permadeath links
---Lucas, Coppola, and Kurosawa
---"the decay in the rule of law"--Assange on the national surveillance state
---Grand Theft Auto: RISE
---Full-fledged ubiquity of social media is not panoptic, as it’s sometimes mislabeled. Instead it brings about lateral surveillance or 'participatory surveillance,' the many observing the many. It enacts a sort of “horizontal control,” inducing us to spy on one another to regulate one another’s behavior and generate marketing data. As law professor Eben Moglen declared, 'every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends.'
The ideological enthusiasm for 'participation' disguises the emptying out of privacy, and the inescapable scrutiny and social documentation ushers in 'self-surveillance' — a grimmer way of describing online self-fashioning or identity construction. In using social media, we become fatally aware of how we can sell ourselves and thus intensify self-marketing practices. We put ourselves forward as a brand in order to register in these commercially oriented, quantification-driven systems. As use of these sites become more pervasive and normative, we start to seem to have no choice but to self-brand because it is the only way to take the measure of ourselves." --Rob Horning
---Bradley Manning's Kafkaesque world
---Wyrmwood
---Le Taxidermiste
---"I didn't entertain that thought [of failure]," he said. "If I did, I'd probably own a video store right now, and it'd be out of business right now, and I don't know what the hell I'd be doing. I just figured I couldn't have a fallback plan, 'cause I couldn't allow myself to fall back. All or nothing. There's directing and there's wanting to direct without ever having directed before, and they're two different dudes. And the thing about wanting to be a director, and wanting this to be your artform... Aside from getting a 16mm camera, or Super 8 camera, and making something, which is definitely within your power, and even more within people's power now, to test out these theories. But in the '80s, when I was a young guy, there was no proof of it at all. You could act, and see if there's something there. If you want to write, you can get a piece of paper, and see if there's something there. But if you want to direct, actually direct a feature film, and you've never done anything, it's all theory. So at 3 in the morning, from time to time, you wonder 'Is this a mistake?' You think you might have it, but you don't know. I'm talking about before I literally did anything. This mountain you're trying to climb, before you even know you're a mountain climber." --Quentin Tarantino
---behind the scenes of Pulp Fiction---trailers for A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, Tabu, Girls: Season 2, Pacific Rim, Let Fury Have the Hour, Django Unchained, and The Attacks of 26/11
---"I am a writer who draws." --Saul Steinberg
---New York and its carbon dioxide
---"It comes from punk DIY culture. In order to survive you have to be creative and resourceful. If you’re creative and resourceful, you can make it. It’s not like you have a guitar tech there. If there’s a problem you have to overcome it, you have to deal with it. We dealt with it at Sub Pop every day. Where’s the money going to come from? How are we going to keep the phone running? We survived because we were creative and resourceful. All the bands we worked with, same thing. As a startup if you don’t have that, you’re toast."
---Where Did This Come From?
---The Universal Arts of Graphic Design
---"Post Industrial Journalism"
---10 lessons about Heaven's Gate
---"The real problem is not that there are no guidelines written down—though the administration itself seems now to acknowledge that what it has is insufficient—but that we the people don’t know what they are. The idea that the president can authorize the killing of a human being far from any traditional battlefield without any publically accessible set of constraints, conditions, or requirements is unacceptable in a country committed to the rule of law. In his first and only speech on security and our national ideals, at the National Archives in May 2009, President Obama insisted that adherence to the rule of law is essential in the fight against terror, and to that end, promised to be transparent about his actions `so that [the people] can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.'"
---making the Silent Hill 2 end title sequence
---"I’m optimistic and delighted every time I open up Twitter on my browser, while Facebook is something I only click on once or twice a day and always with a small sense of dread."
---the advantages of permadeath
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