malvasia bianca

One of my main sources of blog posts is following analogies: seeing where they’ll lead me, stretching them far past their breaking point in hopes that they’ll give me a different perspective on something that I’m thinking about. And today’s area in which to analogize is forms of social organization, or relationships more broadly. The […]

I’ve been trying to make a decision recently that’s been unexpectedly difficult. Or at least unpleasantly and abnormally difficult; maybe that’s completely to be expected in this case. My uncertainty on this score is a reflection of my overall state: in some sense, I feel that I’ve been really off my game mentally for about […]

I’ve been walking to work ever since I started working at Playdom three years ago. In fact, that’s part of why I took that job: I saw Steve Meretsky on a panel at GDC 2009, looked up the web page for the company he was working at, and found that it was located a little […]

In the media I interact with, there’s a lot of killing. In games, it’s especially prominent, because killing is frequently used as a core mechanic for non-narrative reasons. (That’s not the only reason for the prominence of killing in games, of course: the desire of many games to appeal to an extremely skewed view of […]

From Thomas Cleary’s introduction to his translation of Zen Lessons: In contrast to the relatively plain and straightforward Zen literature of the Tang dynasty, Song dynasty Zen literature is convoluted and artful. This is not regarded, in Zen terms, as a development in Zen, but as a response to a more complex and pressured society […]

I’ve always been an unconventional video games blogger, because of the low volume of games that I find time to play, but that’s become much more the case over the last year. I was surprised to look at my recently played games list and realize that I didn’t finish any games for five months solid […]

Horace Dediu’s blog Asymco is absolutely one of my favorite blogs, with its insightful mix of data and theory, and Critical Path, its associated podcast, is always fascinating as well. So when Horace announced his conference Asymconf, and when the date turned out to be a time when I was already planning to be in […]

On entering the Musée d’Orsay, you are confronted almost immediately with a sight that is familiar to anybody who plays video games, namely a textbook example of male gaze: This is Femme piquée par un serpent, by Auguste Clésinger; because, of course, we all know that, when a woman is bitten by a snake, her […]

My current (mild) bugaboo at work: agreeing on plans. “Bugaboo” is really too strong a term, but it’s something that I’ve been probing a bit. Like a lot of my coworkers, I’m not a big fan of hierarchy (actually, I actively dislike hierarchy, though I won’t speak for others in that regard); also, like a […]

I wasn’t planning to go to this talk until I heard his pitch in the Flash Forward session; something in that pitch reminded me of a Gerald Weinberg / AYE approach to personal interaction, so I went. And I’m very glad I went: certainly my favorite talk of this GDC, but perhaps one of my […]

Right after hitting publish on my recent post on fundamental differences, I started to feel nervous about it. I’m fairly sure I didn’t explain myself fairly well, I’m fairly sure that I don’t actually agree with everything I said there, I’m fairly sure that there are parts that I still agree with now but that […]

A friend of mine loaned me her copy of Whipping Girl, because she thought I would enjoy it and find it interesting; she was quite correct in that suspicion. I’m copying down some quotes here largely for my own future reference, but if y’all find something of interest in them, so much the better. (If […]

A while back, I mentioned that I’d written a little microblogging platform called ‘fragments’. At the time, it was a little unpolished; since then, I’ve cleaned up the code a bit (most importantly, separated the content from the guts of publishing, though presentation is probably more interwoven with the latter than would be ideal), enough […]

Our current TV is really showing its age, so I’m planning to buy a TV next week; any advice, whether about specific models or attributes to look out for or good places to go for reviews or good places to buy them from? I imagine I’ll spend less than a thousand dollars on the TV, […]

I never participated in the Blogs of the Round Table back when Corvus was running it (at least I don’t think I did?), but I was quite happy to see that, with Corvus’s blessing, Critical Distance is relaunching that feature. So I thought I would take a swing at this month’s theme (provided by Corvus […]

While reading Lifelode, the character who could see others’ possible futures really grabbed me. After I put down the book, though, I realized: that character didn’t grab me because that image particularly stood out in the context of the book, she grabbed me because of where my head has been recently. Because, looking back, I’ve […]

I’ve been a Jo Walton fan for a while—all of her books are quite good, and Tooth and Claw is rather wonderful book if you’re a fan of Victorian novels and dragons—but Lifelode got to me in a way that none of her previous novels did. It’s a fantasy novel, and makes contact with many […]

I recently (re)read The Mad Man, by Samuel R. Delany. Which is a book that I’m still trying to figure out: on the one hand, it’s one of the most life-affirming books that I know, but on the other hand, it’s pornography, and pornography where the protagonist spends a fair amount of time drinking piss. […]

We first saw Zero Patience when it came out; I guess that means in 1994? I’d had generalized fond memories of it since then: what’s not to like about a musical about AIDS where the main characters are Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor: he drank from the fountain of youth and is working […]

As is doubtless clear from this blog, for the last several years most of my time interacting with art has been spent with video games. And that’s been wonderful, no question. What is less clear from this blog, however, is the extent to which that wasn’t always the case: while I’ve played video games regularly […]