# Fifth Head of Cerberus surfaces again *The Urth list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 13 Jan 2010* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Gwern Branwen *13 Jan 2010, 13:10* > '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 ``` --- ### Lane Haygood *13 Jan 2010, 14:38 · in reply to Gwern Branwen* 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 wrote: >> '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 > _______________________________________________ --- ### Matthew Keeley *13 Jan 2010, 16:51 · in reply to Lane Haygood* 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 ---