Category Essays

Cynics

Cynicism is like cholesterol; there’s a good kind and a bad kind. I used to dislike cynicism categorically, but over time I’ve come to recognize that we call at least two diametrically opposed concepts by the same name. This sort…

How to Not Create

Get very frustrated you can’t think of anything interesting to write about. Discard several ideas as not interesting enough to write about. Wait, is that one interesting? Ah, you’ve probably written about it before. It sounds familiar, you’ve definitely thought…

Lines

There’s no such thing as a line. Lines are wholly conceptual. They are a thing that we perceive rather than a thing that exists. The lines that we see emerge wherever we perceive a division between one thing and another…

Simulacra

There’s always a gap between the world we perceive and the world as it is, and we’ll never be able to measure how wide it is. There’s a distance between the person we know and our knowledge of the person,…

Ornate

Game graphics have increasingly emphasized their ability to capture fine detail – details such as skin texture, fine creases in fabric, and ornate stone and metalwork. We’ve increased poly count, we’ve gone from flat textures to bump maps to normal…