This is explicitly a function of nostalgia, but it is nostalgia had second-hand, where the original object is eerily absent, decontextualized and beginning to run down like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where the original recordings were physically destroyed in the process of transferring them over.
Read MoreMy students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I loved science fiction and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.
Read MoreIf we accept that it’s possible for a game to be not fun, the next obvious question is simple: if it is not fun, is there perhaps some other reason for playing it?
Read MoreIf I had all the money in the world, I would spend it on not being advertised to. Perhaps it’s just the price of being on the internet these days, but I think that the constant presence of banners, advertisements, and boosted posts is directly harmful to everyone.
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