My attempt at playing “Sancta Dorothea” by Franz Liszt.

This is one of my favorite aphorisms from The Gay Science:

I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses.  My natures is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all—from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up: the good things parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.

“Plainclothes Man”
by Heatmiser

This year I’m trying to learn some guitar, and am going to try and document my progress with short video clips.  So here’s my first!

“Stay Golden”
by Au Revoir Simone

          JOEL
I can't think of anything I don't like
about you right now.

          CLEMENTINE
But you will.  You will think of things.
And I'll get bored with you and feel
trapped because that's what happens with 
me.

          JOEL
Okay.

          CLEMENTINE
Okay.

                                          THE END

I really like this ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I think it could be an expression or example of Nietzsche’s attitude of amor fati.

“Rain”
by Bishop Allen

The following code doesn’t look like it should be possible:

(define break 'undefined)

(let ((i 0))
  (loop (set! i (+ i 1))
           (display i)
           (when (>= i 5)
                      (break #f))))

> 12345#f

Loop is a regular syntax-rules macro, which means it’s required to be “hygienic” and “referentially transparent”—writing (break #f) should expand and evaluate to ('undefined #f), and cause an error!

What’s happened is that loop takes advantage of a very clever trick described by Al Petrofsky and Oleg Kiselyov, where it uses an auxiliary macro to search for occurrences of an identifier (e.g., break), for which it provides an arbitrary binding (e.g., to an escape continuation).