learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed
Quotes
As Dave Winer noted, Medium does content categorization upside down: “Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category.” He means collection in Medium-speak, but you get the idea: Topic triumphs over author. Medium doesn’t want you to read something because of who wrote it; Medium wants you to read something because of what it’s about. And because of the implicit promise that Medium = quality.
Blogging for its relevance to project SAKE, where I am also struggling with finding alternative organizational schemes for contributions from players. A stream metaphor seems wrong. Also, we really want to incentivize quality over quantity (or frequency) of posts. Medium might have gotten a few things right, there.
If the dogs no longer guarded the sheep, he observes, they would be taken by the wolves (again, at once the closest ancestors and the fiercest enemies of the dogs). “In denying us the bones,” the dogs protest, “you will lose them along with the meat.” We, in other words, eat the beasts of the field together, and it is this arrangement that keeps us alive, and that gives shape and meaning to the pronoun in the first-person plural.
Ecce Canis — Justin Erik Halldór Smith
Fantastic article on the coevolution of dogs and humans, and its philosophical implications.
schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared
Toxo makes cat odor smell sexy to male rats.
… in the hypersocial atmosphere of Facebook, it is enough to just make noise to fake a persona. No actual interaction is required. And there is so much noise that the loss of one voice means nothing — there are a billion others ready to step up to join the chorus of social cacophonia. … I don’t think it’s really contact … just reflections from random angled surfaces.
ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_050712_1
I’ve made similar attempts at ditching Facebook in the past and had similar experiences.
“Could you make fake panda?”
“Sure.”
“What about human?”
“Don’t go there.”
They’re going for a mastery of technique, then a mastery over all the important details of service,” Freeman said. “It adds up to an incredibly elusive experience. It’s hard to manufacture splendidness. It seems as though they have something very difficult figured out.
Japan’s Pour-Over Coffee Wins Converts — NYTimes.com
The Japanese dedication to details never seizes to amaze me.
The reward for work is more work.
Came across this after watching his film about studio culture, 10 Bullets.
A game is something that we play. A videogame is a digital playspace. This is the shape of games to come. To impose stricter definitions will only serve to stifle creativity and unnecessarily celebrate past trends in favor of present and future possibilities— this is already happening.
If these proposed definitions are so broad as to include everything, and now everything is thus a game, then let’s play everything!
[…]
If we’re going to admit systems of ranking into our games, to construct goals, their design should come from an intimacy with the materials of the playspace as a freely-played space, meaning one explored through our own self-directed (and constantly dissolving?) goals; these goals should invite us to play with processes that direct us toward and help realize our vision of inner utopia.