Subject: (urth) Fifth Head of Cerberus surfaces again

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:10:10 +0000

> 'My cohort's education is always foremost in my mind, but in the past I've typically resorted to misdirections that (once discovered) set the project back substantially. This time - and I recognize that this is strange - I am actually taking his predilections into account. Before, I would have flopped a book like The Fifth Head of Cerberus onto his Intuos and said "eat this, *dog*." I'm taking a different tack now, a breadcrumb trail, so that his mind is starving at the end of each book, and into that ravenous mind I will continuously heap works of burning fire and terrible consequence.'
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/1/13/

It's funny because the insult is 'dog'.

But it's also worth noting that the link is to Wikipedia. Since
penny-arcade.com records a few hundred thousand hits a day (
http://www.statsaholic.com/penny-arcade.com ), odds are good that this
is most of the readers' first exposure to Wolfe. It will be
interesting to keep an eye on
http://stats.grok.se/en/201001/The_Fifth_Head_of_Cerberus and see just
how much the article traffic spikes. If it doesn't go to at least a
thousand, I will be disapointed :)

-- 
gwern

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From: Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:38:56 +0000

I would expect no less from Tycho, whose video game blogging skills I
greatly admire.  On my own video-game related column for a blog, I
plan to discuss this reference and others to examine Wolfe's influence
on video games.

-L.

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
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From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:51:41 +0000

Penny Arcade has mentioned The Book of the New Sun before. It was some
time before I'd read Wolfe, though I'd heard of him and had been
meaning to read him. I owe Penny Arcade some thanks for helping to
keep Wolfe in my mind.

-Matt