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24 Jan
This Malbolge program displays “Hello world!”, with full capitalization and exclamation mark at the end.
('&%:9]!~}|z2Vxwv-,POqponl$Hjig%eB@@>}=<M:9wv6WsU2T|nm-,jcL(I&%$#"`CB]V?Tx<uVtT`Rpo3NlF.Jh++FdbCBA@?]!~|4XzyTT43Qsqq(Lnmkj"Fhg${z@>
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24 Jan
INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as “READ OUT”, “IGNORE”, “FORGET”, and modifiers such as “PLEASE”. This last keyword provides two reasons for the program’s rejection by the compiler: if “PLEASE” does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.
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1 Jan
A previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.
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1 Jan
t can surely be no coincidence that this phenomenon first appeared at a time when those languages spoken in what are now these United States were as far different as those same languages are now from those in current use and previously. And this process is by no means complete but continues until this very day, so much so that it is impossible to say what might have been—or indeed what might be in the future.
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7 Dec
If World War I snapped, as we hear tell, the threads of civilization except where it continued briefly to baste the memories of men like Valéry and Joyce, the next generation’s problem was to create works whose resonance lasted more than a season. A culture without Greek or Latin or Anglo-Saxon goes off the gold standard. How to draw upon the treasure?
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5 Dec
Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
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5 Dec
We use certain authors at certain times of our lives, and we may never go back to them again.
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1 Dec
Something of the awe and terror of crime itself should cling round the figure of the detective: a grim shadow behind a curtain, who might himself be a criminal. Let the author invest him with this sense of gloom and the dark places of the brain, and we may safely leave all the wholesomeness to the murderer.
It will thus be apparent why, in all annals of detective fiction, there has been only one man. The lean hawk-faced gentleman from Baker Street—Sherlock Holmes of the evil laughter and the hypodermic needle—beside him, the rest of them are pygmies. It was not alone that with one glance he could tell that you were left-handed, asthmatic, henpecked, and a retired sergeant of marines from Afghanistan. It was rather the sense of overshadowing knowledge that emanated from him—and you understood that eerie power when night after night you saw the gaunt shadow pass the lighted window. In his efforts to convince you of a cold thinking machine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle convinced you of a living man. He caught from the London fog a terrible ghost of retribution, and in this day of “significant novels” and “memorable portraits,” it is well to remember just who has created the one character that can never be forgotten.
— John Dickson Carr, “The Detective in Fiction,” 1932.
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26 Nov
Agatha Christie was not cozy. She earned the title the Queen of Crime the old-fashioned way — by killing off a lot of people. Although never graphic or gratuitous, she was breathtakingly ruthless. Children, old folks, newlyweds, starlets, ballerinas — no one is safe in a Christie tale.
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26 Nov
Optimists have pointed to the proliferation of online reviews as an indication that criticism is flourishing, but the payment for most reviewing these days is meager to nil. When writing a review becomes a diversion instead of a vocation, or else an arena for book authors to horse-trade and log-roll—the literary world’s penurious equivalent of the financial world’s “revolving door”—then reviewing will list toward clubbiness, bitterness or mushy praise.
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20 Nov
I discovered a battered collection of Ward’s books on my father’s bookshelf. This illustration— one of my favorites— was from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At age five, I was already expert at drawing scary monsters. I’d figured out that the two most important ingredients for a monster were 1.) a scary face, and 2.) great big muscles. Yet, Ward’s monster had neither. Ward succeeded in unnerving me without showing a face at all. (via ILLUSTRATION ART: 0NE LOVELY DRAWING, part 38)
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19 Nov
when the power and money come from a force whose main characteristic is vast and featureless potential, the baroque aesthetic seeks to exhaust possibilities by expressing that emptiness with platonic forms.
So the Bauhaus chair is not a rejection of the baroque. The modernist designer merely seeks to build cathedrals to his new master: a vast emptiness of possibility within the refinement surplus.
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19 Nov
A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies.
