around Baltimore more than once. The downside is that the ~60 hours demands to be marathoned, and ate my month.

  The first season is perfect in its taut narrative from start to finish and illustrating the theme of The Wire: it's the incentives, stupid.

  There's a lot of discussion of The Wire and praise for how it deals with racial themes, but this misses the mark - race is almost entirely irrelevant in the series, except occasionally as something fools are blinded by and can be manipulated with (such as how Clay Davis gulls voters and jurymen with racial rhetoric). What is important is how, black or white, male or female, everyone faces pressure from the system & reality to maximize pursuit of their assigned objectives, not the underlying latent goals.

  Everyone is 'juking the stats' and responding to incentives to the extent that the series is practically a primer on public choice: the police respond to overtime increases and pressure to fake the crime statistics; poorer people respond to demand from junkies to make easy risky money selling drugs; politicians respond to the pressure from myopic voters and their ambition for re-election or election to higher office to do what looks good rather than what is good; newspapers tolerate faked news for the potential awards; and everyone faces coordination problems posed by incentives. Stringer Bell & Avon Barksdale sell each other out, resulting in their death & incarceration respectively; two prisoners remain silent but one is tricked into thinking the other is talking and then defects; a stickup boy is tortured to death, not because anyone really wants to but to maintain deterrence; a young boy talks to police, but an error results in his defection being detected and punished; the mayor frantically argues with his advisers to maintain a successful drug legalization policy but his police chief interprets the delay as indicating the mayor is preparing to pin all the blame on him and defects to the newspapers, contributing to the mayor's electoral defeat; the next mayor asks for FBI help with a cluster of murders but that's outside the FBI's terrorism mission (FBI employees are not rewarded for making Americans safer but fighting 'the War on Terror') and he refuses the political sacrifice which would give them cover to help. Incentives pop up from the grand politics to the low interpersonal relationships: the political consultant won't sleep with the mayor when he's only a lowly councilman but the instant he's elected? Jumps on him the first moment they're alone.

  And this is all systemic, so it's not clear how it could ever be fixed. Anyone who claims to be a reformer may well decide to 'sell out' and respond to the incentives, as the season 3-5 mayoral arc illustrates. Real-world events since then have illustrated this: one of the saddest things about The Wire is that there's only one thing in the Wire world which actually seems to be done right and morally: the eponymous wiretaps. They have to show probable cause, they get it for limited times and purposes, barely abuse it at all, and have to fight to have it at all. When they do abuse it, it's in the service of a good cause, the abuse is discovered, and the culprits are punished more than most characters. And now here we are in 2014 with smartphones and Facebook and the endless Snowden revelations, and it all doesn't mean shit any more. All it took was one terrorist attack, and that was that. The politicians responded to the incentives.

  One of the things I like most is that almost none of this is spoonfed you: season 3 doesn't ever explicitly point out the parallel plots are Prisoner's Dilemmas in which both groups wind up defecting and reaching the worst outcome for most members, it expects you to infer this; similarly, when the white junkie kid ODs, it doesn't hammer his death in, just does a quick ~10 second bit of his body being found and you barely see his face; or when you see the police major at a gay bar, explaining why he has no family and is such a paranoid careerist, he's just a face in the background; or it establishes characters in bits which are almost invisible, such as in season 4 when the camera pans in on the ex-convict's boxing gym past a poster of Avon's photo up on the wall with the legend 'platinum club' - referencing the original photo in season 1 of Avon, and also requiring us to remember that Avon didn't want his sponsorship known because he was free but that he's back in jail now in this season and this is a comment on the boxer's loyalty. Timing can be established similarly, in the unremarked-upon upgrade of kids playing Halo on Xbox to playing it on Xbox 360.

  There are some missteps. I disagree with the pollyanna-ish approach to inner-city school problems; the kids are pretty bad at playing Halo - the SMGs are useless against close-in Elites, they should've been meleeing them; Stringer Bell misuses the concept of elasticity, confusing it with competitiveness/market-power; the Brother Muzon character was a bad idea, coming off like a a shonen or comic book monster-of-the-week character ('the nerd gunfighter!'); in contrast to the others, the gang boss Marlo is too opaque and it's unclear what motivates him besides sheer lust for power and an animalistic taste for conflict; season 2 wastes time on the Ziggy character who winds up contributing nothing; and I'm unsure the mayoral arc of season 3-5 really needed to last that long.

(Movie, 1990) The Hunt for Red October

Interesting because the plot focuses on coordination rather than combat. Also just generally pretty engaging and suspenseful.

I'm curious about other people's reactions to The Imitation Game, a film in which Sherlock Holmes is hired by Tywin Lannister to crack Enigma.

Paths of Glory (1957), film. Kirk Douglas vs. Moloch. An anti-war film, for reasons both usual and unusual.

Film:

• The Shining: I watched it because it was a famous classic; it's very slow-moving movie which has the pacing problem of spending what seems like half the movie establishing the basic premise and then short-changes the descent into madness, which comes off as abrupt and unconvincing. The special effects are now tame enough that they're more amusing than frightening (the blood-hallway didn't inspire any unease in me, just some wondering how they did it - a miniature set which they could flood at will?) except for the rotting woman. I also couldn't get over how strange Shelley Duvall looks, and was a little offput by the Magical Negro character. Still, the hotel is a great setting and the ending works nicely, so I'd call it a good film.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 remake); pretty decent, albeit very little like story, and a rather shoehorned in quest/Blue Bird of Happiness which undermines original short story's protagonist by implying he was a failure before & the core dreaming was escapism

TV (putting The Wire in a separate comment due to length):

• Blue Blazes

  Live-action Japanese TV series, 11 half-hour episodes: quasi-autobiographical account of the manga artist Kazuhiko Shimamoto's university years as he flailed around, drew manga, and finally got a break in a magazine's contest. The mangaka himself isn't particularly notable - he did the Blazing Transfer Student manga and apparently the Anime Tenchou commercials, which are "hot blooded youth" bombastic fun heavy on sketchy art to convey intensity & drama & speed, but I had to look up his WP entry to realize that he was involved in those.

  The series is heavy on exaggerated emotion and facial reactions as the protagonist lurches from extremes of high and low, and draws on cringe-humor - you're laughing at the follies of his youth, not laughing with him. Tastes will vary for this kind of humor. Personally, I find some bathos is fine, but sustained over a series is a bit too much. The romantic subplots are also a misstep as they wind up being irrelevant, and inflicting a character on us whose voice is best described as a nasal whine.

  The real interest of Blue Blazes is in the otaku culture depicted; it is stuffed with cameos (Hiroyuki Yamaga is the bartender in the scene about him forgetting to breathe; Toshio Okada plays Osamu Tezuka after Daicon; several manga editors have small parts), allusions and in-jokes, many of which I didn't even get (the episode intros are based on kyodai hero poses from Ultraman & other franchises, but I've never seen enough of them to recognize them) but some of which were hysterical (to me) - the manga club character dominates every scene he is in, eg after crushing the protagonist's dreams by critiquing his draft, remarks "One does not care to recall the mistakes of youth!" and rides away on his pink bicycle, declaring, "it's three times as fast!" (Char Aznable/Mobile Suit Gundam). In particular, I was surprised to learn that he had gone to the same university at the same time with some of the founders of Gainax, and it is depicting Hideaki Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and the run-up to the DAICON films where it shines for me as it gives another perspective on early Gainax beyond The Notenki Memoirs. He apparently competed with them but was crushed; eg ep3 has Anno doing the Gendo pose after crushing everyone in animation (as expected from the master!). The character sketches are dead-on: when a room-mate's sister visits and Anno learns she has not seen Mobile Suit Gundam and shows his hospitality by marathoning 12 episodes with her, one senses this is something that really happened and which his friends have never let him live it down. Other incidents are interestingly reflective of the times: getting a new VCR to allow stepping through home-videos of animated series frame by frame, to better understand them; visiting an animation supply shop just to watch a loop of anime series intros on their TV; passing out slowly and dramatically, imitating a tokusatsu; re-enacting a sea fight in the baths. The student films shown seem to either be the originals or shot-by-shot remakes. Other aspects are... odd. If episode 8 is remotely accurate, Toshio Okada was crazier than a bag of honey-roasted peanuts and his nouveau-riche family (with terrible decorating taste) made their money off blatantly counterfeiting money, which undermines my generally positive impression of him.

  Overall: a must-watch for anyone interested in Gainax; probably a good watch for anyone who liked Bakuman or Genshiken; maybe a watch for anime fans; probably better skipped by anyone else.

Just finished marathoning the first season of Broadchurch, a typical cozy murder series staring David Tennant and every other actor I presume the BBC keeps locked away in a closet somewhere.

Tennant plays a guilt-ridden and deathly-sick-but-hiding-it DCI Alec Hardy who's just been reassigned to Broadchurch, replacing DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman), who was promised the job. He's all forlorn and gritty (not unlike Cohle from True Detective, but minus the philosophical rambling) and she's all sociable and awkward at investigating all her friends and neighbors.

The show wins when it's about DS Miller coming to terms with the idea that everyone's a suspect and about DCI Hardy being a gruff, tragic hero with a heart of gold. It also is good at being a Scottish cozy that doesn't depend as heavily on British cozy murder tropes (although there is the obligatory adultery that is revealed when one of the parties lies about their alibi). There's lots of fish and chips, and also (more shockingly) child actors who can act.

At one point, I told the television screen, "No, you don't get any more f--king plot twists, you're not M. Night Shyamalan." To the show's credit, there were no more plot twists after that point. There's also a stupid and annoying and worthless police psychic sticking his nose in the plot every once in a while, but luckily he doesn't show up that often.

You may be familiar with Gracepoint, the FOX AU fanfiction that also stars Tennant playing the same character, but this time in California without his Scottish accent. The only difference I've detected in the plot is that they've roughed it up a bit (pedophiles, drug dealing minors, and whatnot) and made Anna Gunn play Miller like she's Skyler from Breaking Bad. One of these shows was renewed for a second season; hint: it wasn't Gracepoint.

Vsauce is a great youtube channel for kid's education.

Trailer (90 seconds) for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens.

A couple of videos from the Venturists' END DEATH Cryonics Convention in Laughlin,Nevada:

An interview with the Venturists' founder, David Pizer:

http://youtu.be/jsuMWrGxZRU

Maria Konovalenko's talk:

http://youtu.be/aZbrfgMgXZw

A few YouTube channels for anyone with an interest in Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA):

scholagladiatoria

Lindybeige

Skallagrim

The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, by Francis Fukuyama.

The project is like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but with a focus on institutions. Basically, it's an overview of all the different routes political development has taken. It mostly presents historical examples. This overview of the first book is decent, which covers autonomous states in China, India, the Middle East (so early Islam, Mamluk slave-military-rulers (!), and Europe (he focuses on the balance of powers between Church/aristocracy/monarchy in France, Spain+Early Spanish Colonies, Denmark, UK, Hungary and Russia) up to the French Revolution. The second volume covers modern democracy (contrasting early American and European democracy, and contemporary Italy/Greece v Northern Europe), colonial and post-colonial states (contrasting Latin America and African, and then the different paths within each area), and bureaucracies (a lot of German stuff; a surprisingly interesting discussion of the US Forest Service). He makes some nods to contemporary issues at the end of the last book, but probably not in a way that will trigger any particular tribal reflexes; he talks about why he thinks contemporary American bureaucracy has degraded in quality over time, about political gridlock, and about lobbying and corruption.

I highly recommend the project as a cure for a sort of myopia where we take our contemporary political concerns as the starting ground for our general model of how societies vary. He's admirable in not trying to force-fit everything to a particular pattern: He explicitly highlights Costa Rica and Botswana as more successful than his general theories would predict, and Argentina as less successful. Unlike other grand-sweeping-overview books, his history comes across as neither reactionary nor reformist.

• Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (review; excerpts)
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett, Bryne (review)
• Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, Jansen (review)
• The Art of Unix Usability, ESR (review)

Superman by Habit

One might be interested in Lyons' Probability on Trees and Networks. For a non-expert some cognitive-kilometers away from probability theory, the text is surprisingly readable.

Generation Kill. While I can't know how accurate or biased it ultimately is, it gave me a much more visceral appreciation for the kind of decisions a combatant has to make, and how many of the seeming stupidities of war arise as a result of perfectly rational decisions from the various actors based on the information they have available. While I've long had an anti-war tilt, this gave me a new appreciation for how hard some goals (e.g. low civilian casualties) might be to achieve, and what some of the tradeoffs are. The psychology of the often strikingly young Marines - insightful on some subjects, simplistic on others - was also fascinating.

Patrick Rothfuss' The Slow Regard of Silent Things, describing the inner and outer world of Aur is written as beautifully as the two previous novels, maybe even more so. I highly recommend the audiobook, read by the author, as the book just screams to be read aloud, like poetry, which it basically is.

I wonder if there are any reviews of the book by psychiatrists (maybe SSC will get around to it, once done bashing NRx and social justice?). Auri seems to have schizo, bipolar and OCD, all seeming sensible and natural from her own point of view.

• A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
• Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees
• The Far Side Gallery 3 (I think I liked them better as a kid; re-reading, I realize Larson really only had a few jokes & characters which he permuted endlessly. It doesn't grow up with you as much as some others like Calvin & Hobbes do.)

Shirobako, ongoing series. It's an anime about an animation company. Seems pretty realistic apart from some comically exaggerated characters. It's not going to blow anyone's mind but if you're into anime as a medium it's an interesting and entertaining look at how it's made.

I've been enjoying Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Touhou:

• "千年幻想郷 ~ History of the Moon" (Liverne (ゆう), Yu- (Phoenix Project), Tokunan; Touhou Gensou Shiten 2 "Canon" {C71}) [metal]
• "チルノ ／おてんば恋娘" (Yoshiki Ara; Charisma Lash Type-M {C86}) [orchestral]
• "ソリテス・パラドックス" (Ryuuha Mikaido; ティマイオス ～風の詩～ {C86}) [orchestral]
• "オッカムの剃刀" (Ryuuha Mikaido; ティマイオス ～風の詩～ {C86}) [orchestral]
• "Even if they say nothing in the night" (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [waltz]
• "Library Rag" (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [ragtime]
• "巫女みこ茶々々" (Machikado-Mapoze; Dancing Phantasmagoria {C86}) [Cha-cha-chá]
• "佐々木喜善はかく語りき ～ 願わくはこれを語りて平地人を戦慄せしめよ" (ジャム; DAYDREAM TUNES {C86}) [classical]
• "天空の花の都" (埼玉最終兵器; Cradle Re:BOOT -東方幻樂祀典- {C86}) [metal]
• "An Enlarging Story" (RD-Sounds; Slaughter {C86}) [orchestral]
• "Way to go Shinmyoumaru ~Battle with Titans~" (RD-Sounds; Slaughter {C86}) [orchestral]
• "Could She Know The Summer?" (setsugen; DAYDREAM TUNES {C86}) [classical]

Doujin:

• "Summer Dayz" (村瀬悠太; AD:HOUSE 3 {C86}) [instrumental]
• "またあした" (bacon8 feat. nijimine kakoi; luminous flux {C85}) [acoustic]
• "パラミシアの狼" (O-kei feat. ヤマイ; SONORA {2014}) [Jpop]
• "Call My Cell" (Hige Driver feat. ΦKushiΦ; Hige Dance {C86}) [electronic]

Vocaloid:

• "Back to You" (Luka; Planty; Planet Planty {2014}) [trance]
• "In Adversae" (Luka, Kaito; Planty; Planet Planty {2014}) [trance]
• "It was ten days ago." (Miku; Toku-P; The Universe {2009}) [vocal]
• "魁!パンツメン☆ミ" (Miku; KASANE; sync-loid:05 {2014}) [Jpop]
• "Boku mo Kuzu Dakara" (Miku; PinnochioP; Yusei Masshirake {VM27}) [Jpop]

Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon. I'm surprised I missed this album when it first came out. It's like a folk version of Agalloch. Excellent.

In Flames' newest album was garbage. It's sad, since that band got me into metal. These are some of my favorites of their old stuff: Man Made God, Episode 666, and Swim.

中島みゆき:

• 地上の星; live rock version; lyrics with translation

• ファイト！; lyrics with translation (Ctrl+F "Fight!")

• ヘッドライト・テールライト

Top Ten Myths about the Alexander Technique

An excellent depiction of letting mind-body systems work without imposing unnecessary concepts (posture, relaxation, symmetry, etc.) on them.

Here's an advent postcard I have received today in Fallen London:

"We've had our differences. But this is Christmas.

Best wishes, the Fallen London Probably Random Number Algorithm"

There was a pair of Devilbone Dice in the letter. I wonder what could they be good for?

Fallen London (formerly Echo Bazaar) is an alternative Victorian London with gothic and steampunk overtones", according to Wikipedia.

It won an Escapist Magazine's award for Browser-Based Game of 2009 (scroll to the end) and is, in fact, developed by the actual Londoners.

I am Listic in Fallen London.

I can send you an invite (listic.pony at gmail; not sure what an invite gets you, though) or you may register all by yourself, as it is a free-to-p(l)ay game.

Reminder that Weird Sun Twitter exists.

(Edited link because Unit Of Selection is apparently deactivated)

02geek is offering a Kickstarter pre-order special offer for a bundle of online video training courses:

Learn to develop amazing animations for the web/apps teaches JavaScript via animation. I like the approach, since I find both topic interesting.

I can arrange for a free pass, in exchange for a review; email me.

Board Games:

I recently played Archipelago for the first time and the physical object is just so, so pretty. It feels like the setup is quite complex - perhaps too complex to be worth it - but I'm in love with the pieces and the way it tries to integrate a standard eurogame theme into its mechanics in a way that's actually relevant.

I didn't like the 7 Wonders: Leaders expansion; one leader in particular seemed to have a very unbalancing effect, not so much on the owning player as their neighbours thanks to the effect on resource distribution.

...