Edgar Allen Poe’s influences

Edgar Allen Poe’s influences

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PBS has a good little 2 part documentary on Edgar Allen Poe called “In Search of Edgar Allen Poe” that you can watch for free.

I’ve always been a Poe fan since I found his stories in my elementary school years. The documentary did a decent overview of his life – which was quite a story of struggles and loss in itself.

One of the things I learned was the breadth and accomplishment on his influence in many genres. He is cited as the inventor of not only the horror story, but of the detective story, and science fiction. He also wrote impressive essays on poetry, cryptography, cosmology and even the nature of the music of bells.

At the end of the documentary, there is a list of works that inspired other authors (either directly stated by the author or having obvious influence). I thought it was worth putting them here to record just how influential his work became.

  • The Gold Bug
    • Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
    • William F Friedman – man who broke Japanese “Purple” cypher in WW2
  • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
    • Moby Dick – Herman Melville
    • At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
    • An Antarctic Mystery – Jules Verne
  • The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
    • In the House of Suddho – Rudyard Kipling
  • The Man of the Crowd
    • Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
    • The Seven Old Men – Charles Baudelaire
  • Murders in the Rue Morgue
    • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Mystery of Marie Roget
    • Hercule Poirot mysteries – Agatha Christie
  • The Purloined Letter
    • Nero Wolfe detective mysteries – Rex Stout
  • The Oval Portrait
    • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  • The Premature Burial
    • Ulysses – James Joyce
  • Three Sundays in a Week
    • Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne
  • William Wilson
    • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Eukreka
    • Pioneering treatise on an expanding universe – Alexander Friedmann
  • The Balloon Hoax
    • Five Weeks in a Balloon – Jules Verne
  • The Tell-Tale Heart
    • Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Fall of the House of Usher
    • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Poetic Principle (essay)
    • Art for Art’s Sake movement
    • French Symoblists
    • The Pre-Raphaelites
  • The Pit and the Pendulum
    • The Inn of the Two Witches – Joseph Conrad
  • Annabel Lee
    • Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Masque of the Red Death
    • The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
  • Poe’s Short stories
    • Inspired science fiction of H.G. Wells
    • Charles Baudelaire – French poet who translated Poe and popularized him in France
    • Jorge Luis Borges – Argentine short-story writer/poet that translated Poe’s work to Spanish
    • Fernando Pessoa – Portuguese poet/writer/philosopher and translator
    • Edogawa Rampo – Japanese mystery writer that introduced modern detective stories in Japan in 1920’s. Used a pen name which was the Japanese version of the name “Edgar Allan Poe”
    • Allen Ginsberg – claimed you could trace all modern literary art to Poe’s influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan…etc
    • Roger Corman – made 7 movies based on Poe’s work
    • Stephen King
    • Alfred Hitchcock – “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films”
  • Poe added over a thousand words to the English language including:
    • memory-stirring, normality, odorless, epilepsy, bugaboo, sentience, irreducible, multicolor, aeronaut, and cryptography
Runescape and the rise of bot warfare

Runescape and the rise of bot warfare

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Runescape was one of the first really big, popular online games. Soon, people wrote bot programs to do repetitive tasks for you. Then the game designers started fighting back from the bots.

What came next was the rise of the back and forth arms race with attack and counter-attack that created a lot of early MMORPG memes and cultural touchpoints. Today the arms race has advanced to ill-advised kernel based anti-cheat system and even AI based cheat detection.

Learning how and why these systems developed is an important part of any software engineers toolbag.

Strange festival of San Bartolome de Pinares

Strange festival of San Bartolome de Pinares

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Each year on January 16, the town celebrates the traditional Luminarias festival. Purportedly held for five centuries, the origins of the festival trace back to a ritual purification to preserve the health of the horses in the village. Bonfires are lit in the central streets, and horses jump through the flames, with the smoke intended to protect the animals from disease.

Pentangle

Pentangle

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The 70’s was famous for folk songs, but did you know this trend was also occurring overseas as well? Pentangle did a number of folk songs – but the songs they song weren’t from 20 or 30 years earlier like in the US. They were from 300 years earlier in 1775 like this song – Willy O Winsbury.

They also recorded this fantastic version of Hunting Song:

Repentance and conversion

Repentance and conversion

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As we enter Lent, we are invited to fast, give alms, and deepen prayer – but those are simply practices designed to help us reach the true goal: a relationship of truth with God and each other. I think there is a lot of confusion about fasting and almsgiving – because I know I got it wrong for a long time.

In Isaiah’s time, the people of Israel complained God didn’t seem to answer their prayers despite fasting and almsgiving. The passage tells us that the people were even trying hard to please God, but Isaiah was instructed to tell them why they were missing their mark. They were performing the acts of penance, but their hearts were still full of injustice and lacked conversion: driving their workers, leaving people naked and hungry, and even committing violence on one another. To go a step further, Jesus Himself tells us that there will be some who prophesy in His name and even drive out demons and performed miracles – but will still be rejected as having never known God. Why? Jesus gives us this parable:

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 18:9-14

At first, the Pharisee appears to be doing everything right – fasting, tithing on all his earnings as prescribed, and trying to live an upright life. There is not wrong with all that in itself. But Jesus tells us that this alone doesn’t justify us in God’s eyes. We see the Pharisee focused on how he is better than others around him – full of pride and silently judging others.

The modern version of this is saying, “I’m basically a good person – I don’t kill people or rob banks or anything.” If this is our response, we better take heed. Jesus is speaking to us too.

So is fasting, tithing, almsgiving worthless? No. Jesus is telling us that fasting and tithing without humility or while judging others is worthless. Fasting without repentance or conversion is worthless. Most of all, fasting and tithing without the purpose of connecting and reconciling your relationship with God is worthless.

Instead, we should fast and give alms with humility and the purpose of connecting ourselves with God spiritually. We should fast and give alms for the conversion of our hearts and as an offering for others. We should fast in ways to untie sin in our lives. We should stop behaviors that encourage others to sin. We should clothe the naked and feed the hungry at our door. We should help lose bonds of poverty, ignorance, fear, hunger, and illness to live justly with our fellow man.

Then our prayers will be heard and answered. But most of all, at the end of our lives we’ll find ourselves able to stand before the God we have loved and talked with daily and find ourselves justified – despite our sins – and hear the words,

23 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. Since you have been faithful in small matters, I will give you much greater responsibilities. Come and share your master’s joy.’

Matthew 25:23
More than 25% of game devs were laid off and half don’t have a new job

More than 25% of game devs were laid off and half don’t have a new job

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GDC sent out their annual State of the Game Industry survey and it confirms the dire state of game development. More than 25% of game developers were laid off the last 2 years and half of them have not found another job.

Game developer Farhan Noor, who has been tracking industry job cuts since 2022, estimates that around 8,500 workers were laid off in 2022, 10,500 workers in 2023, 14,600 workers in 2024 and 5,300 workers in 2025.

North Korean infiltrator caught by his lag

North Korean infiltrator caught by his lag

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A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a contract system developer at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists. Instead of a more normal 10ms lag normal remote workers generated, this contractor’s lag was around 110ms.

North Korean workers have increasingly infiltrated U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage. It’s definitely not the first time and joins their highly successful Bitcoin theft efforts.