Avenging Spider-Man #7
You’ll be missed, Peter Parker.
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MoMA adds Pac-Man, The Sims and 12 other video games to their new collection →
Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.
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What I have witnessed happening in the last twenty years is the aesthetic equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The wholesale industrialization and mechanistation of the creative process.
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Flower skirts via Reddit
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Whatever Works For You →
Marco Arment talks about how he’s stopped being such an evangelist of his tech choices as he grew older.
I choose to fit myself into most of Apple’s intended-use constraints because their products tend to work better that way, which makes my life easier. But that requires trade-offs that many people can’t or won’t make.
Previous-me tried to persuade everyone to switch to my setup, but I now know that it’s not worth the effort. I’ll never know someone else’s requirements, environment, or priorities as well as they do. I don’t know shit about Windows or Outlook or architecture.
You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.
I find I’ve undergone the same thinking, and I’ve been applying this not just to tech but other subjects I used to feel strongly about.
In my teens and early 20’s, I would get into rows with my mom because my neo-liberal University-educated cosmopolitan idealism clashed with her values. Which I now understand to be a product of her rural, less-wealthy upbringing, but which doesn’t make them any less valid than mine.
In fact, everyone’s values and beliefs are products of the entirety of their lives. Despite all this talk about an individual’s infinite capacity for freedom and choice, some people just can’t change how they think. That’s just the state of their minds are at this specific point in time, because they are uniquely wired in a specific way.
Once I’ve accepted this, I found myself more at peace with everyone else’s beliefs and decisions. Sure I still find some of them incredibly stupid, but that doesn’t frustrate me as much as it used to. They’re perfectly valid to them, and I can respect that.
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Don't Overthink Day-to-Day Problems →
In a Vanity Fair profile of Obama by Michael Lewis, the president advises against putting effort into meaningless decisions:
“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
Reminds me of why Steve Jobs always wore black turtlenecks and jeans.
via The Wirecutter
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Iranian Cleric Gets Beaten up By "Badly Covered" Woman →
Over a year ago, I wrote a post about my opinion on seeing a woman wearing a burka at Carrefour.
Some people said i’m totally infringing on her freedom of expression because it’s totally her choice to do so. It’s religious! It’s cultural!
I mentioned that because of that religion and that culture, she may not actually have that choice to begin with.
This incident is what happens when the women of Muslim cultures finally realise that they can make that choice.
via BoingBoing
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Wow one of my infographics got featured in #news! I haven’t been to my other Tumblr site in like, forever, and I didn’t receive any notifications or anything.
I just put that Tumblr blog up quickly to share my work with a friend and never checked back again. It was supposed to be private. I didn’t set it to be private but I didn’t think anybody would find it and give a shit. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see a bunch of likes and reblogs on my dashboard when logged in again after a couple of months.
Anyway, the reason I went back again was that so I can turn it into a proper portfolio site. I’ve been working like a dog for the past three year. Sometimes I get so caught up in the daily toil and drudgery and every so often I feel worn down and weary. Having one place to display and see some of the work I did may help give me a sense of accomplishment and remind me why I do what I do.
And if other people see it and dig it, then that’s good. If they learn something from it, even better.
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Coming up for Garage Hermetiq: experimenting with a new theme, customising theme, curating new stuff to upload, writing descriptions for some of my work. New content coming soon.
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"Math Doesn't Suck, You Do" →
I didn’t realise that Maddox had resumed writing again. I stopped following his site at 2009, when he only had one post for the year.
A link from a comment thread brought me back to his site and was surprised to see a new slew of his bluntly critical rants against lazy popular opinion.
Here, he tackles people’s general hatred towards math, and the tired old excuse, “when will I ever use this in life?”
Why is math the only discipline that has to put up with this bullshit? People gladly learn art, music, literature and geography. You’ll even nod like a happy idiot when you learn what a haiku is, and you never complain or whine about how you’ll never use this in your “life.” When is the last time you wrote a haiku, asshole?
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Co-op App →
It’s like Twitter for teams. Mad Men fans, you must check out their anatomy page.
