Fifth Head of Cerberus surfaces again

Gwern Branwen · 13 Jan 2010, 13:10 · from 2010-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:10:10 -0500
Subject: (urth) Fifth Head of Cerberus surfaces again
Message-ID: <cbf55b101001130510x8872d37p3412c1d8ac0d4578 at mail.gmail.com>

> '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

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net