I use Twitter and Google Reader every day, and every day I find two or three articles I want to read. Whether they’re long or short, I open them in a new Chrome tab until I get round to them. Most articles get consumed and dismissed within the hour, but others, especially if they’re lengthy, wait much longer. I often have tabs open for weeks.
I do this because I know that if I bookmark the page and close the tab, then I’ll never read it. Bookmarks are where websites go to be forgotten. But the flip of that is that when there’s more long articles I want to read than normal, I end up with thirty or forty tabs open at the same time. I will almost always eventually read everything, but in the meantime, my screen becomes cluttered. It starts to feel like my brain is cluttered, filled by half-read thoughts, and it becomes harder to finish reading any of them.
So in the interest of clearing some brainspace, I’m linking and closing all of the tabs I currently have open. I’ve done this before, by reading each article first. This time, I’ve read all of some of what’s below, and some of all the others. I’m not guaranteeing the quality of any of it.
A Beautiful Mind, about an autistic artist.
Consider the Lobster, which I think is the last famous piece of David Foster Wallace journalism that I haven’t read.
An annotated version of Obama’s third State of the Union.
Navigating Love and Autism, in the New York Times.
The Rise of the New Groupthink, from same.
The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. The New Yorker still capitalises “Internet”.
Film Critic Hulk’s Screenwriting 101.
Stumptown Girl, about the creators of the TV show Portlandia.
2011: The Cinescape, a montage of movie clips that makes me wish I was a film editor.
An interview with Bill Clinton.
Some answers to this year’s Edge question.
Response to the response to Level With Me, Robert Yang’s collaborative Portal 2 level experiment, which requests that gamers be more knowledgeable about games. Also this.
Linked from within the above: Donkeyspace.
Happiness takes (a little) magic, about stepping away from the damned internet.
Playing God: On Death, Motherhood and Creating (Artificial) Life.
Paul McCartney takes the Tube.
The Brain on Trial, which is disturbing enough you’ll tell your friends.
Lack of Love, a forgotten, probably terrible game that I am thinking about playing.