johnke.meCasey Johnston goes deep to find the best Kanye song, pitting them against each other. Even if you don’t like Kanye or you think brackets are a bad methodology to finding the best anything, the writing here is just great.
Alan Jacobs wrote seventy-nine theses on technology and how it affects and informs our world.
- Everything begins with attention.
- It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”
- It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”
- It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”
- To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.
The whole thing is wonderful. But just as wonderful are some of the responses they have invited. And the responses to the responses. Oh listen, just go read the whole thing, will you?
It may not be a great film, but these photos at least give you some idea of why it’s such an amazing achievement. The amount of care and craft that went into something that would appear on screen for a second or two. So impressive.
This is so good. I could use any one of his answers as a pull-quote here, but this answer hit one of my weak spots:
Why do you EDC?
I like the idea of finding the very best version of some otherwise mundane object, settling on it, having that problem solved well, and then using that object for the rest of my life. This is my watch. This is my pen. This is my wallet.
Based on his terrific books his occasional appearances on Radiolab, Oliver Sacks seems like a really great guy: smart, funny, and curious. So it’s pretty sad to hear that he’s been dealt one last shitty hand. But at the same time, it sounds like he’s totally at peace with it:
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
He’ll be missed.
Nathan Barley is ten years old today and this is a great retrospective from The Guardian on how the show came about and why it’s still so prescient. If you haven’t actually seen the show yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you’ve already seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch it again.
The optimistic side of me loves this. It puts the emphasis back on the words, rather than a semi-arbitrary number at the bottom.
The pessimistic side of me can’t help but notice that this is exactly what Joystiq did just a couple of weeks before it was shut down.
But this also means that Sunless Sea got the last ever Eurogamer 10/10. I can’t think of a better way for review scores to go out.
The amount of planning and effort that these guys put into their little jokes is impressive. Although I kind of wish they’d gone with their previous idea of naming the island “Fuck Mountain”.
Monkey Island 2 had some of the best art of its time. The colours, the character. And nearly all done in marker? So impressive.
When I was about ten years old, I saved up all my pocket money for months and bought myself a hardback copy of Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects. And the thing I loved most about this book was all the matte paintings. Such a simple idea, but so powerful and so evocative. I’d get lost in them for hours. And here we are, over twenty years later and they still draw me in, every time.