January 2012
15 posts
“one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous...”
– An interview with William Gibson | The Verge
Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers,...
What the Internet Means for How We Think About the...
I think the Net generation is beginning to see knowledge in a way that is closer to the truth about knowledge — a truth we’ve long known but couldn’t instantiate. My generation, and the many generations before mine, have thought about knowledge as being the collected set of trusted content, typically expressed in libraries full of books. Our tradition has taken the...
WatchSal Khan: SOPA and PIPA
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves. — Richard Feynman
The Way the Future Blogs, an online memoir by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl » Blog Archive » Bright Sayings of Bright People, No. 22
December 2011
13 posts
for touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical
— (Barthes, Mythologies), via Dan Hill
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
— J.G. Ballard, Ambit magazine, 1967
via Ballardian
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you called life was made up by people...
Throughout his life and frequently in these letters, Beckett refers to his writing as excretion. Never communication.
— Tim Parks, LRB
November 2011
18 posts
It’s always just 26 letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation, and that is so staggeringly elegant …. It’s just you and the page, and there is something very addictive about that.
— Alan Moore (‘Superheroes are our dreams of ourselves’ - Features - Books - The Independent)
WatchDaisy Ginsberg: Synthetic aesthetics
“The strange thing about change is that people are always saying ‘oh he’s...”
– Living in a Material World
“I think revision is hugely underrated. It is very seldom recognized as a place...”
– Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson
… the exact same criticism I have for Microsoft today applies to 1987 Apple. “Knowledge Navigator” encapsulates everything that was wrong with Apple in 1987. Their coolest products were imaginary futuristic bullshit. The mindset and priorities of Apple’s executive leadership in 1987 led the company to lose what was then an enormous usability and user experience lead over the rest of the...
October 2011
11 posts
Twitter / @mcluhanspeaks: As information levels... →
As information levels rise, fixed point of view yields to inclusive, multi-dimensional awareness.
