July 2, 2009
Worry, Debt & Passion | Jason DeFillippo

jaybushman:

I feel your pain, brother.

All this, but also trapped. We’ve spent a lot of money trying to feel better, reach farther, be bigger, and it’s gotten us trapped in a city we don’t love, in a house we don’t really want, under debts that keep us from being as good and as successful as we’d like. It feels sometimes like our lives are done already and we’re just waiting it out now.

Well, fuck that.

June 30, 2009
"What he is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart's policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of "attention-paid" enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer."

claytoncubitt:

(via)

This is neo-feudal just like Vampire: The Requiem was neo-feudal. Yes, the people at the ground level will continue to produce those things you need to survive — whether the “content” is writing or blood — but the ones getting rich off that, the vassals who shuttle that content from the serfs to the lords, are all vampires, feeding, feeding, feeding. They keep the serfs fed well enough to labor but hungry enough to fear and love the teat, these content-passing vassals, and like vampires they might fight and fuck but they don’t create. They take.

If Chris Anderson thinks neo-feudal stuff this is a great idea, then my love of Wired just dropped by half.

"Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive."
(via evoke)
(via evoke)
June 29, 2009
May 31, 2009
“ We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S. Eliot (via hydrogen) (via evoke)
“ ‘Watership Down? I wouldn’t wipe my sphincter with Watership Down!’ This is the literary equivalent of a cornered lizard unfurling its neck frill and hissing. It doesn’t mean the lizard has read the book.
“How to Lie About Books,” by Jason Henninger, @ Tor.com
May 27, 2009
“ Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.
Guillermo del Toro, Wired 17.06
“ In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform “story engine.” The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.
Guillermo del Toro, Wired 17.06
May 25, 2009
"I'd give them a basic goal for the scene, like 'don't let him sell you a package of workout sessions,' and turn them loose. I'd say 95 percent of the film is made up of first or second takes. They were controlled improvisations where the actors were encouraged to speak freely about themselves and as themselves."

Steven Soderbergh talking to Roger Ebert about The Girlfriend Experience.

There’s often an element of roleplaying on both parts of the escort transaction. (They tell me.) In this film, Soderbergh has minimized the role-playing of the actors and, in so doing, moved closer to an improvisational game or indie-style roleplaying game. It’s so wonderfully meta — I can’t wait to see this thing.