The Tiger's Paw.

I was thinking about cutting all this, and then thought better of it. When I make huge cuts, it usually just means I'm feeling self-conscious, and chop things because I feel they're overlong, whiny, or... boring, maybe? Like I said, self-conscious.

Here's a strange problem; I love video games. I seem to enjoy thinking about them, occasionally analyzing them to various degrees of satisfaction, and reading others attempt similar goals. But....

Actually, maybe it's two problems.

Firstly, I probably shouldn't spend as much time as I do reading and thinking about games. (More than I spend playing them, in fact, but I don't think this trait is that weird.) But more importantly because I am not a game designer. I'm not in school for game design. I don't want, 10 years from now, to look back on this period and realize that I know more about (let's pick on Gamasutra) how to bleed higher ad revenue and micro-transaction models from social gaming or "mobile" gaming than I do about the history of photography, or thinking about photography's transformation into bits, and how this can (and inevitably will) lend itself to the porousness of other forms of bits. Photography and film have a relationship, and film and music have a relationship (sometimes, unless you're Bresson), but we're reaching a state where photography and music/auditory environments can start to meet. What will that look like? What does it do? What's gained, or lost?

This is a silly worry, and I'll get over it the same way I get over every concern of this nature; I'll read a shit-ton of books.

(And I'm not quite ready to believe that knowing way too much about games and gaming can't, someday, in some way, have some benefit. But, then again, I'm really weird when it comes to thinking about "careers," and debt, so... I usually change the subject. See how I did that? Seamless.)

The second problem, and the one that sparked this ill-conceived tangent; I dislike most of the writing that I find on games. (Almost all of which is on the internet. Should I be following the new crop of more scholarly and academic texts on gaming in dead tree format? And cut way, way back on what I follow online? I'd lose any hope of getting turned on to something current.)

None of it's what I want it to be. Is there some blog community that I'm not tapped into? What am I doing wrong? Or does this not even remotely exist? Can it?

I want a mixture of big, sweeping, vitriolic calls-to-arms and insightful summaries and commentaries on gaming and its history, and insightful and eloquent analysis of individual games to such an extent that I'm going to run, not walk, to my Google search field and get myself this game and dig in. And then feel so inspired by the quality of the original commentary that I want to add to it, perhaps even on a new game of my choosing. Perhaps something wonderfully obscure and under-appreciated. And we go round and round, and it will be fantastic.

This is why I miss The Gamer's Quarter. A lot. (I've tried posting to their forums, but I found out that I can't write like that. I write like this. Forums don't really go for that. I think they view it as arrogant. Which, obviously, it sort of is.)

If I had readers I could task an urgent plea. Help! Make recommendations! Alas.

(I seem to be using this word a lot lately.)

I really loved this rant! It's old, but since that's basically the last time I was playing console games [frowny face], it seems like it was written today! Three cheers for suspended animation. (You guys, I'm sure by this point, know that I have a weird fetishization for obsolete technology. Even pagers and, my newest stupid obsession, digital cameras that are so old and shitty they take floppy disks. Very NASA-ish.)

Death to the Games Industry

















Stats

Not long ago I mentioned some of my simple Sitemeter statistics. Are you guys vaguely curious about such things? I know Joe likes graphs. Here you go, buddy.



I think what we're seeing here is that during my closed-to-the-public period I was unindexed from Google's image search database. And as yet, not reindexed. Which... though single digit stats don't feel as good as the mid-fifties I was hovering around, I appreciate my long-term readers still coming back. Sometimes a site I read will report bitterly on the effects of being Boinged or dugg or whatever. They describe it as a very temporary flood of uninterested, unengaged traffic. Here today to crash your server, leave nasty, idiotic comments, and immediately gone. Which, of course, sounds pretty lousy. I'm lucky if my site is only read by people I know. Anyone still here likes something, I guess.

Maybe Google just demands more Sankaku re-blogging. Mostly I've been ripping off Gorilla Boots Fotolife lately. I am a terrible re-blogger. In case you didn't know.

Why do I blog these? Because I collect them. Easy answer. They just accumulate. If they bother you, you should definitely not collect them. Or just in small doses.

They are vital, in some way, though. No? You're boring.

Someone, I believe at the Village Voice, penned this. Mamet is in fact working on some adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, though whether for the stage or screen I seem to have forgotten. So this is what some clever fellow thinks that might look like.

Leaked: Excerpt from David Mamet's The Diary of Anne Frank
By Roy Edroso in Featured, The Arts
Wednesday, Aug. 12 2009 @ 1:18PM

Peter: Goddamned fucking Nazis.
Anne: You want a potato?
Peter: No, I don't want a potato.
Anne: Take a potato.
Peter: I don't want a fucking potato.
Anne: Go on, take a potato.
Peter: What do I want with a fucking potato?
Anne: We're starving.
Peter: (pause) What the hell, I'll take a potato. (takes potato, eats)
Anne: I kinda like it without salt.
Peter: Salt. That shit'll kill you.
Anne: Okay.
Peter: I'm trying to make light of a fuckin' situation here.
Anne: Okay.
Peter: Like when you spilled milk on that cunt's fur coat.
Anne: That was an accident.
Peter: (Monologue on how there are no accidents)
Anne: Hey, kiss me.
Peter: Why the fuck not?

And then, around this time, I came across this. Whether it's genuine or another parody, I find myself unconcerned with.

The David Mamet Weather Report: August 13, 12:07 PM
"So is it going to rain or is the sky just gonna fucking pout all day?"