BLDGBLOG interview with Jim Rossignol on his new book, This Gaming Life. It’s excellent, of course… I don’t really play games any more. When I read something like this or talk to poeple who work on games, I get an antsy feeling that I’m missing out, but where I would fit it into a twenty four hour day I don’t know.

Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware in conversation with Françoise Mouly.

An extremely awkward but nonetheless interesting profile of Fang Lijun in ArtZine China. “…young Fang Lijun made a name for himself by writing and presenting a story called, Dickhead Confucius is a Stupid Pig.”

“Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.” I’ve never been interested in working at Google, though it’s always described as some sort of heaven on earth and I certainly know people who are quite happy there. I can’t quite put my finger on it other than that their presentations on user experience often seems to consist of a series of studies conducted at great time and expense to learn something any competent designer could have told them immediately; the implication being that they daren’t give visual thinkers the same sort of liberty they give engineers. I can imagine feeling underused.

A couple of the curiously specific notes by the students of W.G. Sebald, from Five Dials number 5, The Collected Maxims:

It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it’s not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a series of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.

It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not, perhaps, trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

I’m not quite understanding the great huff over Amazon’s new option to publish blogs to Kindle (a lot of other critiques seem to link back to that one). My first thought was that it’s one of the few ways that blog writers might get paid for actually writing. It requires neither the stomach for the questionable business of shilling for crap through affiliates and pasting up ads, nor the potentially irrelevant energy required to sell cupcakes and t-shirts. If readers care to pay a buck or two a month for the convenience of formatting and offline access, that’s fine (though pretty unlikely in most cases, especially the linky ones). The content itself is still free. Even if it generates next to nothing, the idea seems like a pretty revolutionary solution to having our electric cake and eating it too. Content is free, writers get paid. And at a higher percentage than traditional publishing, no? What am I missing here? Is it just that Amazon is the man? I admit, that’s a stumper, since Amazon’s monstrous share of that market is what makes the whole thing practicable… Seriously, this is not a defense, I really want to know what I’m missing. The negative response doesn’t seem very well articulated yet. Also no one seems to be asking the more concerning questions like, what are the implications of Amazon’s distribution rights for blogs that function even partially as writer’s notebooks? Could writers be prohibited from repurposing their own work elsewhere? What happens when devices start to more or less converge? Does Amazon hold the rights to your work on a Chumby? What about a portable TV? And how about those fridges with internet! The mobile, dorm size fridges, of course. And you know some enterprising smartypants will shortly stick internet in a Igloo lunchbox complete with social networking components that let your true friends automatically save your lunch (including that cake I was going on about) to The Cloud. Will Amazon own your lunch?

Oh internet, you are so nice sometimes! I think to myself, self, wouldn’t it be great is someone were embroidering their text messages? and voila! someone is.  Also, let me just state that punctuation is hard (for me). And personal. And even though I periodically decide once and for all where I stand on capitalization in titles, fancy commas, and exotic parenthesis, I usually can’t recall the decision the next day. Also I can’t spell, so maybe that will keep you distracted from the punctuation problem, in the way a broken thumb will keep you from whining about that headache. Hold out your hand, dear internet.