““To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.” - Eleanor Roosevelt”

“And still, tired as the tech-sexism narrative has become, you don’t want to stop talking about the problem. Ignorance has never solved anything. But it’s also hard not to think that maybe all of the profiles of boy-wonder founders and outraged blogging about sexist tweets have their own sort of chilling effect, perpetuating a narrative that enables the worst entrenched tendencies of the industry and alienates the very people who could challenge them. Rather than highlighting the appalling nature of Titstare or CodeBabes, perhaps we should be talking about tech success stories — the companies and training programs that have managed to correct the gender imbalance while keeping their innovative, disruptive values intact.”

“But I remind myself, each time: Messiness and imperfection are part of the process of creation. Manifestation and realization—bringing something to creation—requires endless amounts of decision making. There is a cruelty inherent in cutting out all of the ways you won’t move forward, in order to move from the infinite boundlessness of ideas to the limited arena of conception. An idea always seems smaller when it becomes a practical thing. Perfection is an ideal that lives in our minds, a lifting, an aspiration, a drive towards the higher creativity we all have within us. The act of creation, however, is messy, fragile, fraught, and filled with the mistakes of making.”

“Burke’s experience with Scarred and its largely favorable reception helped convince him to continue his mood-driven development process. “Typically, when starting a project there’s an emotion I want to get across. So I start designing the game with that emotion in mind.” That statement loudly echoes similar ones made by the Modern artists, particularly Paul Cézanne, who once proclaimed, “A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.””

“I think it takes about 10 years to make something you care about, so some of what really mattered to you 10 years ago is probably going to creep in somehow.”

“The second problem, quite apart from the stranger stuff, is that my chosen, beloved stream of people offer me so many small incidents of wrongness that it sometimes erodes my energy for doing things. I use Twitter to track goings-on in several professional and personal affinity groups: journalism, open web advocacy, web design, publishing, speculative fiction, feminism, and others. And beyond these, individual people I follow each care about their own wide range of things. And the internet is now sufficiently ubiquitous that in any given field of interest, on any given day, something awful will have happened online.”

“Honestly, I think there is a Minecraft generation, one that is learning that you don’t just have to use computers, that you can make things with these machines, that you can hack it.”