Monday morning links are probably out-of-date

[kate_nepveu]

It's been unusually busy, whatcha gonna do.

• I thought I posted this previously, but didn't seem to see it, and want it for reference: at Vice, Is Using a Mouse and Keyboard on Consoles Cheating?: "More importantly, talking to the XIM's creator and people who use the device made it clear that—even if it were unequivocally a form of cheating—banning it would be devastating to some of the XIM's biggest fans: people with motor disabilities."

• Gwen Ihnat at the AV Club looks back on season one of Why Women Kill and finds it an addictive feminist serial. It stars Ginnifer Goodwin, Lucy Liu, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste, which is a cast that definitely gets my attention, though I'm generally not inclined toward separate-timeline narratives.

• The NYT Style Magazine did an issue on The Greats, specifically Nicolas Ghesquière, Rachel Weisz, Shigeru Ban, and Nick Cave. I found the last two profiles fascinating:

  Ban, a designer of houses and visitors’ centers and condominiums and towers, is perhaps more famous as a designer of emergency shelters, for people suffering from earthquakes and floods, for people escaping violence and genocide. For them, he has employed a signature material — recycled paper tubes of variable length and thickness. [...]

  Using materials that range from twigs to crystals to rainbow-colored hair, [Cave] makes sculptures that, for all their beauty, are visceral and necessary critiques of racial injustice.  

• Ten Rules for a Better Conference Name Badge, via Clever Manka.

• A quality cat video with an unexpected ending, from eliistender10 (sound not necessary).

• The Boston Globe documents how At MIT, a rancid 25-year-old milk carton is fetid and famous; if you're having trouble accessing that, you can try archive.org, though it's without pictures.

• “Libraries are Not the Enemy:” A Guest Post from Wendy the SuperLibrarian on the Macmillan eBook Embargo, over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. In addition, kidsilkhaze, a Collection Engagement Librarian, breaks down the circulation and purchase numbers and concludes that they make no sense for anyone, including Macmillan.

• Everyone's seen this already, but: at Vice, I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb.

• At Vulture, Alexander Chee has three questions for authors who want to write "the other".

• The San Francisco School of Needlework & Design is trying to make the World’s Longest Band Sampler. I'm putting this in the back of my mind to think about what I might do, while I work on my existing projects.

• The NYT investigates the reliability of alcohol breath tests (I'm sure you're all shocked to hear that there are problems).

• Thanks to Chad, I've listened to enough Giants football games to have a fondness for the radio callers; the viral call of a black cat on the field during a Giants game isn't the local guy, Bob Papa, but it's very good all the same. (The linked story has a partial sync with the video and the full call.)

• I will never have these things in my home, part a zillion: Hackers Can Use Lasers to ‘Speak’ to Your Amazon Echo or Google Home.

• Very long, excellent Twitter liveblog of reading Dracula for the first time, from xoDrVenture; secondarily notable for the fact that she never broke the thread over multiple days and hundreds of tweets.

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Comments

[lannamichaels]

Thanks for linking the AirBNB article, I hadn't seen it. I've only used the site once and that was to get a paper trail on a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's apartment for which they wanted me to pay them in cash.

[kate_nepveu]

oh good, I'm glad that that was useful after all!

[minoanmiss]

The article on Writing The Other was really useful to me from both sides of the question. *saves it*

[kate_nepveu]

Glad to hear it, thanks for letting me know!

[lavendertook]

Those cats! The game's the thing.

[kate_nepveu]

It's suggested below that the video is fake, which is too bad if so, but even the first half of it is still amusing to me.

[landofnowhere]

I had friends in the MIT dorm with The Milk, so I've been aware of it since probably '03 or '04. It's been entertaining watching it go viral.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm sure it's a thing that gets rediscovered every so often!

[landofnowhere]

I think this is the first time it's gotten any attention outside of MIT! And I hadn't seen its college application :-) I haven't actually been to Random since 2008-ish, so I'm glad to hear that it's still going strong.

[kate_nepveu]

oh neat! thanks for letting me know.

[thomasyan]

Thanks for the AirBnB article.

I loved the cat video. Too bad it seems to be a clever manipulation.

[kate_nepveu]

Awww. Even the first half of it is still amusing to me, though.

[thistleingrey]

That band sampler link is amazing.

Likewise for the "never have these things in my home" one. Reason can hear "Okay, Google" from next door, where they often leave the windows wide open; also occasionally "Hey Siri" and "Hey, Alexa." Y'all have fun with that---I remember the Cold War, kthx.

[kate_nepveu]

I really am having fun thinking of what I shall put on one! . . . after finishing at least two WIPs that have semi-deadlines.

[jhameia]

I love how the article about nametags repeats "Discourage creepiness!" several times. And those are all very sensible nametag design guidelines.

The Alexander Chee piece is also very useful too. I'm doing the Worldbuilding Master Class with Writing the Other again and I suspect this will be handy as a resource.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, I really like how he distills it down into those sets of questions. Glad you found it useful!