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1) People who don’t derive pleasure from reading do generally see it as an affection, because they can’t understand the appeal outside of apparent status-signaling. Reading, and di…

Dithering is used quite frequently in PICO-8 projects at the “native” (128x128) resolution. Here’s an example from a few years ago: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=110273#p

The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an …

I’m guessing you haven’t worked in the film business, as ‘more efficient’ is not the same as ‘brighter’ in real-world conditions on a film set. LED lighting brings efficiencies in …

The exact number “24” may be a standard for historical reasons, but a frame rate AROUND 24 is not an arbitrary standard. Higher frame rates require more light so that the image is …

You’re describing something real; I’m a screenwriter and have worked on studio films where this kind of character arc was encouraged. (I wouldn’t call it a distinct structure becau…

With respect, I have no personal investment in defending the quality of PKD’s prose; I wouldn’t even count him among my favorite authors. I’m a professional writer—and while that d…

Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rat…

A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s…

This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it…

A simple technique not listed here for drawing contour edges: 1) Create an array storing all unique edges of the faces (each edge being composed of a vertex pair V0, V1), as well a…

I work in Hollywood. Like USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the UCLA Center for Scholars & Storytellers is just another example of a political advocacy group using a university…

A later version is available here (along with the compiler itself): https://winworldpc.com/product/metaware-high-c-cpp/33x

I do some light hacking in iDOS for fun as well. Might as well go straight to Borland C++ 3.1 [0] (the "professional" version) over Turbo C++ these days. When you eventually hit th…

It’s great. I’ve been running iDOS regularly on a 3rd-gen iPad Pro, at 26800 cycles (roughly a 486DX4 100Mhz). I can run every DOS game well supported by DOSBox, write in WordPerfe…

Absolutely. Chandler was in fact employed by an oil company before he tapped a richer vein (sorry) with his fiction. Incidentally, while re-reading Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake…

No—not necessarily. In the case of, say, a hypothetical plane crash in a desert, with two thirsty survivors and one cup of water, resource allocation may also be a profound ethical…

Well, no, the article doesn't address any of those issues. In the case of the teenager apparently allowed to die through refusal-of-service, the logic of the situation as presented…

I'm not hand-waving the issue; as I said, it's clearly a very difficult problem. But it is not an ethical dilemma ; it is a resource-allocation problem. In the United States, we ar…

I fail to see how this is, as one specialist puts it, a “profound ethical dilemma," and not simply a temporary and embarrassing misalignment of resources. If you can prevent people…

>> Nobody is yet trying to create permanent wastelands inhabited only by robots. On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine…

"This absolute horror scenario is what happened to writer Michael Berben (not his real name)." Absolutely didn't happen. You might occasionally credit a story in the NYT or WSJ usi…

This is, at best, a wildly misleading headline, as the WGA would in most cases NOT allow it. This was the official WGA statement on AI-generated writing: “The WGA’s proposal to reg…

That is NPR's analysis of the situation, based on expertise, available information, and reliable polling such as that which I linked above. "Opinion" is reading an article, then en…