Because the widespread distaste for the Miami Heat stirkes me as a little too much like mindless groupthink, this year I’ve been trying to curb my knee-jerk negativity towards the team. After all, these guys are pretty good at playing basketball, which is something I enjoy watching. But it’s been harder than it sounds. I can’t just make myself appreciate them.
(Which goes to show, by the way, how powerful media messages can be. Like pretty much everyone who doesn’t live in Cleveland, I have no reason to dislike the Heat, yet I instinctively curl my lip at them. It’s a little scary.)
This is going to sound ridiculous, but I think this .gif (and it’s only slightly-less-funny sibling) finally turned me around on them. Chris Bosh has alway been unfairly painted as the least likable of Miami’s “Big Three,” and this one genuinely hilarious photobomb shatters that image. It’s humanizing.
Jason Johnson explores a spooky mansion in RDR, while also investigating the psychology behind videogame myths:
More curious than the mansion itself is why videogames generate urban legends in the first place. I have my own theory on this. It shows that a game has been assimilated into culture, to the point where people are willing to make up bullshit about it, which might be the highest achievement of all for a game. In the classics, this sort of rumor mongering happens all the time.
The ending is somewhat, one might say, curiously spooky.
Jason Rohrer makes intersting videogames. This one is a simultaneous turn-based strategy game centered on hidden information and subterfuge that is also a comment on the diamond trade of the early 90s. Even by his stardards, I mean, god damn.
It’s a DS game, and he’s trying to get his kick started so he can make the cartridges. I hope that happens.
Indie game developer Tiger Style released Waking Mars to the App Store a couple months ago, and they share their numbers in this post. It’s doing fine, but not as well as they hoped.
I’m always interested to see financial data from indie developers, but this case makes me kinda sad. Waking Mars is one of the most exquisitely well crafted games for the iPad and iPhone. It presents a coherent and unique creative vision that avoids the pitfalls that make so many games feel juvenile and backwards. The two main characters are an Asian man and black woman, with distinct, layered personalities, who have a playful but not flirtatious chemistry. There is no combat; instead, you play as a sort of cosmic horticulturalist (it’s fun). The game’s voice is that of genuine, undramatized science, but smartly timed humor keeps the text from feeling too academic.
If you’re an adult who plays games and too often feels insulted by mainstream titles, Waking Mars gives you everything you ever wanted. It makes me pretty frustrated that people evidently feel five dollars is too much for a game this good, but I guess that’s the world we live in. They just dropped the price to three bucks; I hope it sells like crazy.
Speaking of iPhone games, here’s a winner: a tile sliding game that’s actually enjoyable. It has a great style and gameplay that requires just a little more brain power than your average puzzler. I know some people hate in-app purchases, but the One Polymer mode is worth it (you can play for a while to unlock it, too, if you can’t spare a buck).
Adam Cadre used to work for a test prep company, and he shares his perspective on a controversial reading comprehension section, given to kids in New York, that was adapted from an absurd story by Daniel Pinkwater:
Companies such as ETS that produce standardized tests employ two types of people: psychologists and lawyers. The psychologists develop questions that, they contend, measure certain mental skills. The lawyers make sure the answers to those questions can hold up in court against litigious parents. A lawyer for one of these companies can’t very well say, “The plaintiff argues that the answer to #29 is (D). We contend that it’s (C). Your honor — doesn’t (C) just feel right to you? Don’t you just kinda look at it and say, ‘Yeah, gotta be (C)’?” That wouldn’t fly. So the answer pretty much has to be a paraphrase of something that’s right there in the passage.
Keep reading for a twist ending.
I was gonna link the image on this Deadspin post (which also explains what the hell this is about), but the .gif swooped in and stole the “most linkable humorous interpretation of Amar’e Stoudemire punching a fire extinguisher” title. A shocking upset. (Author unknown.)
I’ve been posting MetaFilter comments here because I see some really great writing there that you’d only notice if you spend a lot of time on the site. Well, now the MeFi moderators are running a whole blog that just does that. I guess now I know what it feels like to be an obsolete piece of technology.
Chuck Klosterman goes to see Creed and Nickleback, which goes about how you’d expect.
I feel slightly odd saying that I enjoy the work Klosterman has been doing for Grantland. Whenever I see him discussed online, he’s usually derided, and on some level I can recognize that his area of interest is incredibly shallow. But his hypersensitivity to trends in media, combined with his penchant for making arbitrary but absolute statements, sends his arguments down paths that always interest me, even if they aren’t very well constructed. Take this quote from the linked piece:
The key to being appreciated by pop critics is the act of taking your own music less seriously than the people who adore it (Stephen Malkmus is probably the best contemporary example).
This is a totally ridiculous statement that is trivial to disprove (no critic could take Kevin Shields’ music more serious than he does, yet they seem to like My Bloody Valentine pretty well). But it’s fun to think about, and since all his writing is in the low-stakes areas of sports and pop culture, I don’t have to worry that it affects society. I suppose that sounds condescending, but I’m geniunely excited whenever I see he’s written something new.
This is the new anime series from Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno, which is automatically exciting. I’m not totally sure they can recapture the magic (the first episode is no “Asteroid Blues”), but I’m not ready to count it out just yet. It does look gorgeous, at least. And hey, you can watch it for free.
Many gamers will play the game and see that ending and put it away being very impressed with the cleverness of the mixture of 2- and 3D gameplay and puzzles. That’s fine. The more you play and the more you pay attention, however, the more the years spent perfecting the game will become apparent. The puzzles of perspective are not the only challenge you’ll be presented; the game begins to open up and show you its mysteries as you pay attention to every detail of what you see and do.
I have a minor complaint about the reviews I’ve read of Fez. Each one seems to characterize it as a short or small game because, technically, you can complete it fairly quickly. But the game’s world feels enormous and intricate, and as Kuchera says, there are layers of engagement beyond the openly stated goals. I’ve already spent several evenings with the game, and I foresee many more before I’m through with it.
The crowds never relented, and we soon realized what kind of a monster we had created. Our patrons fancied themselves as backpackers, but in reality, had never done anything adventurous in their lives. They’d just chill out in Vang Vieng for a month or more, eating banana pancakes for breakfast every morning, going tubing every day, frequented my establishment, and then finishing the night off at any number of local opium dens.
You know when you find a website that sells things you never really realized normal people could buy? Specialty Bottle is that for all sorts of bottles, jars, tins, and vials.
It took me a while to come around on The Wirecutter, mostly because I thought its editor, Brian Lam, came off pretty poorly in that whole stolen iPhone 4 saga with Gizmodo. But Apple is basically on its way to becoming Skynet with better killbot UIs now, so I should probably be happy he took them down a peg.
Oh, and he wrote this post, which is one of the most unique and fascinating pieces of writing I’ve seen online in years.
It’s ostensibly about finding the best home juicer, but Lam turns it into so much more than that. He descibes his personal history with juicing, explains what makes juicing good and how to juice properly, he interviews juicing experts, and scours the web for professional and user reviews of juicers. It’s an enlightening, engaging read, and it actually got me to go try a green juice myself the next day.
You know a post is special when even its comments are worth reading. Lam scrums it up in there, offering a eloquent defense of his research method for Wirecutter posts, which is less about his own testing than it is hunting down and distilling the opinions of people who know the products best. Lam is really blazing his own trail with the site and I’m delighted to follow along.
A simple, perfect blog: comparing the Japanese and American versions of videogame box art. It’s pretty sad that America loses everytime, but seriously, how great is the “Yossy Island” box?
The Thunder lost to the Clippers last night on a missed three-pointer from Durant, so I’m posting this to make myself feel better.
I ate at Canlis, Seattle’s most highly regarded fine dining restaurant, a few months ago. The food was great, but not necessarily the best I’ve eaten. It was, however, the most memorable dining experience I’ve ever had. And that’s all down to the service. Co-owner Mark Canlis gets to the heart of what great service means in this candid, insigtful, and refreshing interview.
I was at elBulli with my grandfather, who has spent his whole life in Pensacola, Florida, and my family. We’re way into the meal, and they bring out this far-out fish dish. Grandpa asks, totally seriously, for a couple of slices of lemon, and he has every intention to use his 39-year marine hands to decimate this thing; lemon is a 9 on the acidic scale. Meanwhile, we’re all “Oh, jeez” and ready to backpedal him. After not really understanding what he wanted at first, since my grandpa asked in English, the server comes back with a couple of slices of lemon and says, “We are but learners here.”
Wundergeek, of the awesome and sadly defunct Go Make Me a Sandwich, writes an open letter to Wizards of the Coast, who are currently developing the new version of Dungeons and Dragons. She tells them why making art that doesn’t exploit and objectify women’s bodies would actually be good for their business. It’s sad that it’s come to this, but here we are. What makes it really interesting is how she tells it through the lens of DC’s recent absurdly sexist reboot, which, the numbers suggest, will thankfully go down as a failure.
Like Kevin, I found Robin Sloan’s Tap Essay on liking vs loving stuff online very compelling. However, my behavior diverges from what he suggests “we” do in one important way: I actually do go back and read through my old favorites on MetaFilter from time to time. And the experience is always delightful, just like revisiting a favorite book. Take this simple post on spaghetti. You can learn so much about the fundamentals of cooking with pasta just from this one random thing someone posted online. What a treat.
Michael Bierut is awesome, and so is this book. Now you can get it in a pretty blue paperback. Which you should.
“[Mike Daisey] insisted that ‘This is a work of nonfiction’ be printed in playbills.”
—Alli Houseworth, describing her experience producing Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”
“I’m not calling this ‘nonfiction’ and neither do I tend to call anything I write ‘nonfiction,’ because I don’t accept that term as a useful description of anything I value in literature. The only reason this is being labeled ‘nonfiction’ by your editors is because that is one of the two binary categories that editors allow in prose.”
—John D’Agata, explaining his aversion to journalistic verifiability, in The Lifespan of a Fact, pg. 109.
As this whole Mike Daisey thing was blowing up, I found myself thinking about John D’Agata, another writer who purposefully distorts facts and defends his doing so with rhetoric similar to Daisey’s “tools of theater” argument. But while I find D’Agata to be obnoxious and pretentious, I am sympathetic to his rationale while I find Daisey’s claims to be complete bullshit. The reason why is simple: D’Agata is up front with his frustrations with the term “nonfiction,” and he explicitly reveals this frustration in his work. Daisey, on the other hand, abuses the trust we place in the nonfiction label.
John D’Agata doesn’t want to write nonfiction, he wants to write essays. And he has a very specific idea what that means. Rather than his work being “a vehicle for facts,” he sees it as “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning—an emotional meaning, an intellectual meaning, a political meaning, a scientific one, or whatever goal that artist has set for the text.”
Basically, in a piece of writing that supposedly recounts real events, D’Agata wants to be free to, say, change the temperature on a certain day, propagate a false history of Tae Kwan Do, or state that a person who jumped off a building took nine seconds to hit the ground when it was really eight, all for artistic purposes.
I bet Mike Daisey would say his work functions the same way. In his second interview with Ira Glass in This American Life’s Retraction episode, he says,
Everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.
But here’s the big difference between the two: D’Agata lets his audience know what he’s up to, and Mike Daisey doesn’t. The essay at the heart of Lifespan features a section where the piece completely breaks down and D’Agata says, “if I point to something seeming like significance there is the possibility that nothing real is there.” He tells readers not to trust him. And if he could, he wouldn’t label his work nonfiction because he knows people attach expectations to that term.
Before he got caught, Daisey did none of this. His monologue (or at least what was excerpted for TAL) didn’t even drop a hint that what he was saying was anything other than the gospel truth. And he apparently had no qualms embracing the term “nonfiction,” with all factual gravity and audience expectations that came with it. When backed into a corner, he tried to reach for the “artistic truth” defense, but unlike D’Agata, he’d done nothing to establish his credibility to make such a claim.
Even though I think D’Agata’s arguments are just overeducated prattle, he clearly is a legitimate artist struggling against limitations he doesn’t accept, searching for a different kind of truth. But Daisey, in the end, comes across as nothing more than a chronic liar, the kid on the playground who makes stuff up to gain any sort of authority, and who, when finally called out, sputters pathetically and grasps at straws.
Almost on accident, I caught a screening of this documentary, about professional skateboarder and certified lunatic Danny Way, at SXSW earlier this week. I love going into movies with no expectations because when they’re awesome (like this one is), they can really blow you away. Waiting for Lightning is expertly crafted, stylized without being distracting, and paced with a perfect emotional arc. It’s slightly embarrassing to admit that a movie about skateboarding made me tear up, but during a section about Danny’s legendary performance in the 2008 X-Games, I nearly lost it.
In the same way that rotten food makes you go dark to your refrigerator, I think the clutter of tasks you know you’re never gonna do gets in the way. The same way that you’ve captured a medium-priority task about returning someone’s email that you know you’ll never return, you know know what, now? Now you’re scared of your to-do list, you’re scared of your inbox, you’re scared of your office, you’re scared of your refrigerator.
So perfect. From Merlin Mann’s podcast, Back to Work. (Also, Merlin’s speech is impossible to transcribe in one pass, even at half-speed.)
Henry Abbott is one of the most eloquent voices amongst NBA stat heads, and this is finest work on the subject to date. Using a mix of easily comprehensible numbers and interviews with former coaches and players, he illustrates why the endemic practice of teams always letting their best player take the last shot is an inefficient strategy. Even if you don’t care about basketball, this is a wonderful example of how to explain a complex and heretical idea to a stubborn audience. It’s airtight.
Speaking of people named Abbott, this huge table shows how animal noises (bark, moo, oink, etc.) are pronounced in different languages. Some of them look really weird to native English eyes, but when you actually try to make the noise, you usually see how it makes sense (e.g. the Japanese sound for bees buzzing: “boon boon”). And some of them are way more accurate than their English counterpart, like Turkish hen clucking: “gut gut gdak.”
This is bascially longform.org for critical essays (in fact, it’s done by some of the same people). And even though they’re very similar, Let’s Get Critical really clicks for me where Longform and its ilk never did. I think it’s because excerpts give a strong sense of what a critical article will say and whether it will interest me, while pulling a single paragraph out of a 10,000-word piece of journalism doesn’t tell me much about what I’m getting into. Plus, frankly, the stuff they link is just shorter, and I really like how they use favicons next to the publication’s name. (I don’t mean any of this to put down Longform, which tons of people really like and is clearly well designed. Just trying to explain my preference.)
Doughnut-related items excluded from the above list on the grounds of controversy:
+: doughnut-like feature(s)
–: potentially excluding feature(s)(…)
Malaysia - Kaya ball:
+: deep-fried ball of dough
–: coconut-containing kaya-dough would not necessarily be universally accepted as being “dough”
Continuing last week’s theme of kitchen items I didn’t think were necessary but now consider indispensible, this spatula is seriously fucking great. I know, you only have a spatula in your hand for all of 30 seconds for any given dish, but those 30 seconds can make a huge difference. I’m honing in on a pretty good pan-fried hamburger, and the ease with which this spatula turns the meat without damaging it makes me feel a lot more confident during the only semi-perilous manuver I make. To have that feeling for every piece of food I’ll flip for years, $13 was a steal.
I used to go through probably six pairs of earbuds a year. I’m probably at about two now. And it’s all because I always, always wrap them up with this technique before I put them in my pocket. Just don’t pull too hard.
I got this $90 kitchen thermometer for Christmas, but I wish I had bought it myself. I requested the gift, which is what you do for things you want but think are sort of frivolous. And the Thermapen is anything but. It gives fast, accurate measurements at precise locations for a huge range of temperatures. It is simple to use, pleasant to hold, and nice to look at. I can’t believe I used to try to cook with a cheap piece of shit from Target. I don’t think anyone can truly learn to work with food and temperatures without a tool of this caliber.
Sometimes a site sits in my RSS reader so long I start to take it for granted. It’s like, oh yeah, another wonderful, carefully curated But Does It Float post, that’s nice. But this post is extra extra awesome. The geometry, the nature, the surreality—it works on levels I can barely perceive. The third and fourth images, especially, made by brain spin freely around my skull in delight.
It rains 423 days a year. The reason people ride bikes is because it’s faster than driving and pedestrians get shot. Drive-by shootings. Made all the stranger by the gunman’s car not being able to get away from the traffic.
I am way late getting on the Markdown train, but after about three months I already never want to write another way. This Mac app only reinforces that feeling. The main selling point is that it fades out all of the markdown functions, so your writing stands out, making a language designed for readability even more readable. After that, it gives you what you need and little more: a clean blank window, nice line spacing, a few display options, and export capabilities. For a second I balked at the $10 price tag, then I realized how spoiled I’ve become from iOS apps. It’s worth at least twice the price.
