All Thoughts Being Equal

Contra this op-ed piece in the New York Times : Technology Provides an Alternative to Love . Read that, then get back to me. Now back to that. Now back to me. Okay, one more thing, said by me on Facebook: Interesting, but that guy's writing style ground on my nerves. The message is cloyingly earnest but it doesn't stick to a single point. He starts off with tech-culture specifically but shifts to consumer-culture in general and then offers h is anecdote on birdwatching (which, how the hell does birdwatching do anything for conservation except as a preliminary step?) and offers a meek "well, try it sometime" conclusion. Even that title annoys me. Clearly the thesis is that the erotic/consumerist nature of technology is WORSE than love; why didn't they title it "Technology Prevents Us From Loving Things"? THAT'S a killer title. That was my first conclusion: namely, that the article itself was all over the map and fairly poor-quality overa...

Too late for that plea , apparently, but here’s why basically any video game based on A Song of Ice and Fire,* George R. R. Martin’s gloriously grimdark Take That to the heroic fantasy genre and real-life medieval romanticism, is doomed to failure. The issue comes with the psychology of video games themselves. A video game is meant to be beaten , to at least give some sense of accomplishment for putting time and (rarely more than minimal thumb-twirling) effort into it, whether five minutes beating the next level of Peggle or fifteen bajillion hours grinding towards Blizzard’s latest glass ceiling in World of Warcraft . Even when a game is fundamentally depressing (rarely) or at least a big mind screw you can at least say “well, even if the ending was shit/confusing/nonexistant I still figured out Puzzle X” (*ahem* Braid and Limbo, otherwise quite excellent games). No specific spoilers, but A Song of Ice and Fire is far and away not conducive to that kind of narrative. It becomes...