Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
—DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like A Motherfucker - The Rumpus.net
It was an odd coincidence. What are the chances of finding “Kenneth” and “What is the frequency?” in any way connected to each other, outside of the mouths of Mr. Rather’s attackers? And yet here they were, inside Donald Barthelme’s book.
You tell people what you do for a living,” Bleszinski said later, “and they’re like, ‘Oh, you play video games for a living.’ No, I play a game that’s not as fun as it should be, that’s broken, until it’s no longer broken. Then I give it to other people to have fun with.
When a child grabs a playmate’s toy, or defends himself violently against someone else who is grabbing the toy from him, you show both children what warrior energy is used for by immediately protecting the victim of the aggression, innocent or guilty. Then you help the little warriors see clearly what happened and how they feel. “That made you mad. That anger helped you feel strong. You may need that strength someday when there is nobody else to help you. But you didn’t need it here. You can get your toy back without hurting someone.”
—
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Shooter -Grantland
Tom Bissell reviews Spec Ops: The Line and explores the reasons why we play shooter games.
You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it’s precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.
if you lived in an environment in which culture restricted the topics that you talked about, and not only just your general environmental limitations on the topics you talked about, but if there were a value in the culture that said, don’t talk about topics that go beyond, say, immediate experience—in other words, don’t talk about anything that you haven’t seen or that hasn’t been told to you by an eyewitness—this would severely limit what you could talk about. If that’s the case, then that language might be finite, but it wouldn’t be a poor language; it could be a very rich language. The fact that it’s finite doesn’t mean it’s not a very rich language.
So that the connection between learning how to die and changing, being transformed, turning your world upside down, inverting your world so that you actually are in a different kind of zone, you have a new self. That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.
Why is Contemporary Art an oligarchic “dialogue” between competing Andy Warhol fans rather than a place where anyone who has a new idea about the way the world could look throws their hat in the ring and then fans come and see if the hat fits their head? […]
And soon people would say that art needed “the critic in order to complete it” and nobody would think this was insane the way they would’ve if you’d told them “Psycho” or “Like A Rolling Stone” needed a critic to complete it and the critics were extremely chuffed of course and people who liked to look at things were off somewhere else looking at things which were contemporary and art but not Contemporary Art and occasionally developments would occur which “shook the art world” which meant “shook the narrow assumptions of a bunch people who all agreed about nearly everything and assumed nearly all the same things”.
—
sketchbook: Why People Hate Art
Zak Smith (of Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow) on, basically, why people hate art.
You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn’t have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic—when you saw her watching him you knew that not only would this fucking vieja die for her son, she would probably put a knife in God’s eye if it would give my brother an extra day of life.
—Tupac Gothic! Junot Díaz: “The Pura Principle” : The New Yorker
iOS is the Windows XP for mobile devices. It looks a lot like Windows XP, if feels like Windows XP, and it is loved like Windows XP. It doesn’t have the same market share Windows XP had back in the day, but Windows XP was liked so much that Microsoft had a really hard time replacing it. Sooner or later Apple will have to radically evolve its UI paradigm. For example, it has to create stricter internal guidelines on the use of metaphor. That being said, UI design for operating systems is the highest form of GUI and interaction design. It is incredibly hard to create something iconic and functional on that level of the user interface.
—Good design is invisible: an interview with iA’s Oliver Reichenstein | The Verge