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The Pipwick Papers

Looking beyond video games

It seems that enough people liked the Pipwick Papers that I've been asked to do it again. Here are a selection of links to writing, pictures and video which exist outside the realms of games journalism. Think of me as a social media slug, slithering through your letterbox in the dead of night and sliming links all over your hallway carpet.

Again, it's not instead of The Sunday Papers, it's just different.

  • The New Scientist puts forward a case for lilac and turquoise to be inducted into the list of basic colours (plus you can take part in the ongoing study yourself).
  • A selection of beautiful swamp pictures taken by Jessica Hines.
  • Here's the trailer for the Daredevil reboot:

    Watch on YouTube

  • The Telegraph has this about a plagiarism row over an image taken from the same angle by two different people. I say "row" because that's the language the article uses, but one party was more belligerent than the other.

    "It's a bizarre coincidence and I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often," said Scurr. "You've got hundreds of people staring at landmarks or landscapes, all taking the same picture on their smartphone or camera."

  • The New Yorker's Alice Gregory on text messages as a lifeline (trigger warnings for abuse).
  • Genetic thievery allows sea slugs to steal the ability to photosynthesise from algae. It's a process called kleptoplasty and you can read about it on io9 thanks to George Dvorsky. The full study is here.
  • Jezabel's Madeleine Davies on the need for caution in light of the new Harper Lee novel announcement. The piece is basically about Lee's own reticence with regard to the public eye and her potential vulnerabilty now her sister and lawyer has died.

    she was the protector who shielded Harper Lee from the publishing world and press attention that she was so adamently repelled by. But now Alice - her Atticus - is gone and an unhealthy and unstable Lee must alone face the publishers, interviewers and literary agents that she's spent her entire life avoiding.

  • Uncube features the stunning work of Aki Inomata whose work comments on national identity shifts through sculpted hermit crab shells.

    "It seems that the bodies of the crabs don't identify them but rather the shelters identify them, like one's country or property does."

  • "Are young women linguistic superheroes, a kind of vanguard of language change?" asks peripatetic linguist, Chi Luu in Daily Jstor. This one will be of particular interest if you listened to last week's This American Life which covered people's anxieties about vocal fry.
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