watching a movie. going to church. racing a car. surfing the web. visiting a museum. playing a sport. all are ways to experience the relief of being displaced across time and space. the present is where what is happening breaks into the already happened, like water pouring on hard concrete. we bend this arc outwards [...]
Perhaps the reason why literalists have fretted over the popularity of books like Harry Potter and movies like Twilight is not that they fear children will learn to believe in wizards or vampires but rather that children will learn to make believe. The pleasure of make belief is that it is a form of play [...]
stories are how we make sense of the world. they impose a structure on what would otherwise feel chaotic – “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” whether via an internal monologue (that whistling noise is coming from the tea kettle because it is on a lit stove) or in conversation with others (religion, science, politics, literature, [...]
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure of the 140 character limit of Twitter. I may get a round Tuit and synchronize my use of Twitter with this blog. For now, here’s a dump of [...]
I know my fellow consumers. We are a conspicuous competitive lot. Look at what I got. Also, free shit. Everyone loves free shit. I was just trying to remember whether or not you’re supposed to unplug a transformer after you’re done charging your phone when I was reminded that we’re supposed to be getting smart [...]
Will Self: Men – and some women – watch football, dispute and debate football, and even occasionally kick a ball around, because it offers them a small-scale model of life, not necessarily because it distracts them from life altogether. Claude Lévi-Strauss observed in The Savage Mind that the virtue of a small-scale model is that [...]
Reading Michael Heilemann’s celebrated investigation of how the character of Chewbacca was crafted, it struck me that movies are multi-player text-based virtual reality games caught on film. With movies, you start out with a script and then you enlist a bunch of players – artists, craftspeople, actors, musicians, etc. – to they work out the tens of [...]
An example of a Banksy intervention (graffiti!) that introduces a new meaning by changing the visual interpretation of a physical space.
A few days ago I joked that Google Wave has a lot in common with Dungeons & Dragons. The next day Google announced it would abandon Google Wave. After reading responses to Google’s announcement I got the impression that half of Wave’s potential users didn’t know how to use it and the other half, the [...]
The Complete Guide to Google Wave: Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn the ins and outs of how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. The Dungeon Master’s Guide: Within these pages, you’ll discover the tools and [...]