Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules, usually beginning through a system of democratic voting. // Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.

games, democracy, philosophy, politics

Domestic noir is a literary subgenre within crime fiction. Though used earlier in discussion of the film noir subgenre, the term was applied to fiction in 2013 by the novelist Julia Crouch, who has been described by the crime writer, Elizabeth Haynes, as "the queen of domestic noir".

noir, domestic noir

Barbēlō (Greek: Βαρβηλώ) refers to the first emanation of God in several forms of Gnostic cosmogony. Barbēlō is often depicted as a supreme female principle, the single passive antecedent of creation in its manifoldness. This figure is also variously referred to as 'Mother-Father' (hinting at her apparent androgyny), 'First Human Being', 'The Triple Androgynous Name', or 'Eternal Aeon'. So prominent was her place amongst some Gnostics that some schools were designated as Barbeliotae, Barbēlō worshippers or Barbēlōgnostics.

The evil bit is a fictional IPv4 packet header field proposed in RFC 3514, a humorous April Fools' Day RFC from 2003 authored by Steve Bellovin. The RFC recommended that the last remaining unused bit, the "Reserved Bit,"[1] in the IPv4 packet header be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus making computer security engineering an easy problem – simply ignore any messages with the evil bit set and trust the rest.

Too long; didn't read (abbreviated tl;dr and tldr;) is a shorthand notation added by an editor indicating that a passage appeared to be too long to invest the time to digest.

information age anxiety

The country that gave us ahimsa also gave us thugs. // Thuggee or tuggee (Hindi: Nepali ठग्गी ṭhaggī; Urdu: ٹھگ‎; Sanskrit: sthaga; Marathi: ठक; Sindhi: ٺوڳي، ٺڳ‎; Kannada: ಠಕ್ಕ thakka) refers to the acts of Thugs, an organised gang of professional robbers and murderers.

language, culture shock

Spaghetti alla puttanesca (literally “spaghetti of the whore” in Italian) is a tangy, somewhat salty Italian pasta dish invented in the mid-20th century. The ingredients are typical of Southern Italian cuisine... In a 2005 article from Il Golfo—a daily newspaper serving the Italian islands of Ischia and Procida—Annarita Cuomo asserted that sugo alla puttanesca was invented in the 1950s by Sandro Petti, co-owner of Rancio Fellone, a famous Ischian restaurant and nightspot. According to Cuomo, Petti's moment of inspiration came when—near closing one evening—Petti found a group of customers sitting at one of his tables. He was low on ingredients and so told them he didn't have enough to make them a meal. They complained that it was late and they were hungry. “Facci una puttanata qualsiasi,” or “Make any kind of garbage,” they insisted. Petti had nothing more than four tomatoes, two olives and some capers—the basic ingredients for the sugo, “So I used them to make the sauce for the spaghetti,” Petti told Cuomo. Later, Petti included this dish on his menu as spaghetti alla puttanesca.

It got to be a trifle dull towards the end but I think that could be down to my attempt to be moderately frugal with butter (a small concession to the fact that I'd already had a dinner this evening).

curiosity

The Venus of Willendorf is an 11.1-centimetre-high (4.4 in) Venus figurine estimated to have been made between about 28,000 and 25,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 by a workman named Johann Veran or Josef Veram during excavations conducted by archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the town of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The figurine is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

voluptuousness