Travelling around Europe always leaves me with intense motivation to learn languages. Currently riding the wave by getting back onto icelandiconline.is (low priority but I’m immersed every day) and starting German on Duolinguo (higher priority but no immersion at the moment).

My 2hr Norwegian airlines connection from LGW to CPH showed a bunch of short films instead of a long movie. Amongst them was the single best piece of animation I’ve ever seen: Rabbit and Deer:

Everything about this is perfectly executed — the story, the animation, the art styles. It almost makes me want to start animating again, except that it’d take years to make something half as good.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the soundtrack on the plane because the armrest headphone jack didn’t work. At the time I was listening to “The Blackleg Miner” by Appletwig Songbook (here’s a different version), which created this bizzare mental association between an old miners song and this piece of animation.

Shapeways, one of the most prominent places to order 3D printed goods, has a “My Little Pony” section in the top level navigation (note especially how visually distinct the nav item is made). As far as I can tell it’s not directly sponsored by Hasbro.

Pretty sure none of the “3D printing is the future” visionaries saw that one coming.

Saw the ISS fly over for the first time! #space #spaaace

About to go to a French/Breton solstice dance wearing a huge knitted rat. So much for all those people who said I needed to “drink alcohol” to “lower my inhibitions”

Learning about C. V. Raman, first Indian winner of a Nobel Prize in science, inventor of Raman spectroscopy. He also researched musical instrument acoustics!

I love the way #web browser’s consoles allow us to do maths and simple programming directly alongside mathematical webpages. This can be so much better though — the computation and experimentation should happen interactively in the webpage itself

Do Artifacts Have Ethics — 41 questions to ask yourself about the #tech you build or use. #bookmark

RIP Doreen Muskett, author of hurdygurdymethod.co.uk. You contributed so much to the gurdy community.

#wikipedia article of the week: Timeline of the Far Future

Thoroughly enjoyed playing at Portið this Sunday and met a bunch of awesome people! Turns out that (probably for the first time in history) it was one of two #gurdy concerts in Reykjavík on the same day.

Wow. The #wikipedia page for Sesame Street is one of the best organised I’ve ever seen. Unsure how to feel about this.

Anyone know the name/origin/lyrics of a probably English xmas-themed folk song with this chorus:

Bring in the green bring in the green
for it is our desire
to celebrate the holiday
with food and drink and fire

Various google searchings reveal nothing, and I never got a copy of the lyrics.

Wonderful vocal harmonies in this T Sisters version of Come When I Call You:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spPZX7fnCmc

Loving Twine: an in-browser nonlinear text adventure creator with HTML export. Effectively a fascinating directed graph UI view over a stateful wiki.

Much as I like docblocks, the phpdoc proposal reads like an attempt to recreate the semantics which staticly typed languages give us, but outside the language in verbose comments and requiring extra tools to use for some reason.

Personal highlight from today’s DnD session: making an intelligence (religion) check to determine if slices of blessed apple go brown. And failing.

From Pokemon and Star Wars JSON APIs: “There are hundreds of websites about Pokémon but none of the data they had was consumable through an API.” Problem has never been lack of APIs but discrepancy between human-readable hypertext pages and otherwise hidden machine-readable data. Rethink your assumptions!