Month: November 2011

  • (via Kinekt Design) via Boing Boing

  • Remember when we had to tell graphic designers that they couldn’t control how things looked online? That the lovely page they’d designed might not look like that on someone else’s computer, in someone else’s browser? Soon we’re going to have to do that with everything. Designers are going to have to design things that might…

  • theavc: theavc: Pure Sabacc wins again: 22-plus fictitious pop-culture games with convoluted rules Obviously Quidditch, but being able to let go of rules long enough to play Calvinball would be pretty incredible too. What fictional game would you play?

  • Is She or Isn’t She?

    lareviewofbooks: JOHN CLUTE on Margaret Atwood and the S and F words. Elevator Girl House F1  © Miwa Yanagi 1997 Margaret AtwoodIn Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination New York: Doubleday/Nan A Talese, 2011. 255 pp. There are a few problems here, which may take a few minutes to sort through before we can get…

  • emergentfutures: World’s first pee-controlled video game opens in London bar Developed by UK-based Captive Media, the high-tech urinals come with 12-inch LCD screens fitted just above them. Ads play on the screens until a punter approaches the urinal. Detecting that the punter is in position and ready to pee, the system then switches into gaming…

  • slavin: sometimes often the best thing that can happen to ideas you have is that without knowing you even exist, someone else goes ahead and makes them happen. altnytterfarlig: The story of stuff: “99% of the stuff we run through the system [the system of consumption] is trashed within 6 months.” From its extraction through…

  • industrialist: DiceForChange is a concept designed to help you start and act on what you care about. Simply roll the dice to introduce new routines into your life in a playful way and notice how even small and simple actions have a greater positive effect on life.

  • Barthes vehemently opposes the view that authors consciously create masterpieces. He maintains that authors such as Racine and Balzac often reproduce emotional patterns about which they have no conscious knowledge. He opposes the view that authors should be interpreted in terms of what they think they’re doing. Their biographies have no more relevance to what…

  • According to this reading of myth, a myth occurs only if someone is a true believer who consumes the myth innocently. This is why, for certain later writers, a postmodern ‘ironic’ reading, which recognises and plays with the constructedness of myths, is deemed subversive. It is also why ironic uses of stereotypes are sometimes differentiated…

  • David Chalmers, however, argues that materialist reductionism of the Churchlands’ type throws out too much, and cannot deal with the fact that humans enjoy sunsets. Chalmers agrees with Thomas Nagel that there is something that it feels like to be a bat, or a human, but there may be nothing that it is like to…