Art is “the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions”.

How Harold Ramis's movies have stayed funny for twenty-five years.

By breaking a big project into smaller chunks, you stand a better chance at maintaining motivation and rekindling interest.

A short film written and directed by Douglas Coupland

Interview with D. Coupland in 2009 about Gen X, Kurt Cobain, storytelling, voices, technology.

HTML5 audio done right. Outlines the hierarchy of tags to use to get an mp3 file working in all browsers with HTML5 (falling back to Flash where necessary).

Next time you're thinking of an excuse to avoid doing what would make you happiest, remember: stay fun, and get it done. Your ideas won't sound so wild and wacky once you share them.

Smart people actually say things that are very simple and easy to understand. And the smarter they are, the more clear what they say is. It’s stupid people who say things that are hard to understand.

Part of this is because stupid people say things that aren’t true, things that aren’t true don’t make sense, and things that don’t make sense are hard to understand.

Now is the time to plant new ideas. It is time to fuck shit up, throw out the rule book, drop out, and other overused clichés. Even if it seems like everyone is making up their own rules and doing their own thing, we’re all slaves to our environment, upbringing, and language in such a way that the way we ‘break the rules’ is the same way as everyone else. Instead, look to the real innovators, that tiny fraction of society that honestly doesn’t give a whit what anyone else thinks and does their own thing, but with integrity. I’m talking about the Jimi Hendrixes, the Allen Ginsbergs, the Philip K. Dicks – the ones who initially appear to come from another planet, but whose works later turn out to be exactly what we needed and love.

People answer the question: "How has the internet changed the way you think?"

Pokémonetise: to make money by appealing to the stupid human instinct to collect dumb things.

Gist: for anything more challenging than a rudimentary mechanical task, higher incentives produce a lower performance.

Interesting look at the economics behind replay scores, match probability, etc.

E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes spelled E′) is a form of the English language in which the verb to be does not appear in any of its forms.

The just-world phenomenon refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is just so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence with correct grammar (logical form) but semantics that are nonsensical. The sentence therefore has no understandable meaning.

"An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation."

Part Two: http://ratafia.info/post/90532973/transcript-of-howto-149-surprising-ways-to

The original and still the best.

0to255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.

The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

"Fitts' law dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out."

"When you finish reading a section, I encourage you to click the little box in the bottom right to mark it as read, tracking your progress in the article."

Command-line video/audio conversion/merging tool

"Initially a weak copy protection system in 1980s Apple Macintosh Operating System, the term 'flipping the bozo bit' was later reused to describe a decision to ignore a person's input."

Flickr API written in Python.

"After years on a treadmill that’s too easy to fail at, players—students, in this case—are acclimated to the game of education, rather to real achievement."

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era.

Convert ttf files to svg for use in MobileSafari.

The original page.

"Poe's Law points out that it is hard to tell parodies of fundamentalism (or, more generally, any crackpot theory) from the real thing, since they both seem equally insane."

"This is not a pipe."

"Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing."

Gems: the information hierarchy (data/information/knowledge/wisdom), "[Twitter is] connective information tissue."

Interesting look at how to draw pseudo-3D roads in a 2D game.

"It is p, but I don't believe it is p."

"The Macintosh is Catholic and DOS is Protestant."

A conversation with broadcaster Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America.

"A semicolon is a super-comma."

This video is perfect. I think it's from the future.

"Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts. The little house on your desktop isn’t a little house, it’s «home».

Flow is the feed, stock is the durable stuff, and the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together.

"Sure, I'm serious. What possible reason could a person have for saying something amusing that's not true? There's no "Fiction" on the web."

Analysis of gravity in Mario games as video game console hardware has increased in power.

Clay Shirky on how the internet is changing us in 2010.

Heart graph

Greeking is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols -- dummy text, "lorem ipsum," etc.

Testing and Sharing a Web Application

iftop : networks :: top : CPU usage

Hi. The person who sent you this link is a friend who likes you a lot but who wants you to respect their email address, their privacy, and their time.

Keyboard shortcuts for the Mac

You just need patience, and you need to contact the people you want to have contact with in contexts you feel are natural, in ways you feel add value to both of your lives. All you need to do is have patience and put away any attitude that says you’re entitled to anything.