Musings (7)
11 Jun 2011
- Games like Portal 2 make me wish Valve had a bigger impact on the industry. For example, making Mirror’s Edge instead of DICE.1
- This, right now, is the future that science fiction promised us.
- Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land: “nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s at least partially her own fault”. Sometimes, I am reminded that we should acknowledge artists as a product of their time and not, necessarily, hold them accountable for views that, today, are radical or offensive. Other times, I think Heinlein was just an asshole.
- Google is shutting down their Google Translate API. It’s probably my fault: “Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse”.
- Having had a long time to think about it, I’ve decided that Joseph Gorden Levitt’s “paradox” line in Inception is still the only part of the movie that I hate.
- On a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, one of my seat-mates was an elderly woman whose only piece of carry-on luggage was a violin.2 At one point3, she asked the stewardess for an extra soda because “[her] blood sugar was low” and then, when the stewardess left, she gave it to me: “I just wanted to see if I could get one”.
- I’ve been trying to come up with a list of my top video games. This has been quite the trying process as each time I think I’ve finished my list, electrons fire me off into some long-forgotten game or gaming memory that adds yet another to the list. At this point, I now have three categories: Top 10, Honorable Mention, and “Damnit, I should have put more effort/time into that game, because it was awesome and I think it deserves to be on my Top 10, but I can’t be sure”. Still working on what to call that third category…
- The latest entry in my commonplace book: “Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves”.4
- The folly of youth may be that it deems itself invincible, but the folly of age is that it deems itself impotent.
-
I should mention that I actually liked Mirror’s Edge, but it was a game where what it managed to do right was overshadowed by the glaring flaws. What EA actually released would probably only serve as a tech demo for Valve…
↩ -
I feel that you need to know this piece of information in order to better understand my experience: she wore Skullcandy Lowriders.
↩ -
Somewhere between Dickinson and Glendive, for the curious.
↩ -
Justice Robert H. Jackson
↩