metopal

The interstitial experience of video games and their worlds. Find out what it's all about.

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And here things could be counted, each one.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

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I was becoming a process. All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?

Kathe Koja, The Cipher

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The decision to leave quelled her anxiety, as if a valve had suddenly opened to release a huge pressure, and its venting was close to bliss. All here was unhealthy, toxic. Was damaged and infectious. It was a bad place. Some places just were.

Adam Nevill, The House of Small Shadows

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It is facile, virtually meaningless, to demand that literature stick with the "human." [...] The constructing or imaging of something inanimate, or of a portion of the world of nature, is also a valid enterprise, and entails an appropriate rescaling of the human figure.

Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’

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He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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...the best-conceived computer should be thought of as a collage of displaced, reused ruins...

Bruno Latour, Irreductions

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Texts are bodies that can light up, by rendering human perception more acute, those bodies whose favored vehicle of affectivity is less wordy: plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash. One of the stakes for me of the turn to things in contemporary theory is how it might help us live more sustainably, with less violence toward a variety of bodies. Poetry can help us feel more of the liveliness hidden in such things and reveal more of the threads of connection binding our fate to theirs.

Jane Bennett, ‘Systems and Things,’ New Literary History (2012)

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'Thing' or 'body' has advantages over 'object,' I think, if one's task is to disrupt the political parsing that yields only active (American, manly) subjects and passive objects. Why try to disrupt this parsing? Because we are daily confronted with evidence of nonhuman vitalities actively at work around and within us.

Jane Bennett, 'Systems and Things,' New Literary History (2012)

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But perhaps there is no need to choose between objects or their relations. Since everyday, earthly experience routinely identifies some effects as coming from individual objects and some from larger systems (or, better put, from individuations within material configurations and from the complex assemblages in which they participate), why not aim for a theory that toggles between both kinds or magnitudes of "unit"? One would then understand "objects" to be those swirls of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long enough to vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate momentum of the throbbing whole. The project, then, would be to make both objects and relations the periodic focus of theoretical attention, even if it is impossible to articulate fully the "vague" or "vagabond" essence of any system or any things, and even if it is impossible to give equal attention to both at once.

Jane Bennett, 'Systems and Things,' New Literary History (2012)

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Yet the reservation must also be well noted, that even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think them as things in themselves. For otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B XXVI

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Tomb Raider GPU glitch from the Giant Bomb Quick Look live stream.

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Tomb Raider GPU glitch from the Giant Bomb Quick Look live stream.

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Arcade games aren't profitable if people can continue playing for long periods, so their level of difficulty is steeply curved. After a short period of time, the games will actually start to attack the player. However, there are also players capable of clearing the games, giving them a glimpse into an unseen world.

Sunsoft programmer Tomomi Sakai (Mr. Gimmick)

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However, with ever-depressing emphasis on advancing computer graphics, light and shadow have been more or less claimed as a simulation element, an aspect of realism, not a poetic substance to be conceived and tailored for expressive impact. Darkness is one of the oldest concepts in the human imagination, the thing we've all been afraid of for the past several thousand years. There was a brief era in video game graphics when, because they lacked subtelty, these poetics were brought to the surface through a fortuitous collision of technology and subject matter.

Matthew Weise, 'A Brief History of Darkness'

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Metaphysical thinking is precipitated in the between. We find ourselves in the midst of beings.

William Desmond, Being and the Between, p. 5

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The mindful human being is within a community of being that "englobes" it, in the sense of being more encompassing than its singular being; but this is not such as to swallow the singular being within an absorbing totality. Quite to the contrary, the astonishing diversity and differentiation of beings, and precisely within a community of being as common, emerges for mindfulness. Metaphysical mindfulness is aware of difference in itself, as other in thought to being--being with which mind is also intimate.

William Desmond, Being and the Between, p. 4-5

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Each place its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams--all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 262