Day: May 17, 2011

Tuesday is as Tuesday does

Nothing much happened today. It rained until it stopped, and that’s about it. My first train this morning was late, and then the connecting train at Jamaica was flooded. Not exactly underwater, but it’s one of those double-decker trains, and I was on the bottom level. Luckily the seats themselves are elevated off the floor, because the floor itself was one giant puddle.

Oh, and it turns out I didn’t win the Geist Literary Postcard Story Contest. That’s too bad, as I really liked the piece I submitted. I definitely think I’m going to rework it a little, expand it just slightly from the contest’s (maddening) 500-word limit.

And, yep, that was pretty much my Tuesday.

Tuesday various

  • Zadie Smith’s rules for writers:

    When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. [via]

  • “All these worlds are yours except Europa…and possibly Titan.” [via]
  • The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

    It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think. [via]

  • So long and thanks for all the fish: Underwater Translator May Finally Let Us Talk to Dolphins. [via]
  • And finally, My Little 11th Doctor [via]: