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Cutest. Car. Ever.
I blogged earlier today about my Wired News column about why there isn’t yet a Lester Bangs — a well-known, genre-defining critic — for video games. You can read the column here and here, but one of the points I made was that video games have been the first new form of entertainment to grow up in age of blogging — where amateur writers outstrip the pros. Sure, there’s no Lester Bangs for video games in Rolling Stone, nor a comparable Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. But there are thousands of smart, thoughtful bloggers and forum members that every day post better writing than the stuff you’ll read in the mainstream press.
In particular, I namechecked 1UP, the excellent video-game community site. Today I went to the 1UP forums, pumped in “Lester Bangs” to see what people were saying, and found that a guy named Mark Freid had posted this exchange from a 1982 with Lester Bangs himself:
Interviewer: Do you think there’s a danger of rock ‘n’ roll becoming extinct?
Bangs: Yeah, sure. Definitely.
Interviewer: What would there be to take its place?
Bangs: Video games. A lot of things we don’t like to think about.
It’s both prophetic and inadvertantly meta. Perfect.
By the way, if you go to the discussion thread where that quote came from, read through the entire thing. You’ll see what I mean about why the online world is eating the pros for lunch in video-game criticism. The posters are smart, erudite, casual, passionate — everything you’d want in video-game writing.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
New technique renders objects at sea “invisible” to waves of water
Poll: Young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use mobile phones
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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