Dany is the villain. That is the point of her arc. She is turning into Mad King Aerys. We are explicitly told that when a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin: genius or madness. Dany's coin is starting to land the wrong way. Like her father, who was charismatic in... Four years ago I wrote a post about hard to find, unpublished short stories by J.D. Salinger, including his short story "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls." Since then I've taught a few English Lit courses that have had several of Salinger's short stories and Catcher in... Joe Hill has a new book out, and it’s filled with references to his father, Stephen King, to David Mitchell, and to Gerard Manley Hopkins (and to others, I’m sure). Although the references to Mitchell are somehow the most surprising to me, it’s the references to... I'm re-reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series (so I know the ending), and so far I've been very impressed. Having re-read the earlier ones again (I'm on the sixth book, Song of Susannah, right now), some of the things that I was on the fence about, and the things... I'm binging through Supernatural on Netflix, and I just got to Season 4, episode 5, "Monster Movie." (Slight spoilers for jokes ahead.) I just wanted to let everyone know that this episode includes the 1931 version of Dracula (corny accent and all) driving off on a... I just read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. You can find it here: Stories of Your Life and Others. The Kindle version is $7.69. It's really good. It's reminded me (somewhat) of that Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode, "Darmok,"... Boy, Total Recall (1990) is actually a lot weirder than I remember it. This is probably because, as a kid, I often caught bits and pieces of it on TV, so I rarely (if ever) watched it straight through, and whatever I did watch was an edited-for-TV version. The mixture... The Grey (2012) is far better than I would have thought. The quote on the DVD box -- "Terrifically exciting! Hold on tight! It's a true call of the wild!" -- really doesn't do justice to the film. You know how when you finally get around to seeing the original Rocky... I've been binging through Stargate SG-1 recently, and my theory is that the show is secretly a sitcom. The sci-fi ideas in the show are not that innovative; some of the plot lines are quite bad; the effects are definitely not anything to write home about; the villains... Simon Prebble's reading of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is quite good. I've been listening to it on my runs and while I'm doing mindless tasks like making dinner or cleaning. The Literary Theory course by Paul Fry from Yale (on iTunesU) is also...
Danaerys is the villain, I mean come on everyone, that’s the whole point
J.D. Salinger’s “Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” has been leaked
Joe Hill’s NOS4A2: Creativity, Inscape, and Horror
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: a re-read, hazy thoughts, and the Virtual
Gimmick episodes on television shows (Supernatural, Fringe, X-Files, etc.)
“Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang
Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven)
The Grey (dir. Joe Carnahan)
Stargate SG-1: It’s a sitcom
Some audiobooks and other audio stuff
Can dogs understand metonymy? I argue yes, with five examples. In Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jakobson describes six functions of language. The phatic function of language is language whose function is essentially contact, language for the sake of language, regardless of signification. Anyone who owns a cat understands the...
Can Dogs Understand Metonymy?
Cats and the phatic function of language
Okay, I lied in my title. If you have iStat Nano, you have to switch to iStat Pro for this fix. Don't worry: it's freeware. Anyways, the point is, if you've used the iStat Nano or the iStat Pro Dashboard Widget to check on your Mac's system processes in the past, and... You know how in sci fi, a character gets some alien implant that dramatically increases their reading speed, and then they can blitz through a book about some subject they've never encountered before, and can instantly sum up the book's argument and remember every... I've recently found the Pomodoro technique pretty useful for increasing my studying/reading productivity, with regards to my studying for my comps. Basically, you work for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break, then repeat the cycle. After four of these, you take a longer... "Herp Derp" is a good extension. Here's a visual which I shamelessly stole from the Herp Derp website: The extension is useful, obviously, because YouTube comments are just all-around terrible, but more importantly, it prevents spoilers, like if you want... Jay Dolmage’s (relatively) recent blog post about Learning by Writing seemed to me quite on the mark, especially with regards to some of ways in which I’ve been toying around with my own study habits. I’m studying for my reading exams right now, and I’ve been finding... Two months ago my printer (an HP-2170W Laser Printer) told me it refused to print anymore pages. It told me I was out of toner and I had to replace the cartridge. But it was lying to me - there was plenty of toner left. In fact, since that time, I have printed... I started a post comparing the writing habits of Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway, but I found that for each writer the most interesting theme about their writing was unique to them. Trollope is a machine. Dickens is concerned primarily with his...
Fix iStat Nano or iStat Pro Processes in Mountain Lion
On reading speed and retention
The Pomodoro Technique
Herp Derp Youtube Comments
Writing and Studying, Writing to Study
Don’t change your printer’s toner when it tells you to
Writing habits: Anthony Trollope
Oh hey everyone. It's me, Chad Spadders. I'll be answering some questions that have stumped philosophers for thousands of years. I'm qualified to do this because I'm almost done my Introduction to Western Philosophy 110B course and because I have access to Wikipedia... Here are the five scariest things any human being has eve imagined: Sam Neill with no eyeballs. Sam Neill with eyeballs made of hellfire. Sam Neill with his face all scratched up, and also he is saying ominous things; A hole in space-time with Sam Neill in it;... All those Cylons, they’re just a bunch of phonies. What’s their “plan,” anyways, for God’s sake? They don’t have a plan. Every time the pilots walk in and out of the ready room they touch this black and white photo of a viper pilot on his goddamn knees or something.... My graphic novels course is just based on a couple old issues of Amazing Spider-Man I found in my basement. I don't know anything about comics. One time I told a student that I would give him a letter of reference, but all I sent was a drawing of a stick man with his... Dear Mr. Director of Wildlife Canada, Sir, I think you should know that the underground world of "Moose vs. Gravity" has really taken off, and if you are interested in this highly lucrative opportunity, all I need is a few more moose to replace the ones that have... Little helmets and scuba gear so that bees can go underwater. A flashlight that turns on and off really fast, so that when you point it at something, that thing becomes the object of a disco. A game called "Dance Rules Revolution," in which long, boring rules for...
Famous philosophers send in their questions to Chad Spadders, a first-year undergraduate
Five Scary Things
Holden Caulfield Offers Some Random Thoughts About Battlestar Galactica
Confessions of a Sleazy English Professor
Dear Mr. Director of Wildlife Canada, sir
Some ideas
This is a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I guess, but it's a really fancy recipe and takes a lot of time to do. You have to brown a bunch of butter, and toast a bunch of walnuts, and refrigerate the dough, and blah blah blah. But it's all worth it, though, because... The recipe is an amalgamation of two recipes. The banana bread recipe comes from here at Recipe Zaar. It uses sour cream. I already had another banana bread recipe, but I wanted to try something new. I adapted the recipe a bit to include chocolate chips. And because... A long time ago I came across this Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookie Recipe at Two Peas and Their Pod. The recipe was good, but it was mostly a chocolate chip cookie with a few chunks of Oreos in each cookie (which, indeed, is a perfectly fine idea for a cookie). But I... It took me a surprisingly long time to find an oatmeal cookie recipe that I wanted to try (about 10 minutes, which is practically forever if we're talking about "Google time"). I just wanted plain, thin, and buttery oatmeal cookies. I finally adapted a Chewy Chocolate... I mentioned in my Simple Brownies post that I was more of a blondie man than a brownie man. Thus, a blondie recipe. This blondie recipe is simple and pretty much impossible to screw up. I don't really try other blondie recipes (much), because this is all you need.... I am more of a blondie man than a brownie man, myself, but my girlfriend likes brownies. So here are some brownies. I got this brownie recipe from Cookie Madness. My criteria when searching for this recipe was that it had to use an 8x8 or 9x9 pan, it had to be... I still haven't discovered anything worth putting on a good banana bread. Butter, peanut butter, Nutella--all of these fail to improve upon that which is perfect. Although I have found that Banana Bread is a good bread for French Toast, even if it is a quick bread... Here's the original recipe from Recipe Zaar, which is apparently taken from the Toronto Star, and they apparently got it from... Barbara Bush. Say what you will about the 43rd president of the United States--his mom makes a pretty darn good oatmeal chocolate chip... I got this Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from a blog called A Pookie Pantry. It appears to be this AllRecipes version, but with the addition of cream of tartar to the cookies. I bought the cream of tartar for like three bucks then realized that I only needed about 1/4... The title of this post is the hardest thing about making these cookies. The recipe is easy because there is very little measuring. I basically played with the measurements of the ingredients, and added coconut and more chocolate chips. I increased the butter a bit...
Serious Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts
Banana Bread with Streusel Topping
Soft and Chewy Oreo Cookie Cookies
Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies (thin and buttery)
Simple Blondies
Simple Brownies
Banana Bread with Walnuts and Chocolate Chips
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Chip Cookies (using cream of tartar)
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Coconut Cookie Mix Cookies