- What is fantasy for? ✶
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Katherine Rundell, writing in the London Review of Books:
What is fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’
Wednesday, 29 January 2025
- Global water flow path visualizer ✶
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See where water would flow from a chosen starting spot on Earth.
Monday, 27 January 2025
- Goodbye, David Lynch ✶
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The thing I’ll miss most: The superlative sound of his films and series, that would sometimes, very slowly, gradually quieten, with only an electrical buzz or crawling thing in the ground left.
Saturday, 25 January 2025
- Life lessons from 50 years of work ✶
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Helpful insights from David A. Patterson, who incidentally looks like Captain Picard.
- Infinite world generation with wave function collapse algorithm ✶
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Organic, plant-like worlds made from relatively simple rules.
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
- Twenty lessons on tyranny from the Twentieth Century ✶
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Historian Timothy Snyder:
- Do not obey in advance.
- Defend institutions.
- Beware the one-party state.
- Take responsibility for the face of the world.
- Remember professional ethics.
- Be wary of paramilitaries.
- Be reflective if you must be armed.
- Stand out. Someone has to.
- Be kind to our language.
- Believe in truth.
- Investigate. Figure things out for yourself.
- Make eye contact and small talk.
- Practice corporeal politics.
- Establish a private life.
- Contribute to good causes.
- Learn from peers in other countries.
- Listen for dangerous words.
- Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
- Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.
- Be as courageous as you can.
Monday, 20 January 2025
- On heroism ✶
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Heather Cox Richardson:
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
Thursday, 16 January 2025
- Liz England’s game design library ✶
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Liz was a designer in Watch Dogs: Legion, a unique game where you can hire any non-player character and make them player characters.
Wednesday, 15 January 2025
- 3D International Space Station live tracker ✶
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By Matt Eason, who also made Live Cloud Maps and Ambiphone.
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
- ♫ Kyrie ✶
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From Popol Vuh’s 1970 album Hosianna Mantra.
Monday, 13 January 2025
- Awareness of atomic reality ✶
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From the Science and Transformation chapter of Jane English’s Fingers pointing to the Moon:
The phrase “awareness of atomic reality” triggered in me an experience that lasted about a half hour and was accompanied by changes that were noticed by people around me who commented that I seemed to be in a transcendent state. The experience began with a sense of sudden dissolution, especially of visual forms. The initial experience is impossible to describe in words. After a moment, I was aware of patterns of energy, millions of pinpoints of light, and a confused rush of visual sensation. Soon the experience stabilized somewhat, and I became aware of visual forms corresponding to what I now would call the furniture in the room and the sunlight on the trees outside. But everything was somehow different; there was no in-here/out-there split in my seeing!
This experience of no-separation cannot be fully described in words since words are, in their essence, distinctions and separations. It was an experience of union in which I and the world of objects did not exist separately. In this state of awareness there was no space or sense of separation between objects and my eyes. Thus I felt no need for light to exist to connect objects to eyes. Objects, eyes, and light no longer had the objective existence they had seemed to have just before. Separate self-identity and separate objects were optional ways of structuring experience rather than absolute realities. I wandered around delighted, awed, and amazed. I was aware that I had often had moments of this kind of seeing while looking through a camera. I had described it as “becoming what I photograph,” even though that had then seemed crazy, impossible, and not quite accurate.
When experienced as two alternative ways of structuring awareness, rather than as qualities of something objectively real, the existence of light-as-waves and light-as-particles no longer seemed paradoxical. I realized that the wave/particle paradox had been my first koan, and that I had just solved it. The phrase “awareness of atomic reality” had pulled together my experiences in awareness work, in physics, and in photography to create a new state of awareness.
This new seeing gradually faded. I think that I was feeling overwhelmed and not ready to let go of my old worldview or of my separate identify. Since then, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in meditation, I re-experience that seeing for short periods of time. I also find that I am more open to the possibility that things are not as they seem to be. I have learned to trust my experience of reality more than I trust what other people say about reality.
Sunday, 12 January 2025
- Confessions of a disillusioned scientist ✶
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Just found Tom Murphy’s Do the Math blog, via a comment at Ongoing, and I like it a lot.
Tom’s path brings to mind Gia-Fu Feng’s and Jane English’s translation of and artwork in The Complete Tao Te Ching.
I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.
Tom seems to me to be a sane and optimistic person, so it’s a good time to make a plan B, and C, and D, wherever you may be.
The last line of his 2021 textbook Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet:
Treat nature at least as well as we treat ourselves.
And as Jane English puts it:
Each of us can in this way bring a drop of balance and beauty to our world that so needs it. Many such drops can create a river and an ocean … We need to honor ancient wisdom as well as modern science and technology, the intangible and the measurable integrating them in both our minds and our hearts.
Saturday, 11 January 2025
- The People’s Cabinet ✶
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Borrowing the UK’s Shadow Cabinet idea and bringing it across the Atlantic is a good idea. Timothy Snyder:
In a shadow cabinet, in Britain and Canada and elsewhere, parliamentarians from the opposition party follow the actual cabinet members, develop expertise in the relevant portfolios, and comment to the press. They remind the public that other policies and other approaches are possible, and get a chance to show off their skills. (For more on the particular value of such an institution in America right now, see the earlier post.)
Thursday, 9 January 2025
Travel Checklist
A checklist for travel that saves the state of each checkbox in your web browser’s localStorage so it doesn’t get lost when refreshing the page. Click the Clear All button at the end to clear the checkboxes.
˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦
. ★⋆. ࿐࿔ . ˚ ˚ *
✦ . ✶ . ✦ ˚ ✦˚ ˚
. . ˚ . ੈ ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .
Monday, 6 January 2025
- Why triple-A RPGs focus on violence ✶
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As descendants of hunter-gatherers, there’s a thrill felt by many humans, maybe around 50% of them, when swinging or launching a projectile that hits a target. The opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example.
Maybe this is a reason violence in video games is so popular. It lets humans express it in play without real-world consequences.
Yet, at least. See Ender’s Game, Ready Player One, drones in ongoing wars, and James Somers’ writing about AI and robotics for a glimpse of a future, or present, where joypad-controlled machines kill remotely.
The most efficient killers, however, are the ones who can convince a mob to kill for them. Unfortunately, once in a while, they take power.
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
- DOOM: The Gallery Experience ✶
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Admire the glasses and critically curious, somewhat worried expression of your space marine avatar while drinking wine and eating hors d’oeuvers in a web browser experience “…created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.”
Press 1 to switch from the glass of wine to your hand and then click each artwork for a close-up, then click the title of the artwork to open its page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Zelda Breath of the Wild controls ✶
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After playing this video game art piece again yesterday I’ve updated the Zelda BotW page with a table of controls to help avoid future rage during livestreams.
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