September 22, 2020
The Era of Visual Studio Code
"The most important thing I look for when choosing which tools to use is longevity... I believe the era of new text editors emerging and quickly becoming popular has now ended with Visual Studio Code."
The Humbling of Dane Cook
“It’s unreal how quickly the media goes from being a lap dog to an alley cat,” he wrote on July 23rd. “True beauty comes from within but you can’t just show up with dried clumps of shit in your hair either,” he added a week earlier.
The Keys to the White House
Professor Alan Lichtman has correctly predicted every* American election since 1984, says that
polls are a snapshot in time, but are not predictive of Election Day results. Voters are rational, practical decision makers who are not really swayed by rallies, campaign tactics, platforms, or promises. Rather, American Presidential elections are a referendum on the incumbent party and their performance governing over the previous 4 years. His methodology is inspired from earthquake prediction; either there will be stability (incumbent party retains the White House) or there is an “earthquake” (the challenging party takes the White House.) There are 13 true/false “keys”, and if six or more of them are “false”, the model predicts an electoral “earthquake”. [more inside]
Discover a World of Sounds!
Before there were CDs, podcasts, or streaming music, older millennials had: the Fisher Price tape recorder. And it came with a delightful tape that taught you how to make sound effects with cellophane, record family birthday parties, and sing a bizarre version of On Top of Old Smokey.
A Whole New Ballgame (Pass)
Microsoft is buying Bethesda, owner of game franchises including Dishonored, Wolfenstein, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Starfield, Quake, Deathloop, and Prey. With a purchase price of $7.5 billion in cash, the deal is one of the biggest ever in the videogames industry – and it's all about growing Xbox Game Pass (and maybe making Fallout: New Vegas 2 happen).
R.I.P. Ron Cobb, cartoonist and designer
"Cobb started his career in show business at 17, working as an animator on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in the ‘50s before moving on to a gig as an editorial cartoonist for newspapers. By the ‘70s, Cobb had started working in the movie industry, specifically on John Carpenter’s Dark Star with writer Dan O’Bannon, who later asked Cobb to put together some concept art for his next movie, Alien. Cobb worked with H.R. Giger, who famously designed the film’s eponymous monster (later dubbed a “xenomorph”) and some of the more memorable and disgusting aesthetics, while Cobb designed the interior and exterior of the Nostromo, the doomed ship that inadvertently brought the alien on board." --Sam Barsanti @ avclub
A fairy tale about loyalty, a quest, surprise, and triumph
"Once upon a time, in a very small kingdom, there was a king with one
daughter. His wife had died, and he had not remarried. This is not the
fairy tale where the king decides to marry his own daughter, don’t
worry. This king was a completely different sort of terrible father: he
believed that his daughter should earn his love, and nothing she did was
ever good enough." Naomi
Kritzer's short fantasy story "A Star Without Shine" is part of the
fundraiser The New
Decameron. [more inside]
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
When we first did the RS 500 in 2003, people were talking about the “death of the album.” The album —and especially the album release — is more relevant than ever. Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. But that was part of what made rebooting the RS 500 fascinating and fun; 86 of the albums on the list are from this century, and 154 are new additions that weren’t on the 2003 or 2012 versions. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better. [Rolling Stone]
The P-Word
Angela Mayfield - running for Georgia House of Representatives, district 67 - has a potty mouth. (twitter thread)
This is news.
Find the Mildreds.
It’s been eighteen years... what do you remember about the “D.C. Snipers”? Earlier this year Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall dedicated four forensically empathetic episodes of their podcast You’re Wrong About to revisiting what the series of shootings were about - a deep-dive examination of media, police and justice system blind spots through a rereading of the available sources that document the forestory, the events, and the judicial aftermath. (Their apt TW: “We are unable to conceive of a content warning comprehensive enough for all the horrors contained in these episodes.”) [more inside]
What we didn't get
Politics is an American industry - "Industries like technology, finance, health care, higher education, and media dominate our collective lives, and yet they are not regulated by anything recognizable as open competition for the custom of decentralized consumers. These industries share some things in common." [more inside]
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