hope

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”

[pixelartus]

“Shakedown: Hawaii fuses open world action and empire building. Build a “legitimate” corporation by completing open world missions, acquiring businesses, sabotaging competitors, “re-zoning” land, and shaking down shops for protection money. You are the CEO, and questionable subsidiaries, hidden service fees, misleading ads, and fine print are your super power.”

Release: May 7th 2019 (Switch, PS4, Vita, PC)

[bikeshed-blog]

We've won the war on boredom! If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay! But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they're right. I've noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me. I make my living being creative and have always assumed that my potential was inherited from my parents. But for allowing my creativity to flourish, I have to credit the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood.

Scott Adams on the Benefits of Boredom - WSJ.com

[warrenellis-deactivated20200730]

what do you do when (if) you ever feel like giving up?

theaudacityofswope

There is no such goddamn thing. There is only getting up and doing it all over again, smarter and harder, until something ups and fucking kills you, because that’s the only thing big enough to stop you.

...

[bikeshed-blog]

Fractal art

(via MB3D_0220_hd by 0Encrypted0 on deviantART)

[bikeshed-blog]

Which wolf will win?

An elder was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me.. it is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

"This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too", he added.

The Grandchildren thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "But Grandfather, Which wolf will win?"

The old wise man simply replied... "The one you feed."

[bikeshed-blog]

FREE DOWNLOAD: http://www.sendspace.com/file/lqxxjb a gift to you all on my birthday =] Chillout track. Celebrating a 2.1 degree in creative sound and music technology and to say thank you for everyone's support over the last year. I hope you enjoy it =] Please join my facebook page: http://listn.to/RamesesB

[bikeshed-blog]

Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.

TED talks are lying to you - Salon.com

[bikeshed-blog]

(via 3 Ingenious Designs That Will Fool Your Eyes | Wired Design | Wired.com)

[bikeshed-blog]

Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case not wrought. The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inaposite. But in fact, it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.

[bikeshed-blog]

(via Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem: Venice 2013 - first look review | Film | theguardian.com)

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Eleanor Longden: The voices in my head (by TED)

[bikeshed-blog]

I'll use Python and NumPy to compute generational steps for the game of life, and use my JSAnimation package to animate the results. Because the Game of Life is so simple, the time step can be computed rather tersely in Python. Here I implement two possibilities: one using generator expressions, and one using the convolve2d function from scipy. Note that neither of these are extremely performant: they involve creating several temporary arrays, and will not work well for large problems with many time steps

The Game of Life in Python

[bikeshed-blog]

The competition in a large market, such as CRM software, is very tough. The top companies have huge budgets and armies of developers and marketing people. Your chance of getting on the first few pages of Google results for a search term such as “CRM software” are as near to zero as makes no difference. And there are all sorts of network effects working in the favour of the established companies. For example, the biggest vendors will have an ecosystem of consultants, resellers, training courses, books, user forums and third party products that no new product can hope to match. Then there are power laws which mean that you have to rank surprisingly high to get 1% of a market. The most famous power law is the Pareto 80/20 distribution. This is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto distributions appear in all sorts of places. I have looked at various data for my own product and I have found the 80/20 distribution appears in my own data. For example: * 77% of searches result from 20% of search phrases * 75% of sales come from 20% of email domains

[bikeshed-blog]

There are many types of opening, but most obey the fundamental rule of developing the pieces from the back rank as soon as possible. To develop means "to bring one's pieces into play during the opening phase"

[bikeshed-blog]

I installed the Classic Bookmark Button add-on and that fixed the problem. After installation I had a new Bookmarks button in the customize menu, which I was able to drag onto the Bookmarks toolbar.

12.04 - Firefox Dropdown Bookmarks menu disappears when quitting "Customize" - Ask Ubuntu

[bikeshed-blog]

I’ll finish by saying that while this was Federer’s first loss before the semifinals of the U.S. Open since 2003, it wasn't the first time we've talked of his descent from heaven to earth. In 2008, he had his string of five straight Wimbledon titles, and four straight years at No. 1, snapped by Rafael Nadal. At the Open that year, he fought through a long fourth-round match with Igor Andreev and was emotional in victory throughout the two weeks. Afterward, I wrote about the 27-year-old Federer, “He showed us the effort that has always been there, just beneath the surface mirage of his effortlessness.” I speculated that seeing Federer fight to win would be the fun part of watching him in the future. In other words, the man has been “human” for years. Federer has always been an athlete, not an artist. He’s always won because he’s a good competitor, not because he makes competing look easy. He shouldn’t have needed to start losing for us to appreciate that.

tennis.com - Reaction to the Reactions

[teddziuba]

At least once per year, I fly to Las Vegas and completely blow my tubes out for forty eight hours. Alternative realities give you new perspectives on things, so I justify it as personal development.

After uncounted hours of punishment at a craps table, I was in no mood to be placated with...