This is one of those articles I wish I’d written, since it’s entirely and precisely about me.

This article is worth it if only for one line:

Steep is the descent into orthographic antinomianism.

But there’s other gold there too. Programmers, especially: go read it.

How to write badly well.

Use it wisely, friends.

I love it when random bits of the internet form new connections and mutual explanations.

I read an article this morning about some poorer examples of Twilight defence:

But the people — my God — the people who unironically love Twilight, who scour the Internet to find opportunities to defend it, who suffer weird delusions of grandeur — these people terrify me.

For what it is, it’s interesting. Both for the examples of hopeless comments (presumably made by teenage girls), but also for the counter-attacks in the comments. From both sides there’s a whole lot of “ZOMG you are so wrong you should just shut up and die!!!11!!“, only one side has slightly better grammar. And a superiority complex.

The very next random link was all about language: snarkiness, to be exact.

[Earnestness] builds a case; flippancy gets to just dance entertainingly on a case. One is the way you talk to people who get you, the other is the way you explain yourself to people who don’t. Teenagers are really amazing at one and often really poor at the other; they like being gotten, and they haven’t collected much information yet about what other people’s assumptions even are.

This kind of thing is often really important in Christian ministry—both earnestness and flippancy. The whole project is to establish sincerely and clearly the truth of the good news about Jesus. In lots of contexts, though, the key do communicating effectively is to be (at least partly) within the subculture of the group, whether it’s teenagers or retirees.

That’s where appropriate flippancy is gold. A one-liner that the 14-year-old gets (but maybe her parents don’t) goes a long way. It says ‘I understand you; I get where you’re coming from… and so you can probably get what I’m saying too’.

To pull off that one-liner, though, requires a bunch of cultural know-how. Get to know the people you’re with, what makes them tick, what they watch, listen to, love, hate, talk about, don’t know about. Not just to give you the sociological credit, but in order to really love them—it’s near impossible to love people you don’t know.

Maybe even—just maybe—watch Twilight.

For your daily dose of false dichotomies, religious stereotyping, and historical dalliance, get yourself over to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Today: why the Justinian doctrine of monogamy is a failed social experiment, and why polygyny is a form of praise to one’s first wife.

Putting skin-deep cultural analysis to one side, if this is accurately reflective of how marriage relationships are carried out more broadly within Muslim families (even without entering into polygamy), then I’m even more dismayed about how women are treated under Islam than I was before.

Which is saying something.

This is incredible technology.

In short, we have tiny barcodes that are legible when the picture is out of focus, exploiting the optical characteristics of most camera lenses. Seriously, the people who came up with this are very clever. Kudos.

But the ‘application scenarios’ they’ve come up with are outrageously lame. ‘Crowd gaming in public spaces‘. Who would do that? It’s like those public billboards that have a stereo jack down the bottom you can plug your headphones into in order to listen to the latest track by some artist. I’ve never seen anyone listening to one, ever.