kirabug’s idea files

First, do not start playing Fallen London on Echo Bazaar. It’s a deliciously dark choose-your-own-adventure-style text adventure set in a steampunky Neverwhere-like underground London (which is quite a different thing than the London Underground).

You don’t want to play, because it’s weird and warped and fun and addictive and you only get 70 turns a day. You most certainly don’t want to look for me (@kirabug), because then you’d also be following me on Twitter and I post weird stuff and complain all day.

I’ll see you there.

Second, some neat links:

• Twitter FailOhmu (which probably makes more sense if you’ve seen Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)
• The art of cause and effect in a solitary comic panel via Scott McCloud
• A tale of two focal points by Aaron Diaz, also via Scott McCloud

Third, here are some weird videos.

Japanese tea advertisement:

100 Greatest Movie Insults of all time WARNING: NSFW

cows & cows & cows

Kirabug.com: destroying your teen years one video at a time.

Read this. Now. Especially if you’re a parent.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D.,  is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water.  And it does not look like most people expect.  There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.  To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this:  It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under just behind vehicle accidents – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult.  In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening source: CDC. 

Read the rest at Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning.

Hat tip to Pam for pointing it out.

Also, awesome simple desktops.

Edited to add: This one won a Webby.

The Velluvial Matrix is the commencement speech Atul Gawande gave Stanford’s School of Medicine.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

It’s worth a read.

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Also worth the read, but in a totally different way: some folks write one of the most interesting Facebook updates I’ve ever seen.

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This article from Donna Spencer got me out of a major funk last week.

The more design work I do the more I realise that there is no such thing – there is no right answer to a design problem. [...] There are only bad, good and better answers for the current situation. Each of the potential solutions sits within a particular context.

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Jesus Without Miracles takes me back to a religious class I had in college, and a bit of faith I thought I’d lost.

• An interesting view of why this author won’t be seeing The Last Airbender that makes me think maybe I won’t either.
• The facts in the case of Andrew Wakefield, which tells the story of how some folks came to believe that autism is caused by vaccinations.
• Since I saw it while I was in England, I found the Tate Modern made of sugar cubes to be kind of cool, actually.
• This picture cracks me up. (Pic is SFW but the rest of the site – including the ads – might not be. You’re warned.)
• Three Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics worth reading:
  • one
  • two
  • three
• Adam Savage on problem solving
• This is some wild and crazy art by Boris Artzybasheff, which I thought was really cool

OK, that’s good for now.