July 2011
1 tag
In Defense of Anonymity
The anonymous, from the whistleblower to the common crook, are in need of defense. The campaign against anonymity has many fronts, ranging from the erosion of mechanisms of obtaining anonymity (through the law) to an incessant chipping away at its intellectual legitimacy (through association with various evils). In the wake of the July 22 attacks in Oslo, a number of commentators have blamed...
“How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is a...”
– H. G. Wells describes his game of toy soldiers, Little Wars, and its cousin, Great War. (Emphasis mine. Link via Best of Wikipedia)
Flags
“There is hopeful symbolism”, Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”
In his piece about 9/11, David Foster Wallace noted that the day after, everyone had flags. Small flags, huge flags. Flags everywhere. Where everyone got their flags from was a mystery to him.
Currently, it looks like the terrorist attacks in and outside of Oslo were...
Project Frontier →
One of the nice things about Minecraft is the interest it’s kicked off about procedural generation. Procedural generation may very well be the future of most games, at least on the developer side: with modern graphics, every cubic meter is tens, hundreds or thousands of times more complex than the same volume in a game from a decade or two ago. This makes creating the same amount of game...
3 tags
How to: make your website look like mine
I won’t pretend my inbox is getting bombed, but I’ve had a few requests for the theme code I use. Hi, I’d like my website to look like yours. Is that possible? Well, no. I haven’t been giving out that code. For several reasons. The most obvious being that I don’t want everybody’s websites to look like mine, because then mine will look like everyone else’s....
Framing Edo
Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was, and is, a very influential series of Japanese woodblock prints published in 1856-58. One of the things I appreciate about them is their photographic qualities. In particular, the device of framing a wider landscape with a foreground element is one photographers are very fond of. Of course, in 1856, photography was still a newborn medium, and...
Are We Gods in the Chrysalis?
Potential is a funny thing. Some people want to give human rights to things that have only the potential to be humans. Some people seem to think that potential revenue gives them a right to actual revenue, and strive to erect laws protecting that right. I’ve said before that I think we fetishize potential. I still stand by that. Not only do we ascribe to it the same properties we ascribe to...
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all...”
– Aldous Huxley.
June 2011
1 tag
A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of... →
It’s easy to take the sea of information on the internet for granted. It’s pretty rare that I experience that flash of awe that often accompanied my first trips to this strange network: wow, I’ve really stumbled on a treasure trove of information here! This is one of those times. Saudi Aramco World is a bimonthly magazine published by the Saudi Arabian national oil company....