Hou tu pranownse Inglish
Sure, English spelling is undeniably wacky. But it’s not as lawless as people claim. This is an article from 2000 that discusses the often subtle (but logical!) rules that govern (most of) English spelling, and explains once and for all why “ghoti” can’t actually be pronounced “fish.”
Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up all the words in -ough, or George Bernard Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee.
The purpose of this page is to describe those rules-- to explain the system behind English spelling, the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time.
The Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy
A series of articles from the 00s discussing each game in the Final Fantasy series in excruciating detail. I’ve never made it past the very beginning of any of these games (and there's only a few I've even touched), yet I find this series of articles fascinating and have read through the whole thing multiple times. Could not tell you why for the life of me. I think I just enjoy the writing style. Also I guess I'm a video game maker person so I like reading about video game design. ANYWAY worth a read.
Check out their essays on the Mother series as well, which are also great.
Check out their essays on the Mother series as well, which are also great.
Is The Video for “Bittersweet Symphony” Mocking Itself?
A blog post from 2012 that discusses the irony that comes across in the music videos for a couple Britpop songs from the ’90s.
But what I really like about Song 2 and Bittersweet Symphony is that the irony is genuinely funny. That's something I think a lot of people miss about irony, and it's part of why I'm getting more and more weary of people tossing the term Hipster around like it's some sort of critical argument in and of itself. I mean, I like the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit, but that thing is just begging to be lampooned, and Blur manages to pull it off simply through the ironic juxtaposition of Nirvana-like overblown, set-wrecking nihilism sung by guys that look kinda like the people I play Magic: The Gathering with.
Revolutionary Girl Utena liveblog
A read-through and close reading / literary analysis of an anime I like a lot. Some of their readings of the text are a little far out there, which honestly is exactly what the show deserves. I really enjoyed reading through it, and the insights it contains made me look at the show in a different way than I had before.
A Deep CSS Dive Into Radial And Conic Gradients
A very interesting article summing up all the cool stuff you can do with CSS gradient. I didn't know about a lot of this stuff, as my CSS knowledge was a bit out of date, but after I read it I used some of this to improve (or at least "improve") the styling on my personal website. Did you know you can use CSS gradient to create a checkerboard pattern? Pretty dang cool!
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
An article that inspired me to create this website. It makes the point that small websites are hard to find in the sea of social media and SEO that is the wider internet, yet it's not common for them to link to each other, and we should change that by actually linking small websites together like how the web is supposed to work. I think this is a great idea!
Choice quote:
Choice quote:
It’s a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites. A hyperlink isn’t a marriage proposal. It is enough to find some redeeming quality in a website to link to it. It costs nothing, and helps bring traffic to pages that you yourself think deserve it.
If we actually want these small websites to flourish as a healthy community, we need to promote each other much more than we do. It is advertisement, yes, but in earnest. I like it when other people link to my stuff. What sort of hypocrite would I then be if I only ever linked to my own websites?