Sam King's Verbose Letters

From http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131210/08174425520/norway-to-digitize-all-norwegian-books-allowing-domestic-ip-addresses-to-read-all-them-irrespective-copyright-status.shtml.  Apparently, Norway is totally awesome.

I have two goals in mind with regard to the environment:

Take two very qualified dancers.  Give them a long time to choreograph a dance.  Now, put them in a room that rotates (so, sometimes the ceiling is down).  Now, fix a camera to the room so that it always looks like the floor is down even when they're dancing on the walls.  Then, you have the Defying Gravity Dance.

Watch it.  Your mind will be blown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luJlg0PG7PE

I am picky about tofu.  I didn't become vegetarian until my sister showed me how to prepare tofu that didn't taste bad.  This is my attempt to share that recipe.

The Spoiler Free Part

"The Stanley Parable" is one of the best video games that I have played in a while. The person who recommended it to me had this to say about it: "I hope you took out insurance on your 4th wall" -- and ain't it the truth. The thing that is great about "Stanley" is that it is very explicitly self referential and critical of the player.

Today, 11/18/2013, I buried my grandpa and realized that the process of death has lost its enormity.  

I wrote earlier about Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: Legend of Korra, but that was early into Korra, so I didn't have much experience.  Now that the second season of Korra is done, it has disappointed me.  It's a fun show, but it lacks what made The Last Airbender special.  Airbender was both more lighthearted and more serious than Korra.

Google has an annual science fair.  This year, a 15 year old made a flashlight that runs off of the heat of your hand like a sympathy lamp in Name of the Wind.  The article is pasted below.  You can also see a YouTube video of her explaining how it works and showing it in action.

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The chronology of Witcher books:

• The Last Wish
• Sword of Destiny
• Blood of Elves
• Times of Contempt
• Baptism of Fire
• The Swallow's Tower
• Lady of the Lake

"The Last Wish" was a series of standalone short stories. "Sword of Destiny" is a series of short stories, but they are tied together more closely, and they lead directly in to the novels, so "Blood of Elves" and future books might be confusing without it.

There was a video game called "The Witcher" (see my writeup) that was fun and thought provoking.  I didn't play through "The Witcher 2," but I saw the trailer for "The Witcher 3" and my interest was rekindled.  I decided to read the books that the video games were based on.  They were great!  They are about Geralt of Rivia, a witcher (mutant monster fighter) in a European folklore fantasy setting.