• "Show up for the work. For me, this means sitting at my loom every day and weaving for at least a few hours no matter what else might be pulling at me in business or in life. I was given this advice early on, in both my studio art education and in writing workshops I attended over the years. This commitment is the gateway to developing a habit, and in turn, a creative practice. The simple repetition of throwing the shuttle across the loom for even an hour has never failed to open up my thinking, ground my anxiety and, ultimately, move the work forward. Even if my thoughts don't dramatically shift, I can walk away from the work and see tangible evidence of a woven yard or two. Affirmation." As if I didn't need reminding. (I bookmarked this primarily, though, for the beautiful photos and workplace.)
  • "But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.

    And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve." So much good thinking in this post from Frank Lantz

  • "Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is not the same as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. In fact, you would tackle society’s needs a great deal more effectively were you to challenge this whole alienated model of learning. Medieval universities served the wider society superbly well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers, theologians, and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and state, not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might fail to turn a quick buck." Terry Eagleton on good form.
  • "Once everyone got on-board with "anyone can make video games", then the weird leap in logic was, "who wouldn't want to make video games," and worse, "who wouldn't want to solely live off their video games?"" This is all lovely from Robert – especially noting that making art is not incompatible with, separately, working, and that creative endeavours do not have to be our sole life's work. (And: that doing things not full-time does not devalue them in the slightest!)
  • "With this project, I ask: In the record listening experience, how important is the still environment and kinetic spectacle? With modern tangible media supplanted by cross-platform, network-based storage and playback, is contemporary record and turntable ownership a novelty, or an effort towards meditative stability?" Superb.
  • John Resig's original code for jQuery, annotated on Genius. I remember using a very, very early version of this around 2005 (and, indeed, using XPath selectors). Nice to see that other developers are just a bit mortal like oneself, too; his annotations are great.