15 Jan 2025
I love a good highly-curated, lightly-annotated list of recommendations: Evil Mad Scientist’s periodic linkdump posts are a highlight of my RSS feed, and have been a source of creative inspiration for years.
Will this post be a one-off? Will it become a regular series? We will discover that together, dear reader! For today, I’m going to sort by relative intensity.1
Shing Yin Khor’s Make Little Guys: a (very brief) manifesto
From one of the most inspirational makers themself:
Make little guys out of clay, out of wood, out of felt, out of iron, out of paper, out of pixels and code, but little guys have to be the work of your hands and the work of your heart.
A little guy made without heart is uninhabited and will not have the correct little guy energy.
You’ll know.
Sam Wlody’s “really really good random number generator (rrgrng)”
“Computers are busy taking over people’s jobs with AI, so it’s important that humans even the playing field and start stealing jobs from computers at things that they are historically good at, like choosing random numbers.”
Read the write-up, and then go and generate some really really good random numbers of your own!
Martha Wells’ Murderbot diaries book series, which open with:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Over the winter holidays, I listened my way through the audiobooks for the entire series, then went out and got myself a hard copy of the first volume. My dad picked it up and didn’t put it down again until he’d finished the first book, several hours later.
If at all possible, listen to the audiobook version—Kevin R. Free’s narration is perfect. (I also enjoyed this recent Martha Wells feature.)
The Universal Paperclips game
I made the mistake of clicking “Make Paperclip” a couple months ago, promptly got sucked in, and made paperclips until the wee hours of the night.2 A month or so later, in the process of explaining that situation to my bro-in-law, I pulled the game up to show him—and promptly suckered myself into playing the whole thing all over again.3 I thought he’d escaped unscathed…until I received a 4 a.m. text that he’d completed his own playthrough.4
I am intentionally not describing the game itself. If you are even slightly susceptible to addicting activities, do not click “Make Paperclip” unless you have nothing important to be doing for the next several hours. And whatever you do, don’t start playing late at night. (h/t NR)
17776, John Bois’ web-based speculative fiction piece
A charming read about friendship, community, what it means to be a person—and, nominally, football. I was pleased to discover that it is just as engrossing on reread. (I’d recommend reading on desktop rather than phone, if you have that option.)
BBC Radio 4’s Add to Playlist Podcast
A podcast about music and musical throughlines that draws connections across genres and eras. For example, one arbitrarily-selected episode focuses on
Expansions by Lonnie Liston Smith
Ouverture by La Bottine Souriante
Overture from Candide by Leonard Bernstein
Khusara Khusara by Hossam Ramzy Egyptian Ensemble
Basin Street Blues by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Fivewhile also referencing
Green Onions by Booker T. and the M.G.'s
Ché Ché Colé by Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón
Hushabye Birdie by Kathryn Tickell
La Valse D'Orphelin by Christine Balfa
Toxic by Britney Spears
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker by TchaikovskyI like it for both background and active listening; it would make an excellent roadtrip companion.I’ve been listening chronologically, but you can start with any episode and it’ll be great. (You don’t have to take my word for it!)
Hazel Weakly’s You Have One Voice:
“Tech is not a vacuum, nor is it apolitical; regardless of how objective we might want to make an analysis of technology, the people who build it and use it and think about it remain. Those people are going to find part of their identity in the tech that they use, and that is a feature of humanity, not a bug. We should lean into that! It’s awesome! But it also means that when we belittle and attack technology, we are inevitably attacking groups of identities that choose to associate with that technology.”
The whole thing is excellent.
Caleb Hearth’s Don’t Get Distracted:
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.
But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
A timely read for anyone at (or looking for) a job, not limited to programmers. (h/t IR)
Martha Well’s 2017 World Fantasy Awards speech Unbury the Future:
Another unfortunately timely read.
Book burning draws too much attention. In science fiction and fantasy, in comics, in media fandom, everybody was always here, but we have been disappeared over and over again. We stumble on ourselves in old books and magazines and fanzines, fading print, grainy black and white photos, 16 millimeter film, archives of abandoned GeoCities web sites. We remember again that we were here, they were here, I saw them, I knew them.
We have to unearth that buried history.
Joshua Kaplan’s The Militia and the Mole (Jan. 4 2025, ProPublica).
I don’t feel equipped to add commentary to this one right now, but I am glad I read it.
…I was planning to end there, but I can’t in good faith end this list with The Militia and the Mole, so here are a few pieces of art I’ve particularly appreciated recently: