I wrote a photopoem titled high. Here’s the photoand here’s the poem →
What’s new with me
I finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is a complex book that warrants a re-read. I will start reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy next.
I also finished reading The Rust Book. It is a great introduction to the Rust Programming Language and is a must-read for any aspiring Rustaceans.
Curated content
Keeping with the theme of this issue, here are two of various things.
Two YouTube videos
Tom Scott presents a game show titled Money. In this show, five of Tom’s YouTuber friends play for a piece of the potential prize pool of $10,000. They can win the entire amount as a group only if they work together and cooperate with each other. If someone defects and acts selfishly, the total winnings of the group falls.
This game is a test of trust, loyalty, and deceptiveness among the players. It is a great example of a repeated game in action. Will the players cooperate, or will someone betray their friends for a chance to increase their personal winnings? Watch the show and find out!
In a web exclusive episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver does an in-depth review of the 1997 movie Air Bud which is about a dog that plays basketball. In this episode, he highlights and discusses the moral and ethical flaws of making a dog play professional basketball.
Two websites
If you are tired of binging on Netflix and would like something more nutritional, check out NHK World-Japan. This is the international broadcast service of NHK, a public broadcasting organisation in Japan.
There is a wide variety of shows and documentaries available On Demand that you can watch for free without having to sign up.
A show that I liked was The Myths and Legends of Hiroshima and Shimane. This show takes you on a train ride across towns in Hiroshima and Shimane, and gives a glimpse of the arts, the culture, the myths, and the legends on the way. Another show that I would like to watch is a four-part documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese filmmaker who co-founded Studio Ghibli.
If you are feeling nostalgic and miss the times when we all watched the same content at the same time and couldn’t rewind or skip forward, there’s Live TV for you. There is also a section on the site where you can learn Japanese.
A fun game called Redactle that you can play in your browser. In this game, you are given a Wikipedia article with almost all words redacted. You can guess a word, and if it is present in the article, then all occurences of the word are revealed. The objective of the game is to guess the title of the article.
While there is no limit on the number of words you can guess, you can set your own targets. I like to guess the title in the shortest time, so I don’t care how many guesses it takes.
This game tests your general knowledge and pattern recognition skills. Having read a lot of Wikipedia articles certainly helps. A new article is available everyday at 9.30pm IST.
Two excerpts
This first excerpt is from Crime and Punishment. It shows the thoughts of the main character Raskolnikov moments before he is about to commit a crime.
At first—even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary. According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes. But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.
– Excerpt from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
This second excerpt is much more light-hearted. It is a conversation that Mark Twain had while visiting Fiji in September:
“This? This is not hot. You ought to be here in the summer time once.”
“We supposed that this was summer; it has the ear-marks of it. You could take it to almost any country and deceive people with it. But if it isn’t summer, what does it lack?”
“It lacks half a year. This is mid-winter.”
— Excerpt from Following the Equator by Mark Twain
and Two songs
Here are two songs that have French names and were released in 1979:
