shaonicwhite

[shaonicwhite]

"To the Poem" is one of twelve poems by Frank O'Hara highlighted in JSTOR Daily's recent article, just in time for National Poetry Month. We love the effect produced by enjambment here!

What are some poems you can't keep away from? We'd love to read them :)

[shaonicwhite]

My average writing experience:

"Alright I think I'm almost done actually-"

*Google doc grows second health bar and a choir starts singing in latin*

[shaonicwhite]

[shaonicwhite]

Jonathan Harker In College vibes

[shaonicwhite]

I have a mild interest in video game history stuff, so I was reading through the "50 Years of Text Games" page recently. I got to the article on The Hobbit (1982), which I had only heard about in passing before this, but this seems to have been an oversight given its apparent importance. Looking through this and some other articles, the game was well known for having npc behavior years ahead of its time, and was inspirational to early games programmers; this page even going so far as to say it "is often credited for helping to jump-start the British home computing market." But beyond the game's technical achievements, one paragraph at the article's end about the game's creator, Veronika Megler, stuck with me:

Megler for years was little aware of the game’s success. After graduating, Melbourne House offered her a full-time position, but she was sick of assembler debugging and turned it down: “I have a very low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again.” She accepted an entry-level job at IBM, who “made it very clear that having written a game was not regarded as any kind of relevant work experience,” and would go on to a long and successful career as a computer professional—but never again worked in games. It wasn’t until the 2000s that she learned the extent of The Hobbit’s popularity, and its impact on a generation of players around the world: players who had first learned English to solve it, or had their imaginations fired for their own computer careers by the magic inherent in the game’s simulated possibilities.

(50 Years of Text Games)

And that got me thinking about legacy and how we perceive ourselves for a bit. Because to Megler none of this stuff is that important, apparently. For her this was just a college programming job, what others saw as groundbreaking NPC design she saw as ordinary, a stepping stone in her career; not part of her real life, which involved IT work. And today she is a leading data scientist at Amazon. But if you look her up online, check her wikipedia page, all of that stuff is a footnote. The last 40 years of her life, the stuff she valued, it's all placed under several paragraphs talking about her involvement in games, stuff she did for less than a year. 100 years from now, assuming people are still playing video games, people will probably be talking about The Hobbit, long after all the other stuff fades into history.

Really makes you realize that we have very little control over how we will be remembered, what about our lives others consider important and worth remembering.

[shaonicwhite]

Explaining how the timeless clash between the two sides remains among the most elemental forms of storytelling worldwide, a study published Tuesday by researchers at Oxford University has concluded that virtually all modern narratives are re-expressions of the classic Alien Vs. Predator conflict. “The Epic Of Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, The Old Man And The Sea—each is simply a different culture’s exploration of the ageless, universally relatable struggle between Alien and Predator,” said study co-author Dr. Gavin Horsley, who noted he has yet to encounter a civilization whose most prized written works and oral traditions did not derive from the prototypical confrontation between the savage Xenomorphs and their technologically advanced, extraterrestrial humanoid adversaries.

Full Story

[shaonicwhite]

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

[shaonicwhite]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[shaonicwhite]

The thing about many city-builder games is that they still can't break away from the SimCity model, and the SimCity model, as groundbreaking it was for its time, was never exactly the best way to simulate a city.

I of course deeply respect SimCity for what it did but it came out in 1989. I think it's time to think away from it. Do you really need a Residential Commercial Industrial index in every game?

[shaonicwhite]

What if we all got really into arguing about the meaning of some other short story for awhile. If I were in the room with the yellow wallpaper I would simply leave

[shaonicwhite]

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

[shaonicwhite]

politely informing my boss that i can't do my job because i have to spend 18 hours perusing beafts on e-codices

[shaonicwhite]

“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

[shaonicwhite]

Do you have the Libby library app?

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈

[shaonicwhite]

say what you will about california but i love that we have an official state slug (banana slug). more states should have official state slugs.

[shaonicwhite]

Happy 2025! We're so excited to be releasing our Carmilla adaptation on the Re: Dracula feed this year, starting Feb 14! The cast and crew absolutely nailed this production and it's going to be such a treat. (If you're impatient you can join our Patreon page and listen to the first half of the series right now!)