this week, on the Internets

USB Cassette Converter by CD-R King (Php780)

Discovered earlier today that, not only does CD-R King have practically everything -- it has something that'd convert your old cassette mixtapes to MP3 FORMAT. (And while you're at it -- also a safe box disguised as a cereal box. Really.)

Indeed, this has been a rather interesting week for online finds. (More under cut: Longreads, etc etc)





- Via @NYMag -- "Just Kids" -- on the early days of Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr. I've always fantasized about belonging to a cool crew of writers haha. Anyway, striking bit:

But Wallace was volatile, Karr says, and she was sharp-tongued; their fights became frequent and virulent. Karr is a charismatic raconteur, and the portrait of Wallace that she painted in speaking with me was striking. In one fight, he threw her coffee table at her; in another, he stopped the car in a bad neighborhood and pushed her out, leaving her to walk home. Then he would try to win her back. He once climbed up on her balcony, she says, to “beat on the door like in the fucking Graduate.” This is not the familiar Wallace, wounded and ever sweet. Years later he wrote Karr a letter of apology, she says, for “being such a dick.”

- Via @TheAtlantic -- Hacked! -- Do you use Gmail? You may want to read this. Lord, this fucked me up big time. After reading, I downloaded LastPass and changed ALL my passwords. Scariest bit:

When she looked at her Inbox, and her Archives, and even the Trash and Spam folders in her account, she found—absolutely nothing. Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone. All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased. It had not just been put in the “Trash” folder but permanently deleted.

I can't even -- I took a long hard look at my online life and asked myself, How much of me is on the cloud, somewhere? God, plenty. I'm still studying ways re: how to protect myself.

- Via @TheAtlantic: Why are modern children so anxious? All work and no play

The researchers found that compared to 1981, children in 1997 spent less time in play and had less free time. They spent 18 percent more time at school, 145 percent more time doing school work, and 168 percent more time shopping with parents. The researchers found that, including computer play, children in 1997 spent only about eleven hours per week at play.

- Via @TheAtlantic: Why more and more women are forgoing marriage in favor of the single life.

In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. She’d never had sex with anyone but my father. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone? And the ex-lover’s fiancée being so generous and open-minded as to suggest the shopping trip to begin with?

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.

- Via Thought Catalog: Why We Want People who are Unavailable

It’s possible we choose people we can’t have not because we want a challenge, not because we actually believe that we belong with them, but because we can keep them at arm’s length. There’s something that keeps them from getting too close, and that’s what we want, and sometimes, what we need.

- Via Thought Catalog: Do's and Don'ts of being a lesbian -- LOL at times dubious, but what the fuck, anything that mentions familiarity with PMS deserves a two-line mention.

- Via The Guardian: A Murakami interview -- "The Murakami style: enigmatic, deadpan, full of big emotions sheared flat by repression and presented with detachment." I still love Norwegian Wood best. And I am kinda in love with the way seeing cats on the street make him SO HAPPY. ILU.

How, then, did he find the confidence to do what he wanted?

"Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven't changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That's a confidence. If you don't know what you love, you are lost."

- Via Spin.com: Special Report: Homophobia Haunts Indie Rock

- Also: My LGBT feed on Google Reader is on fire and it's because October is LGBT History month -- elsewhere at least, so: LGBT Resource Guide « Albert S. Cook Library

- I love Rookiemag.com, which I discovered through @ndreanicola. Anyway -- witchcraft as metaphor for girl empowerment, anyone?: The Season of the Witch

There were a lot of things that my friends and I were scared of, during our Craft mania. We were scared of our bodies. We were scared of the attention that our bodies were receiving. We were scared of dating, and of sex. But we were also scared that we’d never date, or that we’d never have sex. We were scared of college; we were scared that we might not get into college. We were scared of driving, and scared of not getting the license. We were scared that we might grow up to be our parents. We were scared that we didn’t know what to do with our lives. We were scared of tests, auditions, try-outs, games, and recitals. We were scared of increased responsibility, and scared of our own powerlessness. We were scared of our classmates. And every day, we kept on turning into someone else—turning into our new selves, our grown-up selves—and we had no idea what the outcome would be, or if we’d like it. So, more than anything, we were scared of ourselves. But here’s one thing that definitely didn’t scare us: The idea that, if we supported each other and stuck together, we could somehow control all of this just by wishing.

So it's a site geared toward teenage girls. I wish there was a place just like this that's geared specifically toward gay girls. JUST SAYING. I could have used that when I was younger, is all. (What, meron nang ganun? TAKE ME TO THE RIOT, GUYS.)