Shannon Phillips

My Dad went though a period where he played a lot of FreeCell, an interest which eventually gave way to Sudoku, and probably something else by now. Anyway, Dad, I thought this was a really neat article:

http://gameological.com/2012/04/unbeatable/

Dave Ring is a hard man to find. Given that he launched one of the earliest crowdsourced internet projects—if not the first—one would expect Ring to be something of an online superstar. He was using group power before Huffington had a Post, back when Amazon was just a river.

But when you Google his name—the smell test of millennial relevancy—our Dave is buried beneath Dave Ring the stand-up comedian, Dave Ring the editorial consultant, and Dave Ring the mentally disabled televangelist. Perhaps the web has obscured Dave Ring the internet revolutionary because his project was, from the most straightforward perspective, a bust. In the summer of ’94, Ring led 110 online comrades to beat a video game called FreeCell. They lost.

It kind of goes into the math of FreeCell, and how Dave Ring organized an effort to determine whether each and every hand of FreeCell was theoretically winnable.

So when that final push on No. 11,982—an effort aided by humans and even a handful of game-solving programs—met with failure, Ring celebrated. Is every hand in FreeCell winnable? No. Thirty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine hands are winnable. And one isn’t. He proved that. He had solved one mystery of the universe.

Just a fun little piece.

My friend Wendy wrote this awesome post on geocaching and letterboxing:

Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that you search for boxes, but the approach is pretty different. Again, you look up boxes to find on a website — the two main ones are atlasquest.com and letterboxing.org — but instead of using technology to find the boxes, you follow clues kind of like you’d find on a treasure map or an adventure comic. Stuff like: “Walk to the end of the fence and look in the hollow of the ivy covered tree.”

The other cool thing about letterboxing is the rubber stamps! Each letterbox has its own stamp and each letterboxer or letterboxing team has a signature too. Once you find the box, there is a little booklet inside along with the box’s stamp. You stamp the letterbox stamp in your notebook and write down any notes about your experience. Then you stamp your signature stamp in the booklet in the box. A lot of people use purchased rubber stamps, but a fun part of the hobby is that most of the stamps are hand-carved.

It sounds like…having a pen pal that you can only reach by going on a pirate treasure hunt? It sounds pretty awesome, in other words. I want to try it!

You know, I have some experience at wading into flamewars on the Internet, and I have to say: if I was going to choose somebody to start a war of words with, it wouldn’t be Neil Gaiman. It’s not so much the legions of rabid fans that would put me off—I’m willing to tangle with people who are merely popular—but you have to stay in your weight class, right? This is a man who can eviscerate reputations with a single offhanded remark. This is a writer whose words are being taken down for posterity.

If you read up on the whole thing, once you come to this line from Neil: “I would not be human if I didn’t admit that I looked at his neck in the photograph, to see if it was as mighty and bull-like as I felt he had implied, and that I might have been just a tiny bit disappointed”—well, it reads a bit like that thing kung fu fighters do, you know. When they stretch out an open palm, and then wave the enemy in with a little flick of the fingers. That invitation to an almighty beatdown.

It’s like—I’m reading Norse sagas right now, and the poor fools who thought it was a good idea to tangle with the skalds, people are still laughing at their humiliation. It’s poor planning to insult a bard. Just saying.

Internet, I do not want to talk about Charlie Sheen. Yes, the memes are funny, but the man has two small children and a history of domestic violence, which rather spoils the yuks.

Instead, here’s why I’m grateful for the Internet today. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog I have mentioned admiring before, has discovered Jane Austen.

I love this about blogs—the way they allow you to observe the authors’ thoughts and reactions evolving over the short term. There is such a pleasure in watching a writer who I admire falling into books that I love—and given that I was initially attracted to TNC because he writes so incisively about race in America, a particular pleasure in hearing him declare: “I feel like she’s talking to me, and strangely enough, only to me. It really is kind of sick to say this, but I think I’m in love.” Austen is so often pigeonholed as a genre writer and dismissed on those grounds, and contemporary black writers can be pigeonholed in the same way, stuck off on the African-American shelves in one shadowy corner of the bookstore. It’s delightful to watch two minds reaching across time, geography, and culture to create that ageless alchemy that happens when a receptive reader takes up a great book.

Ta-Nehisi + Jane Austen 4ever. They make such a lovely couple.

A quick shout-out to Quirky Urbanite, who has awesome adventures in local foraging. Her account of harvesting local olives made me all fired up to do the same (I know exactly where there’s a big olive tree in my neighborhood) until I got to the part about the worms. Still, really cool stuff to read about.

So I’m on this Icelandic kick right now—I recently read the Kalevala for the first time, and my to-read stack is currently topped by the Saga of the Volsungs, Viking Age Iceland, and The Sagas of Icelanders. So imagine my delight when a friend linked me to the Tattúínárdœla saga: “What If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga? In Old Norse with English translations.”

On the Daudastjarna, there were many men who marveled at Tsiubakka’s height and broad build. And when they had come to the dungeon, a Stormtrooper asked, “Where are you taking this giant of a man?”

“To the dungeon,” said Lúkr, “He was on the ship that Veidr captured.”

The Stormtrooper said, “I have not heard tell that any man was found on that ship, and we should tell Tarkinn, Jarl of Stórmof, about this first.”

But when this soldier turned around and went to bear these tidings to Tarkinn, Hani the Duelist threw his axe and felled him. Two Stormtroopers saw Hani attack the man, and they each took an axe in hand and went to his aid. Lúkr fought them off with great agility, and struck at them with the strength and fearlessness of a lion. Soon the Stormtroopers had been killed by Luke, for they had only short-shafted axes, but Lúkr struck hard and fast with the spear of Víga-Óbívan.

This is so completely excellent. The best part is that it really is also written out in Old Norse. I left a comment for the author saying “This is possibly the best thing that the Internet has ever given us,” and I meant it, too.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for The Atlantic. Since I stumbled on his blog about a year ago, it’s become one of my favorites: TNC writes with insight and verve, covering a broad range of topics, most incisively the subject of race in America. He’s also a comic book and computer game nerd, which of course I find charming.

For the past year or so he’s gone on a Civil War kick, offering stories and images from the history books he’s been reading and the tours he’s taken of the old battlefields. As a black man, his interest is especially in those who rarely got to write their own histories: the freed slaves, the black soldiers, and how their lives were woven into the societies of the time. He’s also been confronting—with impatience, but also, sometimes, with a surprising level of compassion—the ‘Lost Cause‘ mythology that persists in the South to this day.

So when the governor of Virginia recently declared April to be “Confederate History Month,” reigniting an old controversy, some were appalled and some were defiantly pleased and some, like me, just kind of winced and hoped it would all blow over soon. But TNC decided to take it very seriously, and to contribute as much as he could to the effort, as the Confederate History Month declaration put it, “to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present.”

Here’s TNC on a group of citizens whose “sacrifices…during the period of the Civil War” are beyond measure.

Here he presents a group of soldiers who laid down their lives at rates “astronomical when compared to other regiments.”

And here he finds Ulysses S. Grant writing in visionary fashion of how a Confederate History Month should be truly “honored.”

I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written. Such history will do full credit to the courage, endurance and soldierly ability of the American citizen, no matter what section of the country he hailed from, or in what ranks he fought. The justice of the cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time. For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.

…but while I was falling asleep last night, I thought of a caption for this picture on Unhappy Hipsters:

“He collected the implements of travel–suitcases, motorbikes, once a whole jet engine–only to disassemble them in his elaborate ritual. He wanted a world where nobody could ever leave him again.”

So, I recently stumbled across the Unhappy Hipsters blog, which for the most part I think is great: it takes images from Dwell magazine and gives them captions that turns the trendy design-and-lifestyle layouts into evocative vignettes, little short-short stories about alienation and modernity. I tend to like blogs that do this, take an image and build a story around it: I love, for instance, the “Secret Life of Dresses” series on A Dress A Day. And I don’t, personally, much like modern architecture or design—to me all those shiny, graywashed, hard-edged surfaces seem antiseptic and even anti-human, although I understand that some people find them soothing and restful, or alternatively “interesting” and “challenging”—so I’m fairly sympathetic to a blog that takes a snarky look at that aesthetic.

But having recommended Unhappy Hipsters, I want to also talk about that word “hipster,” which has recently exploded in usage. For example see latfh.com, which is mostly about mocking kids who are having fun with their clothes. In fact a large part of the the “hipster” sneer seems to be a cut at people who take too much interest and enjoyment in a certain subject. Somebody on the New York Times comment section, for instance, called me a “fucking hipster” when I said I liked dark chocolate.

So a hipster is somebody who just likes trendy things, right, except where “trendy” is defined relating not to mass culture but to the specific trends of a young urban demographic. But here’s the thing—only people in that demographic would recognize the trends. Only somebody who’s familiar with the bands, the food, the festivals, the fashion, would have the capacity to recognize and to object to certain preferences on the grounds that they are overdone or too popular. And only somebody who actually worries about whether or not their own tastes are suitably idiosyncratic would even think to insult somebody else on that basis.

Therefore, the people who devised use of the word “hipster” as an insult (in its current popular usage) are clearly OTHER HIPSTERS. Nobody else knows or cares enough about the subcultures in question to police authenticity in this way. Nobody else gives a shit about what’s really cool and what’s overplayed and poser-y. And in the end, it comes down to making fun of people for what they enjoy, which is petty and mean.

So I guess this is an elaborate “no YOU are” to that dude in the nytimes.com comment section? And also, I like Unhappy Hipsters for the stories it creates, but I think the title of the blog probably says a lot more about the people who created it than it does about people who happen to like Dwell magazine.