January 2010
123 posts
How Success Killed Duke Nukem →
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip...
December 2009
35 posts
U2 - Magnificent (RAC mix)
(via PMA)
Roger Ebert on Elevation →
If I were a film producer hoping to make a movie with deep appeal, I would consciously look for Elevation—remembering that it seems to come not through messages or happy endings or sad ones, but in moments when characters we believe in—even an animated robot garbageman—achieve something good. I have observed before that we live in a box of space and time, and movies can open a...
How to Destroy the Book →
Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug.
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WatchNear Sighted: a mesmerizing 3 minutes of macro video (via Coudal)
“Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing....”
– Joshua Ferris
“The best library contains both books you have read, and books you have not. The...”
– Ways of Reading
The Empty Bits of Life →
It’s great to have a smartphone that can keep you occupied during those mindless waiting times. On the other hand, there is this downside:
The serendipitous gaps that used to be part of even the most hectic modern life can now be reduced to near zero. The emotional muscles stretched by those moments of emptiness — the ability to tune into one’s self, to tolerate the anxieties that...
The Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition
Currently...
WatchHow to properly heat a pan (via Metafilter)
You would think this video would be boring with a title like that, but it’s quite fascinating. The idea is basically this: the pan is the perfect temperature when you drop a teaspoon of water in and the water skates around the pan in a perfect sphere. The accompanying article goes into great depths about the physics behind this phenomenon as well...
Why programmers are not paid in proportion to... →
The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”
WatchAn Autumn’s Tale
The background music to this is one of my favorite songs, and the scenes are truly lovely. I love the brief moment where a little girl runs through the frame, around 1:40.
4:33 →
I stumbled across this bit from a Wikipedia article on 4:33, a musical piece with 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed....
Marketing Tricks of Menus →
According to Brandon O’Dell, one of the consultants Poundstone quotes in Priceless, it’s a big mistake to list prices in a straight column. “Customers will go down and choose from the cheapest items,” he says. Consultant Gregg Rapp tells clients to “omit dollar signs, decimal points, and cents … It’s not that customers can’t check prices, but most will follow whatever subtle cues are...
“The best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after...”
– Charlie Hoehn (via Lifehacker)
