Pride and Ambition
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Category Life in the Machine
Nine Methods and Reasons to Not Enjoy Art
1. You’re tired already, and anticipating the sheer weight of emotion that might be dredged up by an unfamiliar but well-written story makes you uncomfortable. There is too much emotion on your plate already. Someday you’ll be up for it,…
Lying’s Pride
We will believe any words said with conviction. Not all of us, not all of the time – sometimes people can tell the difference between flattery and observation, between pleasant lies and harsh truths. Still, as much as you may…
Cogs
As I worked on last piece about Inscryption, I also played Daniel Mullins’ other games, Pony Island and the Hex – primarily out of a desire to not put my foot in my mouth by making over-broad statements on their…
Singularity
There is a tendency to regard the mind as existing separate to, and separable from, the body. Long ago a person once beheld a corpse of someone they knew, now devoid of motion and emotion, thought and dream, and they…
Undeaths and Double-Lives
Halloween – now duly extended to include the entire month of October – is, after New Years, the most introspective time of year. At the dawning of each new year we take a moment to take stock of our future…
Transience
It can be hard to let go. A couple of decades ago there was a burgeoning sense that the emergent internet meant information would be preserved forever, crystallized into magnetic pattern and within easy reach of anyone who cared to…
Dream Castles
You split your brain in two. One half holds what you’re seeing – either through the mind’s eye or through the two normal face eyes – and perceives edge, brightness, darkness, every piece of reality in relation to itself, defined…
Trouble in Paradise
As the world careens towards apocalyptic dystopia, it is only natural that the dedicated escapists of gaming might crave the inverse – a world that at least functions, that isn’t on fire or ridden with disease or rapidly shuffling malicious…
Suspended
Over the last year or so, I’ve become increasingly aware of my dread of completion. This is something that’s been with me a long time and something that is also rather common, I think: How many of us haven’t dawdled…