Metafilter’s Year in Writing has given me much to read in the past and coming weeks… ···

Our Unpaid, Shadow Work: you know that last time you bought a ticket online? Or yesterday when you filled your car with gasoline yourself? Or when you went to the supermarket and scanned your own groceries’ barcodes? You are doing someone else’s job, for free. Sure, you get cheaper tickets, gasoline or groceries because of that (do you really?), but that’s no way to run a proper economy. ···

Makimizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. This is a headline on Forbes!, not The Communist Workers’ Union Monthly or something like that. ···

Two interesting articles about fighting cognitive biases and other kinds of self-delusion: Steven Pinker would ban the idealization of the past if he happened to rule the world, while Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s statistical approach to psychology. ···

Umberto Eco’s guide to identifying fascists, written in 1995, makes the future look rather bleak. ···

Roger Ebert tells us why movie revenue is falling. I’d say what’s surprising is that movie revenue is holding so well, at least here in Portugal. Mini-rant: Even though I’m rather able to concentrate when I go to the movies and cope rather well with other patrons’ poor civics, I find it anoying that going to the movies means quite often driving to a shopping mall in the suburbs, eating overpriced mall food, standing in line for too long to buy tickets, etecetra, the alternative being a couple of inner-city theatres that offer nothing else but waiting out in the cold, or an extremely overpriced and unconfortable bar. Please make the theatres places where people would actually enjoy hanging out, else they’ll be downloading movies off the internet and watching them at home — not because it’s cheaper but because it is better. ···

Peyton’s Place: An interesting essay about what it’s like to lend one’s house to a TV series’ production. It didn’t go well. ···

KidsRuby seems like an interesting tool to teach programming. And not just to kids. Similar tools using Ruby (which, from my very shallow knowledge of it, really seems the general-purpose language with the simplest syntax) include Hackety Hack and the very cool Shoes. ···

Aaron Koblin’s The Single Lane Super Highway. I felt like twelve again, drawing badly pimped-out cars. ···

The Internet as Hyperbole — A Critical Exhamination of Adoption Rates by Gisle Hannemyr is a paper with compelling arguments against the popular perception that people adopted the Internet much faster than other new communication technologies such as radio or television. The demonstration much ICT policy is based on a meme-ified anedocte makes this a compelling read. ···

Neal Stephenson on Innovation Starvation. That’s what happens to nations full of Nixons. ···

Charlie Stross writes about the existential quagmire of the ultra-rich, the ways most of us are richer than the ultra-rich of past generations, and the ways the ultra-rich are not rich at all. ···

George Monbiot on how the elites became destroyers of wealth. Much is made clear by xkcd’s crushing, epic Money infographic. ···

A short guide to lazy EU journalism. Granted, as even though I consider myself a literate European I do have a lot of trouble understanding how the EU institutions work. These lazy journalists won’t help. Please do your job already! ···

Christian Thorne’s two-part essay (part one, part two) on Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is one of the best pieces of film criticism I have ever read. ···

It appears a Russian filmmaker called Ilya Khrzhanovsky took over a large part from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov and turned it into a 24/7 film set. And that has been going on for five years. Almost resembles a real-life Synecdoche, New York. ···

Stu Maschwitz’s totally inconclusive guide to choosing a pro video camera. We live in a glorious era of wonderful and affordable imaging technology, but in a depressing age of nitpicky trade-offs and difficult choices. ···

Sorry About My Face. I too share the same problem — often my face reads bitter even if I’m actually daydreaming about nice things. And nobody takes “it’s just my face” for an answer, which leads to episodes in which I feel a significant other is acting like someone in a club suddently asking me “where are you looking at?!” and trying to pick a fight, etecetera. Perhaps I need to find an early XXth century Virginia Woolf-looking girlfriend… ···

A conservative politician calls for science. Despite being mostly on the other end of the conservative-liberal spectrum, I wish there were more politicians like this. Far too many people people — in the left and right alike — believe and act as if the Outside World would fit with their preconceptions. It won’t: because that’s the very definition of Outside. ···

Film is on its way out, as the last 35mm cinema cameras were built. Am I being sacrilegious by saying and it was about time!? Film has its charm, but is wasteful bordering on the insulting — like printing a whole sheet of paper for every word a writer types. ···

Warner Brothers is developing a film based on a Reddit discussion: could a single battalion of US Marine soldiers fight and destroy the entire Roman Empire? This calls for the ghost of Philip K. Dick. The entire episode, not just the film premise. ···

And also speaking of film: Peter Bogdanovich’s Blogdanovich. ···

Lecturefox links to a mountain of free university lectures. ···

The Golden Grid System. This makes me want to redesign this whole thing, dammit! ···

A funny read every once in a while: the problem with n00b time-travellers that keep killing Hitler. ···

Andy Rutledge has some thoughts on the terrible design of news websites, and some actual proposals at making it better. A very interesting read, and some very interesting proposals, but I have a feeling news websites are defective by design. There’s no advertising revenue on cutting down confusion and unnecessary clicking. Services such as Readability and Instapaper are allowed to let ‘power users’ actually read stuff (some people do the darndest things!), but their very existence is a sign media companies don’t care about the readers, and content is often considered cattle feed. They’d give us lorem ipsum every day if we read the ads. ···

If your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. So says Anil Dash (warning, the link crashes consistently on Chrome, which is something the author should really look into). I agree: moderation is essential. I’ve often learned this the hard way, but there’s no incompatibility between aggressive moderation and freedom of expression (after all the Internet is big, and there are enough free places where you can exercise your expression). It’s all a matter of my house, my rules. ···

Ted Dziuba is a great programmer, he even built a Facebook clone in 4 days. A great humourous play on the stupid job offers that ask for incredible complicated feats of Web development for indeterminate future money (or, I would add, the digital sweatshops *ahem*, ‘creative industries’ that ask for developers to be proefficient in every language known to Man, with some design software thrown in, which only shows ignorance and a certain path to insolvence). ···

The Cinefamily is my new favourite blog about cinema. It rawks. ···

Whose Ideal Was This, Anyway?: the evolution of the ideal body, from late 19th century women in corsets to early 21st century women on the edge of the Uncanny Valley. The contrast between the images of Bond Girls 40 years apart, Ursula Andress and Halle Berry, is the difference between an image of a woman and an image of a Formula1 racing car — an image of science and technology, but not an image of a woman, really. Men, by contrast, have had an easier time keeping the media at bay from blasting their self-image, even if some things are ridiculous — see the steroidal ultra-muscular action figure. ···