“Icon fonts done right.” Indeed.

Ghost is a new CMS from John O’Nolan, a former WordPress UI developer, that is intended for blogging only. It has some interesting ideas (the Markdown editor is pretty clever, for instance). More importantly, I find it interesting and refreshing to see a CMS that focuses on just doing one thing (blogging, in this case) and doing it well.

 Mark Reeves is currently working on an e-book about building your own Tumblr-style site using ExpressionEngine, Craft, and Statamic. Seems rather appropriate, given Yahoo’s recent purchase of Tumblr.

Ryan Green’s son has cancer and so he’s making a video game titled That Dragon, Cancer about it. Here, he explains his approach to the game’s design and intent:

I’m asking that you let me take you to a dark place in my life, and that you’ll have faith I’m not going to abandon you there. Because my intent is not to hurt you. I want the players that enter my creation to feel loved. I want players to walk with me in the garden of my life, to see the faith and hope; the weakness and doubt; and to love my son, the same way I love my son, even if he succumbs to that great dragon that lies in wait.

Pitchfork interviews Daft Punk about the “old school” process of making their new album, Random Access Memories.

To be clear: Daft Punk are not anti-technology, or even anti-computer (they readily admit that RAM could not have been made without them). But they do have a certain amount of ire for the normalizing aspect technology can have upon music, how lines of code are unable to recreate the variables that sprout from relatively organic techniques.

“We were never able to connect with using computers as musical instruments,” Bangalter shrugs. “We've always relied on hardware components—old drum machines, synthesizers—but it was more like a chaotic electrical lab with wires everywhere. We tried to make music with laptops in the mid 2000s, but it was really hard to create from within the computer without putting things into it. In a computer, everything is recallable all the time, but life is a succession of events that only happen once.”

There’s a lot of good stuff in Alan Noble’s response to Eric Metaxas’ recent statements regarding our culture’s crisis of manhood, but I just want to highlight his response to Metaxas’ claim that “all men want to live heroic lives”:

…let’s take another step back from heroism altogether; is it good to encourage your young boys (or girls) to be a hero? Is that natural, deep, basic desire to be the protagonist in the story of your life admirable? Does it lead to Christian virtues?

In my experience as a boy (and even now, as oft-day-dreamer adult), the desire to be a hero almost always manifested as a desire to attain my existential justification through personal greatness. It was an alternate salvation—a salvation through being a heroic savior. If I could do something heroic, even if it cost me everything, then I would know that I mattered. I was worth something. My existence would be assured, and this assurance would be verified by those around me.

I still want to live a heroic life. But I don’t think I should. I think I should want to live quietly, to do all that I do until God and for my neighbor, and to do all this without believing that through my quiet suffering I am redeeming myself.

This really jumps out at me because I confess, I want to live a heroic life — or at least, what I think is a heroic life. But is my vision of the heroic life truly Biblical, or has it been shaped by cultural pressures and norms in ways that, though seemingly noble, actually run counter to Christ’s instructions? This is a hard question, and it’s one that’s become increasingly relevant now that I have children of my own, including two sons.

Oh, and then there’s Noble’s response to Metaxas’ criticism of videogames:

Why videogames? Why not point out that watching football isn’t heroic? Or working on cars? Or Tweeting? Or any other of the myriad ways people waste time in the 21st century?

Precisely.

A fascinating piece by David Gutsche about his spiritual experience while playing Proteus:

I grew up in the Evangelical Christian church, my family usually falling on the conservative and exhaustively theological sides of religion. I left, about three years ago. I find that the less time I spend around Christians, the harder it is to have empathy for their ways of seeing and living.

That’s why I was so happy when I began to learn spiritual empathetic lessons from a videogame.

[…]

Thanks to [the creators of Proteus], I was at least a little bit closer to the Christians in my life, in a way I would have never expected. I know now a bit of what they feel, even if it is just a parallel sensation. Now, when a bible-believer talks to me about the awe they feel, as well as the subsequent worship that such awe produces, I get it. I get it a little.

Seth T. Hahne:

I haven’t questioned my belief that mecha stories are substandard fare because, well, primarily that would give me one more direction in which to apportion my already far-too-small disposable income. Also: though I read comics all the time and spend at least six hours per week writing about them, at least I don’t read the ones with big robots on the covers because that’s infantile. So when I sat down and read Knights of Sidonia and had my worldview shattered? That was a feeling both delicious and terrifying. After all: I am now someone who reads and enjoys mecha manga.

I've been a fan of Tsutomu Nihei’s previous stuff (Blame!, Biomega) and really do need to check out his latest title.