"Some things never change / my middle name's still Risk"

[larryhammer]

Catching up, with links. Which is not the same thing as catching up with links, though I'm doing that as well.

As part of working out why I like Yotsuba&! so much, I've started doing a critical reading of a chapter a day (as befitting a slice-of-life series with nearly daily episodes) in yotsubato: one, two, three so far (ETA: and now four). Feel free to read along and join in. Maybe by the time I reach volume 6, ADV will stop delaying the release.

I can see why Browning's Aristophanes' Apology was not as popular as Balaustion's Adventure -- and why I've bounced off it both times I've tried to read it. The narrator, Balaustion, is more or less the same character but her voice is nowhere near as appealing as before. It doesn't help that the Euripides play is this time done as a script direct instead of, as in the first poem, a retelling by a fourteen-year-old girl of a performance -- thus abandoning two layers of imagination and mediation. (See previous comments about Browning being less interesting without personas.) Not to mention, Herakles isn't as interesting a play as Alkestis.

• What to do with the cognitive surplus: or, how sitcoms are like gin. (via)
  
  
• Pixelated waterspouting. (via)
  
  
• Spiders don't like it when you mend their webs for them but metronomes like it when you synchronize them. (via)
  
  
• Middle- and lower-class incomes grow faster under Democratic than under Repuiblican presidents. (via)
  
  
• A simple rule for chosing -ible or -able. (via)

---L.