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.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:

It’s interesting to note, then, how this reporter, his colleagues at The Times and journalists at other papers have handled the political implications of the Gosnell story. This Gosnell story is nowhere near as bad as someone saying something untrue about rape. Not that bad. It’s just about a convicted murderer whose abortions fell a bit too far on the post-birth and malpractice side of things than the prebirth side and resulted in an untold number of deaths and scarings and disease spreading.

[…]

Don’t get me wrong, while I will fully agree with the New York Times that a politician saying something stupid deserves at least 250 breathless stories in a three-month span and that the country’s most salacious serial murder trial, that of an abortion doctor to boot, should only begrudgingly and weakly be covered after extreme pressure, I wonder if maybe there’s not room for slight improvement here.

Zing.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this Matt Gemmell article on skeuomorphic design. For example:

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments — or presentations — of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.

The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical. The publishing industry is choking itself to death with that assumption, despite readily available examples of innovative, digitally-native approaches.

Also this:

Nobody is arguing that a notepaper icon might be easier to locate when the user wants to write down some text, or that a telephone handset is much less intimidating than an audio waveform or some other abstract symbol. That’s reasonable, and fair enough up to a point.

But the issue is that, inevitably, we don’t practise restraint. It’s difficult to do so with an approach that celebrates excess, inspirising designers to actually disdain others’ work for lack of realistic shadow-casting, texture effects, or other such monumentally point-missing trivia.

The reality is that skeuomorphism enshrines and validates a failure of vision, and even worse, a failure to capitalise on the medium.

A fascinating piece by Vijith Assar about an aspect of Web history that most people hate:

Firefox intentionally removing support for the <blink> element draws a hard line demarcating the end of a wildly popular primitive Web animation which preceded today’s streaming videos and humorous GIFs. The change may be bittersweet for a certain weird variety of Internet nostalgist, but in most other senses it’s probably for the best: it’s a fantastically annoying bit of code and shouldn’t exist at all.

Even though no sensible designer has used the <blink> element in years, its complete disappearance is still disconcerting. Sites like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine store old versions of sites for historical purposes, in some cases dating back as far as the mid-nineties, but soon enough it may be impossible to view the sites as they actually appeared at the time. Geocities was finally shut down in 2009, but since it was such an important part of the early Web, the contents of many of those sites are still available via a massive six-hundred-and-forty-gigabyte archive posted on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

As a developer, I’m certainly not sad to see the <blink> tag’s support finally disappearing, but Assar raises an interesting question: is it wise to lose a piece of Web history — even one so lamentable — so easily? Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and whatnot. Via MG Siegler.

This is literally the best news I’ve heard all day. And considering the various revelations in the fifth season’s finale, I’d say there’s plenty of comedy gold in store for viewers.