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
Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners – physorg.com
While more than a million humans run marathons voluntarily each year, most animals we consider excellent runners — antelopes and cheetahs, for example — are built for speed, not endurance. Even nature’s best animal distance runners — such as horses and dogs — will run similar distances only if forced to do so, and the startling evidence is that humans are better at it, Lieberman said.
Modern humans and their immediate ancestors such as Homo erectus sport several adaptations that make humans, instead of some ferocious, furry, or fleet creature, the animal world’s best distance runners.
The Bureaucracy of Videogames: Why San Andreas Had to Tone Down the Sex – wired.com
Unfortunately, here is the situation,” Donovan wrote in an e-mail to Sam on Aug. 16, 2004, and proceeded to list the necessary changes.
“Hooker in car blow job — we need to show much less of the critical mouth to penis area.
“Hooker Stand Up Blow Job — this needs to be removed or implied.
“Sex with girlfriend — essentially this is all beyond the bounds of M and 18 ratings, and needs to be removed or implied.
“Sex shop workers need to have slightly more nipple coverage particularly for the States.
“Key to her heart spanking date scene needs to be removed, as it constitutes sexualized violence which is a huge problem.
“Blow job in back room of dealer’s house is cool however.
An interview with Chet Faliszek, writer at Valve Software
For Portal 2 the script was written mainly in Word. The Left 4 Deads have so many lines that need to fire under certain conditions; we track it all in database software – Visual FoxPro 6. This results in my often being lazy and writing directly into the tables and then writing a script to output a Word document to take to the recording studio. I think it is safe to say, L4D2 is the only game written in Visual Foxpro. I don’t really recommend it.
What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?
If you’re 35 years old and you’re thinking about retaking the SAT as a kind of blog stunt, I would highly recommend you avoid it. In fact, I would recommend that no one take the SAT ever. It’s a sternly worded dinosaur of a test, graded in an arbitrary manner with outdated equipment, and it blows. The only reason people take it is because they have to. It exists only so that preppy dipshits can brag about their scores well into adulthood if they did well. I hate it. I hope the Princeton Review gets fucked by a cattle prod.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
The Mounting Minuses at Google – WSJ.com
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.
Whoa.
>Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. **It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure**. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.
[– Time.com profile of Mark Zuckerberg, their person of the year 2010](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html)
This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC. More intuitive.
> Here we have the man who invented the personal computer, then the laptop. He’s now destroying them. That is an amazing life.
[Rupert Murdoch on Steve Jobs](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-murdoch-hopes-apple-will-lower-its-share-of-the-daily-take/)