November 2009
55 posts
Lost Garden - Three False Constraints →
Once again, a call goes out to make games more culturally meaningful. I agree very much with the sentiment, but I’ve always been frustrated with how designers set themselves up for failure due to the constraints placed on the problem.
What I find silly is that everyone assumes videogames’ Citizen Kane will look like Citizen Kane, i.e. a movie, and not like Mario 3 or Tetris. The...
WatchJulieHally - L.E.D. Nation via tinycartridge
Man, I’m not even asleep yet, and I already feel like I don’t want to wake up. That can’t be a good sign for my class tomorrow morning. Ugh.
Anne Applebaum - No one wants America to be the... →
Whenever I read Ann Applebaum, I always wonder why I’m reading Ann Applebaum. I guess the answer is, she talks about the world outside of America’s borders. And that’s really good! But ultimately, she’s a American married to a Polish politician who writes about Russia being bad and America needing to do… something. So we get grafs like:
And thus we are left with a...
WatchTa-Nehisi Coates - Feed Me Hip-Hop And I Start Trembling
In my memoir, I talk about a buddy who, whenever he was about to get jumped, use to recite the last half of Rakim’s Microphone Fiend. It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that whenever I hear society mocking the mask which young black boys don in urban America. We manufacture the conditions, and then rail at kids for...
Watch1UP Whiteboard - Escapism
Clay Shirky - A Speculative Post on the Idea of... →
Shirky is basically describing the epistemic merit of Wikipedia here. Good stuff.
WatchThe Mountain Goats - Woke Up New
4 tags
Thomas Nagel - The I in Me →
The degree to which Anglo-Analytic Philosophy is committed to recapitulating Indian philosophy minus the soteriology is at times shocking. Here is Thomas Nagel reviewing Galen Strawson’s Selves:
Strawson holds that our selves are much more short-lived than we normally take them to be, and that the subjective experience of the self does not require that it persist beyond the lived...
For whatever reason, Vetran’s Day/Armistice Day feels confusingly like Saturday. Did a war ever end on a Saturday?… That could be the thing.
rc3.org - Corollary to Zawinski’s law →
Quoted in its entirety:
Zawinski’s law states:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
I wonder if there’s a corollary that applies to imperialism.
Every empire attempts to expand until it can occupy Afghanistan. Those empires which cannot so expand are replaced by...
Mereological Considerations in Object-Oriented... →
“Object-Oriented Ontology” seems to be like Process Ontology, only with an emphasis on the importance of limitations of the media through which processes interact with one another.
Watch!!!
“Rocks crumbling from the bluff, the cape mumbled on and on
Drawing on memory,...”
– Ishikawa Mina - Urashima
