Monthly Archives: April 2013

Peasants

Posted on by
I have moved from Iceland to the UK three times in my life. The third, which not so coincidentally took place in 2008, is likely to be the last.

(The two attributed quotes in this post are thanks to Íris Erlingsdóttir’s awesome blog post where she collected them all in Icelandic.)

The first time I moved back to Iceland was in 1984 when my parents returned after finishing their studies abroad. Of course, knowing our luck, we returned at the start of what ended up being one of Iceland’s longest general strikes, lasting from the 4th of October to the 30th.

Iceland was in an economic crisis, what we call ‘kreppa’. What most foreigners don’t realise is that Iceland has been in a bipolar boom-bust cycle ever since we declared independence from the Danish. And before that we were in a poverty spiral of misery, hunger, and sky-high childhood mortality rates.

Continue reading →

The idiocies of young men

Posted on by

Giles Bowkett on one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent delusions:

If by “the smartest people” you mean “the smartest young, single geeks in Silicon Valley with time on their hands but no idea how to party,” then it’s basically true, or close enough. It can even stay mostly true when you broaden it to “the smartest geeks in Silicon Valley.”

But if by “the smartest people” you mean “the smartest people in Silicon Valley,” you quickly run into the first zone of epic fail. Steve Wozniak did it as a hobby; Steve Jobs did it as a business. So the idea can only be legit if we assume Wozniak was smarter than Jobs. This is not only a dickhead thing to say, it’s also extremely debatable.

Geeks, like any other social group that consist mostly of young males, generally assume not only that anybody who disagrees with them is dumb but that anybody who is different is also an idiot. Not all of them grow out of this delusion.

Studio Tendra’s grand and marvellous Oz Reading Club

Posted on by
Revealing our super-secret project

It’s time to announce Studio Tendra’s second major project: The OZ Reading Club.

The idea is simple:

We are going to release two ebooks in the Oz series per month until we’ve released all fourteen of L. Frank Baum’s original ebooks. Each ebook will have a new cover illustrated by Jenný and will be designed and formatted by me, Baldur.

You, if you are so inclined, are invited to read them along with us, two per month, as we release them. Every book page also has a comment thread where you can tell us what you thought of it. (Comments are moderated, of course.)

We’ll announce every new release here, on the OZ Reading Club site, on twitter, and on Google Plus.

The first two books are available now.

Continue reading →