Weekly Head Voices #103: Chips!

I thought that I had nothing for the two weeks from Monday January 18 to Sunday January 31, 2016, but my notes begged to differ. They suggested the following items for your reading, listening and viewing pleasure:

Party trick

If you’re like me, you stop two to three chips short of finishing the packet so that you can explain to your conscience that you didn’t finish the whole thing. However, once or twice in my life, I’ve been faced with the terrifying conundrum of a partially finished packet of chips, but no way to seal the packet for later utilisation. Readers, agonise no more! Learn from this animated demonstration:

How to seal a bag of chips without a clip

Music

A musically inclined colleague recently suggested I try out In Colour, the 2015 studio album by Jamie XX. After multiple listens, I can only highly recommend that you too try this out on your favourite music source. I’m currently on Apple Music, because it is currently the best way for me and my whole family to get access to all the music we can eat. What a time to be alive! Below is one of my favourite tracks from the album:

Irrelevant miscellany, for my OCD

At Stone Three, as I have previously hinted, we have now switched to a self-hosted Mattermost. So far, this is going swimmingly, with some of the resident experts also getting the github integration going (when someone pushes to any of the linked github repos, we get a nicely formatted message on the relevant channels). If you’re curious about how exactly this compares to HipChat, Slack or Campfire (remember that?), let me know in the comments.

For the Saff Efricans reading this: When Afrihost announced that they were going to play MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), I jumped on them. Much more data, somewhat more airtime and contract-free for not very many peanuts sounded like a great deal to me. Let me know in the comments if you need more info.

Backyard linguistics

Millenials, or Generation Y, are humans that were born anywhere from the early 80s to the early 2000s. As a backyard anthropologist, one of my favourite articles about millenials is “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy” by Tim Urban on the Wait but Why blog. However, I found this recent article by Jeff Guo titled “The totes amazesh way millennials are changing the English language” at the Washington Post even more fascinating.

It turns out that millenials have introduced new forms like totes delish (most delicious), abbreviash (abbreviation), appreesh (appreciate) and many more brilliant inventions into the English language. It’s fantastic seeing a language evolve like this, especially now that the internet and the hyper-connected humans on it are acting as such a powerful catalyst, and simultaneously as an instrument of observation, or should I say observash?

Inspiring quotes that you can repost if you want

This is from Soderbergh’s Solaris, which I thought was brilliant (I did read Lem’s book when I was much younger, could be that that did the trick). The quote was brought to my attention by @ckritzinger on the twitters as follows:

There are no answers. Only choices.

Let’s broaden the quote slightly. Remember, this is the dialogue between one of the last living characters on a space station, and a flesh-and-bones version of one of the other crew members that was resurrected (you know, from being completely dead) by the utterly strange planetary intelligence that is Solaris (you can also read this fine analysis):

If you keep thinking there’s a solution, you’ll die here. There are no answers. Only choices.

That sounds like an even more apt bit of advice for most of us here on Earth, except that it’s only going to make the difference between dying, or dying with the disappointing belief that there must have been a solution or final answer somewhere that you were just unable to find.

There is no why.

There is only how, and that’s awesome!

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