What’s the benefit here? I’m not sure I buy the argument that long-form storytelling gives the material room to breathe, or even shows particular fidelity to the writings of Tolkien, Rowling, etc. I fear the real motivation is more cynical than that. It’s the movie equivalent of pumping chickens full of water – bulking out the produce to maximise revenue.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
pulchritude
pulchritude
A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.
— David Foster Wallace, word notes in the Apple dictionary for “Beauty”
Polygon – Johann Sebastian Joust: Making a video game without video.
There’s something truly wonderful about JSJ. It’s a performance-piece that brings video games back to pure play. And it’s so beautifully simple. In the video, Doug Wilson talks about how he came up with the idea for the game and how it was an “oh!” moment.
Plus, now is probably a good time to pimp their Kickstarter, which will help release JSJ to a wider audience.
Freaks and Geeks
1999:
2012:
How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots)
5 Whys are really useful for sorting out an issue in the correct way, but it’s hard to run a good 5 Whys. Dan Milstein’s presentation is a great starting point.
Two Things (Gibson TTS and Fictional Memory Palaces) | booktwo.org
If you play a lot of video games, or a lot of a video game, you slowly learn the map, it stays in your head. It doesn’t exist, it’s an imaginary place, but you can find your way around in it, even give directions within it.
A shared fiction is like a shared map, a space we can inhabit, a shared memory palace, even for a brief period.
— Two Things (Gibson TTS and Fictional Memory Palaces) | booktwo.org