To date, I’ve clocked 439 hours on Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth. This is the second of the Isaac games, which means that these 439 hours are on top of the 300ish hours I’ve spent on the first Binding of Issac. That’s an entire month of my life that I’ve spent on this game, and I’m not proud of it. But this number stands for something (I hope) more than the hours I’ve spent perfecting maneuvering pixels with my keyboard, and I think it’s got to do with a sort of navigation. Read more...

“I look at my Instagram feed and it’s a network; I’m seeing through the eyes of people around the world,” says the image-sharing app’s Teru Kuwayama. Following two decades as a noted photojournalist, covering war and humanitarian crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir, the TED Senior Fellow now works on the community team at Instagram, specifically with photojournalists and the wider photo community. “So many eyes and so many minds are coming online and being harnessed to this grid,” he says. Read more...

I found out that the National Library extended the average user’s borrowing privileges, allowing them to borrow probably 60% more books than they usually could. Because I was sitting at 12 borrowed books at one time and desperately wanted to take home a well-worn issue of LUCKY PEACH (on ugly foods, if I remember correctly), I did my part as an active citizen and actually paid for a premium library membership – which has led to todays situation where I stand at a balance of 33/50 books borrowed. Read more...

(*This short essay is a commentary on Patrick Crogan’s “Logistical Space” in _Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture_1, relating it to how we think about computer aided drawing software.) Before we attempt to make sense of software and its relation to our world, we have to acknowledge its history and how its underpinning technologies have shaped our perceptual world. Software that we interact with through the interface of the screen, mouse, and keyboard are not only means through which we consume and produce “digital” content — these screens and computer peripherals have also come a long way in structuring how we see and interact with the “real-world”3. Read more...

©Pangdemonium A family comedy-drama, Pangdemonium’s staging of Nina Raine’s play Tribes is a raucous event. It comes with the usual: squabbling family members, prejudiced father-figure, overt sibling rivalry, parents trying to get their children to “fuck off”. There’s a twist, though. The youngest and dearest son of the family, Billy (Thomas Pang, who just happens to share a surname with — but is unrelated to — both the artistic directors of the theatre company), is deaf from birth. Read more...

I transcribed a YouTube video Ian Bogost’s WIRED talk on THE DESIGN OF GAMES and posted it on my Web Design and Technologies class blog. He touched on the material of play and the folly of the idea of “gamification,” both relevant in a world that’s been so intent on porting our physical world over to a virtual one without delving into what these practices really mean. A good watch if you’re into any sort of experience design and/or materialist philosophies. Read more...

First done by Bertha Henson. On the Iliad, by Joshua Chiang. Ng Yi-Sheng on What You Can Do About it. Article on the banning of books by NLB on Today Online. (Updated 23:50, 10 Jul 2014: Clarified several of the entries, improved formatting.) (Updated 00:00, 11 Jul 2014: Added link to Joshua Chiang’s open letter) (Updated 00:015, 11 Jul 2014: Added link Ng Yi-Sheng’s appeal to writers and readers) Read more...

(Previously on Speak Simply) A friend of mine (who had the misfortune of being one of my brighter former students) asked me a month or so back about how and why one would frame “non-humans” in a story very obviously about humans. I thought it was a fairly simple question until I thought about it some more. “Well of course it’s a simple question.” A toy or a robot in a story is more likely than not to take on anthropomorphic qualities. Read more...

Today, I received a letter from my future self: Dear Zed, I’m still here. Warmest. Other Letters from Future Selves Originally: ↬ Pohtecktoes Lyndsey Luo Er

Doug Mainwaring has written an article on why same-sex marriages shouldn’t be a thing, stating that it’s a matter of semantics. Marriage, according to Mainwaring, is a term that is historically and culturally linked to heterosexual religious and legal unions. He says that we should leave the term “marriage” for the union of heterosexual couples, while homosexual couples should they want similar legal rights and recognition by the state/law should have “civil unions”. Read more...