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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Programming term. Variables in programming languages can hold different types of data, such as whole numbers, floating point numbers or strings of characters (“text”). Untyped languages figure out on the fly what can and cannot be done to the content of a variable, while typed languages strictly keep track of the type of content (not the value) to catch bugs and improve performance, for example.


  • Ursula Le Guin of Earthsea fame put it nicely:

    Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

    What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.