Ride Rise Roar

This is an excellent idea when Chris Remo has more time to edit the podcast, a return to the Monty Python stuff of yore.

I don't know if the Book Club is still ongoing, but it would be really sweet to see you read some poetry. Preferably a smaller sustained narrative work such as Alice Oswald's Dart, or maybe something by Anne Carson. Failing that a more avant-garde (whatever that means now) piece would be interesting, maybe something from the Dalkey Archive or The French List.

Perhaps you should have a look at the genre of epistolary novels. Some famous British examples are the creepy books Clarissa and Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Some more modern examples would be Foe by Coetzee and Herzog by Below.

Does anybody gain anything from engaging with these conspiracy theorists re: the actual 'conspiracies' themselves (as they are construed by these nuts)? Obviously the misogyny towards women and violence other genders (& minorities) is disgusting and important and should be adressed. However, that there is some conspiracy to 'take my hobby from me', or that it is even possible, is so beyond the pale that it seems to discount the other stuff going on. I don't know if this makes any sense, & please tell me to shut up or educate me if I'm wrong.

I get your point, I'm just not sure if it's applicable to what I'm interested in. When I think of pre-war Boston I think of Emerson, Boston Brahmins, industry, harbor, and the Blue Hills. It is more than just an interesting socio-economic climate, and it's more than what I described above. It's a palimpsest and locus where so many things converge. In the other case (Economy of the Unlost) I'll refer you to the extended blurb: The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. The book is damn amazing, read it and weep. I know I do. Well. I'll just stop shitting up the thread now, thanks for your input! Eeee: I'm not sure I want to "turn this into a thing", I just want to capture what's going on in my head as it might be useful in the future.

I think asset creation is a bigger limit than hardware capability, and the whole outsourcing to Singapore-thing will also reach a limit. Looking the the credits for a game like Assassins Creed 2 you get the feeling that we're on a breaking point, how much longer can you just throw more money at a project as it grows in scope? While it certainly is profitable, I don't think it is sustainable in the long run. Go smart rather than big

Yes I realized that, and figured I'd clarify what I mean. Sorry to be curt. It'd be easier for me to give you an example, like when I was reading about slave-politics in pre-civil war Boston and about how common people didn't want to end slavery because local industry relied on raw material harvested by slaves down south, shipped north to be manufactured into goods to be sold and the intellectual climate surrounding that (in Boston). I found this very interesting, how politics/social issues intersect with philosophical/moral/sociological ones. Or when reading on a classical poet, how his poesy was limited by material considerations and their affect on one another, which also is very interesting and something that rarely comes up when reading criticism. Perhaps I'm asking for the impossible here, but I just feel that there is something that could be attainable but I currently don't have. I'm going to experiment a bit more and try working with some of your suggestions. P. S. What do you create?

I never reflected over that tea isn't native to England, but rather an import and trend started by the whole Asian enterprise. Then when I figured that out I felt retarded to never have questioned tea. The Duty of Genius about Ludwig Wittgenstein by some English philosophy professor is probably the most engaging biography I ever read. The author, Ray Monk, walks through Wittgenstein's life and thinking with efficiency but ultimately it is the subjects insanity that makes the book interesting. He'll soon release a magistral biography of Oppenheimer which I've been looking forward to for a while now.

Creativity is a word to make tangible a process or mode, and I think it works as well as any other word when it comes to making discussion of this possible. This is very interesting, but my problem is rather translating what I've got going in my head down to paper. When I try to express my ideas or thoughts, most of them drain of fertility and the process of writing them down reduced or limit what they can mean. This is hugely disturbing to me, as I don't have the discipline to maintain the same thought for long and writing them down simply doesn't work out. See as a problem of part vs. whole, the whole is unspecifiable and unexpressable but by putting just one part under the microscope the whole and it's qualities are lost. I'm not sure if you understand what I'm trying to say, my English isn't perfect and I might not express what I'm feeling sufficiently.

I've got a question for all of you who create; how do you "get creative?" Right now I'm struggling with my inspiration, while in rare moments I get flashes from reading or watching to something brilliant it quickly fades away and I can rarely capture it. On the occasion I think of something novel or interesting it is gone by the time I'm trying to write it down or capture it. It isn't connected to any practical inconvenience, notebook and such is readily available, it's something else more ephemeral that I can't get a handle on and it's annoying the hell out of me.

While I generally agree with you I do feel that different interpretations carry different validity to some extent, I'd give much more credence to an interpretation thoroughly grounded in the text itself, or an interpretation that heavily concerns itself with historical or intertextual conditions, uncertain as they might be, rather than interpretations based on highly theoretical and abstract notions of comprehension, or only loosely connected to the text in question.

I'm more interested in OP's & others opinions on emotions than McEwan right now; what other positive emotions except for happiness do we attain and how does one go about living knowing that happiness are rare or odd occurrences? I have my own ideas but I'm more interested in yours.

I didn't really become emotionally affected by Blood Meridian, after a while I just distanced myself from all the violence and it became almost mythical or comic. While I really appreciated McCarthy's eloquence I don't think that book is as monolithic as people make it out to be, I found myself engaging in All the Pretty Horses much more. I'm going to read some of his earlier stuff eventually, Outer Dark/Child of God/Suttree all sounds compelling.

I have a vague desire to find an engine and then using pre-existing assets and such to create something nice and narrative. It seems that it is the easiest way to create something new and interesting for a game, I just don't have a clue as to what I want to do and how I'd go about doing it.

I think there's something to be said for mental state, not relating to how you play the game but rather to how you experience it. Nostalgia and games that consciously evoke that are great examples, they assume that the player will affect a certain attitude in order to enjoy the games in the same light as the author. It gets even more interesting when the author and player assume different views, especially in games that allow for that to happen and where "narrative dissonance" can be even more interesting than the actual narrative.