TIL that apprehended 19th-century highwayman James Allen requested that after his death, his memoirs should be BOUND IN HIS OWN SKIN and given to John A. Fenno, a man whom he’d shot during his criminal career

This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: http://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2012/01/31/books-of-human-flesh-the-history-behind-anthropodermic-bibliopegy

Can I watch live on BBC iPlayer?

This self-post was originally posted to /r/eurovision. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

Probably a stupid question, but I almost never use iPlayer. This time last year, I had to dig out my (small-but-digital-capable) television from the attic and hook it up, at the last minute, rather than watching on the large-but-not-digital television attached to my computer.

So what I’m asking is: is iPlayer going to work, or should I start trying to dig through the boxes in my attic to find the television that’s up there?

Programming Sucks

Catastrophic Error

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.

Children’s book about a kid and an alien represented by an asterisk (*)

This self-post was originally posted to /r/Findabook. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

I read a book as a child, probably in the early 1990s, whose story sick with me but which I haven’t been able to find since. The plot goes thusly: a child plays a semi text-based video game in which he controls a character (represented by an asterisk), but it later becomes apparent that the character he’s controlling is real and self-aware. He’s an alien, or something similar, and he needs help… and that’s most of what I remember, but I can’t be the only one who read it, right?