“Considerations of who will or might read the piece are appropriate and sometimes actively useful in planning it, thinking about it, thinking it out, inviting images. But once you start writing, it is fatal to think about anything but the writing. True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; it takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.”

“Surfing is expressive of one’s innermost being. How you surf expresses who you are; what you click is expressive of your identity and fetishes. I think that writers try too hard to express themselves. Just by merely clicking, we are expressing ourselves. The new memoir is our browser history.”

“

I’m a fan Virginia Woolf — I’m a real fan of Mrs. Dalloway more than anything else she’s written. But what, I think, seduces her work is that sense that small things are significant. There’s another great quote [from To the Lighthouse] which sums up one of my theories of design, to the extent that I’m entitled to have any theories, which is: “light and evanescent but held together by bolts of iron.”

[Design] must be, on the surface, like a butterfly’s wing — but underneath it must be clamped together with bolts of iron…

This is what I think is the secret of so much craft — to make it look effortless and evanescent, like a butterfly’s wing, but it needs to have structure, rigidity, purpose.

“As a result, children’s society has less and less to do with the land around them – land which, anyway, they are unlikely to occupy when they become adults in our hypermobile society. Children’s society exists on the internet if at all, with raids in video games and chat rooms replacing geographically colocated monster hunts.”

“Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate — perfectionism — an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success — an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.”

“

But one of the main advantages of making lots of videogames was that I came to realize that I didn’t particularly care a whole lot about making videogames! (I have a totally different talk about that whole process called Fuck Videogames.)

In 2012 I realized that it’s better to create things for me than for some imagined audience. I decided to create things solely because I want them to exist. And I started making things in 1 to 5 hour bursts. And I’m at a place now where I create one or two small things each week and it’s really satisfying.

“

These mods, JadedCat says, are representative of a new trend in modpack making. “Instead of the focus being on a collection of powerhouse mods, the focus is now on creating a new experience by combining mods with selective tweaks and even maps,” she explains. “While there will always be a place for more traditional factory modpacks, themed gamepacks are now more popular and last longer for players. Minecraft has become a game engine.”

Canvox agrees: “Modpackers and server owners are building constructed play experiences using mods as building blocks and making something entirely new with them,” he says. “In my mind, this is the big thing to watch out for.”

“FYNCT is funny because it shows how people in a given demographic turn out all to be so similar even as we might think we’re being original, and that our taste is constructed so completely and calculatedly by infomercial representations in magazines (online and off); which is to say it shows we are being led by the nose by tastemakers who are duping us into buying certain things and liking certain things, but in fact not even duping us, since we seek their guidance and follow their lead willingly.”

“You see this sort of “good waste” everywhere you see creativity. I think the relationship is quite intimate. Creativity involves a lot of false starts, dead-end explorations and so forth. The resource you can waste is precisely the resource that allows you to make this trial and error process fast (not efficient) and frictionless. In fact, your creative medium is defined by the wasteable resource. It is the canvas (literally in painting).”

“Speed is important because ideation is not generally a steady cognitive process. It likes to develop runaway momentum and exhaust itself, often explosively. You then pick through the debris of the explosion and pull out the good bits to develop with more deliberate and measured attention. Anything that dampens the explosion also lowers its fertility.”