Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag).
At some point I should find a version of that intro that I like and repeat it for every future instalment, but today is not that day.
THE SECRET STRUCTURE OF GREAT TALKS (Nancy Duerte, 2011)
I spend a lot of time talking to people about writing–both now, and back in my dayjob at the writers centre–and about 50% of the gig is trying to get people excited about their own work and trying new ideas out (Heck, it’s 50% of the gig in regular blogging as well).
This talk may have originated in 2011, but it floated through my feed in 2013–aka the year that I was delivering workshops and presentations on a what felt like a fortnightly basis. This video about the importance of communicating ideas effectively, but it’s also a really interesting because of the kind of tools that Duerte uses to in her analysis. Consider, for example, the way in which she uses the visual examples to showcase the rhythms of certain speeches.
It’s an intriguing talk to watch twice–once to get the content, the second to see how it’s applied in the presentation you’ve just watched.
Also, as an aside, there was an incredible burst of nostalgia that came up the moment I found myself on the TEd.com site for a talk. You don’t often notice the internet shifting, but it does–it’s feels like I haven’t seen a Ted Talk go viral in the better part of four or five years, even if the flow of content remains one of the most interesting starting points for research on the internet.
THE BEST WAY TO SHUFFLE OR RANDOMIZE A DECK OF CARDS (Numberphile, 2015)
I played a lot of board games, once upon a time, and I was never particularly skilled at the art of the shuffle. Which is a shame, because it’s one of those things you end up doing a lot in board games. Particularly during that three year period where everyone was obsessed with Dominion.
It turns out that the biggest problem with my shuffling was poor technique.
This video features a mathematician talking through probabilities and the number of applications of particular shuffling techniques required to actually create randomness. Mine, naturally, was the version that required 10,000 applications.
6 STEPS IN MAKING YOUR NON-PROFIT’S BLOG A MUST-READ WEB DESTINATION (Pro-Blogger, 2015)
As someone who has spent a good chunk of years as part of a busy, overworked non-profit where blogging was regarded as a good thing, I spent a lot of time looking for tips on how to streamline things and get more content out without doing a hell of a lot more work.
This one largely arrived towards the end of my tenure in the non-profit space, but it’s so damned good (and such a sensible plan if you’re starting a blog, period) that I’ve I’m tucking it away in my useful-blogging-links folder so I can refer back if I ever find myself launching a new platform.
HOW TO KEEP PLANNING KICK-ASS DATE NIGHTS IN A LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP (Lifehacker, 2015)
I am spectacularly bad at this particular aspect of being in a relationship, and occasionally find it useful to have a guide to work from. But originally flagged because I was doing research into functional couples and thinking about the kinds of relationships that generally get presented in fiction, which often highlight disfunction because it’s an easy source of conflict within a scene. Off the top of my head, I can only really think of two characters who start a book a) happily married, and b) largely into one another the entire way through.
The first is Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, which bucks all kinds of hardboiled detective trends by having a loving couple who pushes one another with banter instead of playing to femme fatale tropes, and the protagonist’s marriage in Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.
