There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York
Topic: Games
11:04 pm EDT, Apr 28, 2008
On sale Tuesday.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts. It is by far the best game of the series, which made its debut in 1997 and has since sold more than 70 million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV will retail for $60.
Hardly a demographic escapes skewering.
It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.
I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside.
Avery’s ploy had been unorthodox, unprecedented, and, as players and sages would declare afterward, “embarrassing” and “bush”—akin, maybe, to doing pushups over the twelfth hole at Augusta while an opponent is putting for par.
The next day, amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.
The innovation, like midget batsmen and airplane shoe-bombing, would prove to be short-lived.
I don't care about hockey, or agitators, but I am positively intrigued by the idea of "pan-Canadian outrage."
Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate?
What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?
Consider typography to be the window into the soul of the candidate’s campaign. The depth, the breadth, the good, the bad and the ugly is all there for us to witness and assess in one clear and telegraphic manner. And in this campaign, what you see is definitely what you will get.
...
It is a rather bland face being used in a rather bland way.
It seems a bit elitist and upscale for John McCain.
It sort of reeks of old thrift-shop, Danish furniture, and not in a good way.
It’s a typeface used to trick people into thinking they are involving themselves in something more important and more desirable than it actually is.
It is a typeface I associate with the 1970s: moving past the hygienic purity of, say, a humanist sans-serif and migrating ever so slightly toward fern bars and big hair.
The presidential campaign has gone on for so long that it feels like one of those bad dreams in which you run in slow motion but never get anywhere.
There will be blood.
From the archive:
I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.
A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”)
People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.
I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.
There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.
I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do. When people are involved and committed and political leaders are honest and have clear vision; that usually happens when things are really, really fucked up. Who are the U.S. Presidents we most admire? What was going on during their presidencies?
There is, of course, empirical evidence of declining violence in Iraq, which has coincided with Petraeus’s command. The additional troops he requested have certainly been a factor, but not even Petraeus can say how much of one. At best, during the past year he has helped to piece together a stalemate of heavily armed, bloodstained, conspiracy-minded, ambiguously motivated Iraqi militias. Nobody knows how long this gridlock will hold.
A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”)
Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise | Harper's, January 1996
Topic: Recreation
4:39 pm EDT, Apr 13, 2008
Why not pamper yourself with a little bit (actually a lot) of David Foster Wallace?
I now know every conceivable rationale for somebody spending more than $ 3,000 to go on a Caribbean cruise. To be specific: voluntarily and for pay, I underwent a 7-Night Caribbean (7NC) Cruise on board the m.v. Zenith (which no wag could resist immediately rechristening the m.v. Nadir), a 47,255-ton ship owned by Celebrity Cruises, Inc., one of the twenty-odd cruise lines that operate out of south Florida and specialize in "Megaships," the floating wedding cakes with occupancies in four figures and engines the size of branch banks. The vessel and facilities were, from what I now understand of the industry's standards, absolutely top-hole. The food was beyond belief, the service unimpeachable, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and white it looked boiled. The western Caribbean's blue varied between baby-blanket and fluorescent; likewise the sky. Temperatures were uterine. The very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort. The crew-to-passenger ratio was 1.2 to 2. It was a Luxury Cruise.
This is awesome. Long but awesome.
See also, from the archive:
My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. ... Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.
If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study.
Video from the 150th Anniversary celebration of Harper’s Magazine, including a reading by David Foster Wallace.
Stefanie Posavec's maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces. It’s not often that I am so thoroughly impressed by the depth of an artist’s work, but somehow, for me, these pieces do it all. I know, who would’ve thought I’d have stumbled upon such incredible work in the gallery across from our hotel in Sheffield! It just goes to show the world is full of surprises.
John McCain | Warrior or warmonger? | The Economist
Topic: Elections
7:51 pm EDT, Apr 5, 2008
In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”. He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself. But many voters would rather not suffer at all.
