Interesting Links for 27-07-2015

[andrewducker]

• A great interview with the creators of Rick And Morty
  • (tags: tv animation DanHarmon )
• Genderflip: What would book covers look like if you reversed the genders of their authors?
  • (tags: gender authors books publishing design )
• Some amazing body-paint cosplays (Venom is damned impressive)
  • (tags: nsfw bodyart cosplay )
• What's the right word for "Fear of

Comments

[gonzo21]

Yeah, that Venom is amazing. I hope she left that on as long as possible, took it home, woke up the next day to terrify the neighbours.

[toothycat]

"Install software updates" is great advice for the tech-savvy, but there are unfortunate caveats for "nonexperts".

I am sure the ability to distinguish between genuine "update me now!" system tray popups and "I was using my browser and a window popped up saying software needed updating so I clicked it and now I have dancing penguin browser toolbars up the wazoo" is a teachable skill, but it has never been one I have succeeded in teaching; the useful insights are usually more inferential steps away from where people start out than they have patience for.

Without first acquiring that skill, it feels like advice to always immediately install updates for anything that demands them can only increase the rate at which I will be called upon to clean out the Augean stables.

[andrewducker]

Which is why I think that Microsoft should build a third-party update system into Windows.

That way individual apps could just hook into it, and make applications available, and you could manage them all in one place, rather than deal with 30 different methods, each more confusing than the last.

[skington]

It's interesting to look at how Apple handled this on Mac OS X.

Nowadays most apps come via the App Store and it has a standard way of installing updates for everything.

But before that, some bright spark wrote a library for updating apps, and open sourced it with a permission-enough licence (i.e. not GPL-style "hahaha you used this library, now you need to give away your firstborn every time someone asks"), that pretty much every developer used it. So when an app said "hey, I need to download the latest version" they did so in a consistent manner.

It helps also that there isn't a culture of spyware or adware on Mac OS X.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - by making the App Store for "Metro" apps only, Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot. That whole area around Windows 8 was a massive missed opportunity because one exec decided that these new tablet/phone apps were The Future and everything else could be consigned to history.

And yes, GPL is rubbish for anything you want to be used generally inside other people's code. That's what LGPL is for.

[woodpijn]

I guess the book cover thing is pretty subjective. To me, the cover image on the hardcover Hausfrau looks like a card you'd buy for your grandmother in the bargain section of a cheap card shop. I would assume, based on that cover, that the book was a very bland one aimed at old ladies, kind of Mills and Boon but without the sex.
The one on the right looks like they've made much more effort with the design. It conveys sexy but not excessively or gratuitously so; the clothing looks quite conservative. It also looks like business attire to me, so if I didn't understand the meaning of the title I would think it was about a businesswoman.
But anyway, I think the one on the right looks both more enjoyable and more literary than the one on the left.

[simont]

I thought a persistent failing of the examples further down the page was for the imagined replacement cover to tell you less than the real one about what was actually in the book.

For example, Stardust: originally a falling star, in replacement two people looking in love. (OK, both actually are in the novel, but the latter is a good bet to appear somewhere in almost any fantasy book.) Throne of Glass: originally a woman with a dagger, in replacement what is presumably the eponymous throne (i.e. nothing the title hadn't already told us). A Clockwork Orange: honestly, I can't see the relevance of the replacement cover at all. Heist Society: 'err, we gave up and did something totally abstract

[cmcmck]

Moorcock's views on Tolkien are odd to say the least. The Prof was known to be a traditionalist conservative with libertarian leanings but one with a deep respect for the working class having commanded such men (whom he admired) in WW1. He was also in favour of redistribution of wealth and the welfare state- concepts like the NHS and state pensions- a very un-Fascist view of things.

The prof's specialism in early English philology would have introduced him to Saxon and Norse societies in which everyone had their place and there was a place for everyone, so that's hardly a huge surprise.

Moorcock maybe needs to re-read she scouring of the Shire episode.
It gets left out of the films but is utterly central to the novel as it can be seen to refer the cleansing of post WW2 Europe from fascism.

[kalimac]

Michael Moorcock has probably never read "The Scouring of the Shire" at all.

He admitted several years ago that he found reading The Lord of the Rings to be "a defeating struggle," if I recall the words exactly.

This explains why his pontifications on the subject have always given the air of a man who doesn't know what he's talking about.

He doesn't.

[cmcmck]

Just so.

Fwiw, I'd have taken some of Moorcock's own views to be far closer to Fascism, but there you go.........

[don_fitch]

I can't help with that phobia about finishing things -- it seems to be subsumed under Perfectionism

[andrewducker]

You have my sympathy. I'm not looking forward to hitting that point (or, indeed, my parents hitting that point), but I'm glad that you have somewhere decent to look forward to, and the resources to get extras.