Moving Pixels Podcast: Life Gets Stranger

I accidentally titled this podcast the same thing that I titled our podcast for episode 2. This sort of thing bugs me. I am dumb.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Life Gets Stranger

The Beginner's Guide, a New Prison from the Developer of The Stanley Parable

Less immediately engaging than The Stanley Parable, but still intellectually interesting.

The Beginner's Guide, a New Prison from the Developer of The Stanley Parable

The government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

--Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

fuck all that

Smut hunting and salvation

By focusing on sex, smut-hunters help eroticize a society by establishing boundaries to be transgressed. Censors share with pornographers an exaggerated sense of the importance of sex; in their different ways, both endorse Woody Allen's often-quoted witticism: "Sex is not dirty [pause] unless it's done right." Neither group will grant moral or intellectual motivation to the other side. Pornographers and censors can be sincerely indignant (the one about guilt and repression, the other about excessive freedom and license), can be driven by obsessions, can feel the need to bear witness to deeply held beliefs; both can feel that they are saving others.

--John W. Slade, Pornography in America