Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Prioritising the Search for Good Books

    A favourite hobby of mine is research. Structured or unstructured, informal or scholarly. Deep diving on a topic, old or new, is my jam. For that reason, I spend a lot of time reading about the thing, rather than actually doing the thing. The meta-activities. There are clear negatives to this approach (limited impulsivity, slower…

  • Alt Codes and symbol.wtf

    In my work and in my writing here, I’m constantly searching for “ellipsis”, “euro symbol”, and “section symbol”, among many, many other symbols. For me, trying to remember even more alt codes is a futile endeavour. Obviously, when Sam Rose wrote this, I was excited: “Made a dumb website so I wouldn’t ever have to…

  • The Nerd Urban Dictionary, or: The Overcomplication Compilation

    Seemingly frustrated at how ‘nerds’ throw around technical terms in order to sound smart, Chris Anderson (writer of The Long Tail, etc.) put together The Nerd Urban Dictionary to compile the most common and worst offenders. With terms coming from disciplines ranging from statistics to chemistry, finance to the military, here’s a small sample (mostly…

  • China, Cement, and the Great Wall’s Sticky Rice Mortar

    I’m fascinated by the scale of concrete usage in modern China, and some of the facts can be difficult to fathom on face value. For instance: Now I’ve just read about sticky rice mortar. As Liam said: “The Great Wall of China is held together with sticky rice” sounds like the kind of lie a…

  • Create a Learning Guide for Any Topic

    Want to learn a new topic but unsure where to start (or even whether the topic is what you expect)? The Curricula is an AI-driven learning tool, that will develop a detailed learning guide for any topic you feed it. Developed by Mike Dyer, the Curricula will generate a list of pre-requisites/related learning topics, a…

  • Prediction Markets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, and More

    Each year I get caught up in the big film and television awards, trying to watch as many as possible and speculating on the various winners. I just discovered Gold Derby, a fun site for following and predicting the Hollywood ‘races’ yourself. Gold Derby takes predictions on everything from the Oscars to RuPaul’s Drag Race,…

  • ‘Locked’ Value, and Paying for Everything Twice

    How to account for the true cost and value of our possessions? In the same vein as Thoreau, who wrote in Walden: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run”, David Cain suggests that everything…

  • How to Title Your Work

    Written as advice to visual artists (painters, sculptors, etc.), How to title your art is half rallying cry half tutorial on why and how you should give your art a title. As Claudia Dawson said in Recommendo, the guidance is useful for anyone who writes titles or headlines. Some points that stuck out for me:

  • A Visual Technique Library for Film Shots

    From the common to the lesser-seen cinematographic techniques, Eyecandy is a “visual technique library” for film shots. A database of over 5,000 GIFs, organised into around 100 different techniques, you select the technique and you get a short description and a wall of example clips. While I love movies, I’m certainly a cinematography neophyte, so…

  • Video Clip Search Tool

    As both a movie lover and a Xennial, I still (unashamedly) send a lot of video clips and gifs when texting with friends. If nothing apt comes up immediately, there’s a couple of sites I use where I can enter any phrase and immediately get a clip of it being said in various films and…