Only those who do not know what to say get to write their own lines
The project of modernity had one overarching value above all others: progress. Unlike ancient religious values, this one was realized and made manifest at remarkable speed. Whole categories of disease were completely removed from lived experience, magnificent buildings were constructed higher and faster than at any point in history, and the phrase “better living through [ ]
The stated purpose of psychoanalysis is to render explicit that which works implicitly. The human psyche mainly runs on autopilot, and only occasionally happens into situations where consciousness has any effect one way or the other. By elucidating these mysterious internal processes, whose whims engender our lives, the occasions where conscious thought can make a [ ]
If you are of a certain age, you probably remember being introduced to search engines. You probably also remember a certain ritualized set of instructions for how to use these engines – add a plus between terms to make sure the results contain both words, add a minus to remove undesired results, put phrases into [ ]
When managing systems that affect large numbers of people, it is vital to keep the distinction between hazards and dangers in mind at all times. A hazard is the potential for a dangerous situation to occur; danger is when things actually come to a head. The paradigmatic example is that of tigers kept at a [ ]
Sociology is the science of what happens when large numbers of people are crammed into the same context. Embrace this definition, and the whole discipline unlocks its secrets before your very eyes. As a side effect, it also dissolves many of your long-held personal beliefs about who you are and what you are about. Much [ ]
Some books seem destined to spawn out of this air in places where humans have a fluctuating presence. No one can quite remember why or when they were bought, yet upon revisiting the old summer cottage or the neglected attic space – there they are, fully realized physical objects, fully material in aspect. Give a [ ]
Big corporations have accounting departments. The bigger the corporation, the bigger the accounting department. The correlation is mostly linear, with certain bumps where a corporation has reached a size when it needs to scale up its accounting prowess. The biggest corporations have accounting departments that are larger than entire smaller corporations. It is a number’s [ ]
It is an old wisdom in game design that the player should have fun, rather than the computer. The thrust of this wisdom is that a game can be infinitely complex and model everything down to the smallest of detail, but if the player does not (or can not) do anything significant to affect outcomes, [ ]
Cybernetics is, at its most basic, an accounting of calculation. The load-bearing axiom is that some amount of calculation – be it literal or metaphoric – has to take place somewhere within an organization, and that finding out where it does or does not happen renders valuable insights. If there is a problem, then knowing [ ]
The game loop of Diablo 2 is deceptively simple. The player character starts in town, heads out into the wilderness, slays monsters, loots items from said wilderness and/or monsters, and returns to town to sell the loot, with an option to buy better gear for the recently earned coin. Each iteration of the loop brings [ ]