flâneur

Annie Oh

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 53

  • In a similar vein, French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin describes a process he calls “topographical inversion,” in which further and further inward exploration of the unconscious through depth psychology paradoxically leads one to some exterior symbolic world.1
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Minecraft is our collective Red Book.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • The End is where the hero archetype is most saliently played out, where the player defeats the archetypal monster to be confronted in the heart of the underworld.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Artificial light becomes a signal of psychological safety.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • accretion fantasies are about “the pleasurable process of correcting a weak or vulnerable body by accruing objects from the world of gameplay.”9
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • In Minecraft, the ore a player mines underground has to be brought back to the surface to be put to use, just as knowledge and insight from the unconscious has to be integrated in conscious life, all the while getting through the trials and tribulations of monsters, lava, and potential cave-ins.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • It’s an apt metaphor for the idea that every individual’s psychic landscape is unique, yet subject to the same underlying processes and structures.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Even something as mechanical as procedural terrain generation gains importance when one frames it as a cosmological genesis.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • A world entails a cosmology (how and why the world is): in the beginning was the random seed, from which the universe was born of predetermined functions like Brownian motion and Perlin noise.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious).
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious).
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious).
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious).
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious)
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Should I, Jon Medders, let myself be more like C.G. Jung? See, Jung's narrative demonstrates a way to live one's life that I have often suspected might work well for me: minimize one's tendencies toward rational thought and maximize one's reliance on rationality's opposite (intuition, hunches, coincidences, God, the unconcious).
    Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung | Goodreads
  • Media offers us a magic circle, a space outside of space, and a time outside of time.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word.8
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • For generations of people who grew up with childhoods entangled in Minecraft worlds, how did that affect their relationship with nature? Their relationship with media? And how do nature and media relate to each other?
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • It was developed by Friedrich Fröbel, a German pedagogue who also invented the concept of kindergarten.The main idea behind Fröbelgaben is that children would be presented with progressively more complex sets of blocks as they get older. Fröbel claimed that his wooden blocks would illustrate the “spiritual connectedness of all things.”
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Simulations of nature are ways of imagining alternate relations with nature.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Player and game both exert will and influence over the landscape. Some game mechanics even suggest the value of stewardship.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • we provide no ritual space at all in our lives, or we stay in them too long.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • The Minecraft world becomes a preserved and revisitable record of time spent together with someone. This is why “losing one’s world” is a huge point of grief.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • On another level, Minecraft transforms the space between players, creating an environment in which friends can have deeper conversations, like the atmosphere of sitting around a campfire at night, or on a long train ride (another liminal space).
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • However, the boundary between the ego and the unconscious diffuses in a space that allows for free enactment of creation and destruction — a server of one’s own, as Virgina Woolf might have called it if she was a gamer.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • The psychologist Carl Rogers reports a “trance-like feeling” that client and therapist emerge from at the end of a therapeutic session, “as if from a deep well or tunnel.” Psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes it as “a temporal-spatial frame [that] marks off [a] special kind of reality.”
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • In a randomly generated landscape that is essentially homogeneous from a zoomed out view — a place with no "placeness” — it is up to the player to construct the “where,” to build and recognize landmarks that become imbued with meaning through exploration of the world.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Beyond interactivity, what a video game promises is not just rendered image and sound, not just narrative, not even just the joy of play, but inhabitation of an imaginal realm that is both deeply interior and collectively shared.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Not “in the mind's eye,” but in an actual sensory way, like what happens during dreams and hypnagogic states.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • I’d like to posit Minecraft as a “no-where:” a virtual place that one can’t actually physically enter, yet exists nonetheless.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • When you venture deep within yourself, you encounter the terrain of the collective unconscious, which permeates the world, the anima mundi or “world-soul,” which makes itself accessible to all of us. This is what Corbin means by “topographical inversion:” at some point when we delve so deep in our interiority, we find ourselves in some sort of outside place.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • allowed for a momentary yet reproducible experience of transcendence.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • but were thought to possess an interiority that afforded space for the human spirit to roam.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Minecraft is a vocabulary and grammar that people use to create things both within and without the actual software.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • In a similar vein, French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin describes a process he calls “topographical inversion,” in which further and further inward exploration of the unconscious through depth psychology paradoxically leads one to some exterior symbolic world.1
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin describes a process he calls “topographical inversion,” in which further and further inward exploration of the unconscious through depth psychology paradoxically leads one to some exterior symbolic world.1
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • This is Mattia world. This is Mattia Polibio world. And we’re just living in it. All your friends, your family, your TikTok trends you started, toilet bowl licking and whatnot […] it wasn’t an accident. Do you understand the message we’re trying to tell you?
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • As author Robin Sloan puts it, Minecraft is “a generative, networked system laced throughout with secrets.”2 To gain fluency, one has to rely on trial and error, assumptions carried from other video games, and information from wikis, forums, YouTube, and other platforms. There is no tutorial.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • The “metagaming” of interacting with the online community is essentially built into the experience of Minecraft, because the game itself does nothing to orient players on how they should interact with the software.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Minecraft holds a certain tension between its systematic procedural side, and its emotional creative side.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Game designer Frank Lantz calls video games “operas made out of bridges,” combining the technical complexity of engineering bridges with the artistic complexity of composing operas.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Media researchers Joel Schneier and Nicholas Taylor make a distinction between two popular behavioral patterns within Minecraft: time-biased “monumentary” play — which entails building long-lasting structures, grounding oneself to specific landmarks, and returning to the same Minecraft world; and space-biased “momentary” play, which is characterized by nomadic exploration, survivalist fantasies, and ephemeral worlds that are routinely deleted and replaced.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • Minecraft, and other virtual worlds like it, are arguably even more ripe for the numinous because they can be inhabited more readily, offering a landscape in which archetypes can be enacted and embodied.
    The End is Not the End | Are.na Editorial
  • In his youth, he vacationed differently. Everywhere he went was a place he could live, a potential future life. He could live here, he’d tell himself. Or he could meet a woman there, and start a family there, and become a citizen of that place. Mexico, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Western Indiana, etc. Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?
    YOUTH - by Jared Young - Tolstoyan
  • I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.”
    YOUTH - by Jared Young - Tolstoyan
  • (This will be a recurring theme in this piece: Preserving digital data also requires preserving the means to access that data, just as preserving a book requires preserving the language in which it is written.)
    Century-Scale Storage
  • People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around. Alan Kay (1972) in 1972 Rolling Stone article
    Alan Kay
  • Over the course of 56 softly spoken minutes,
    A Stirring Vision for Human Progress Beyond the Touchscreen | WIRED
  • Well, nostalgia aside, it remains a fun and rewarding challenge to create vibrant artwork within such tight constraints. In the same way we admire how a few brushstrokes from a trained hand can represent a form and evoke emotion, so do we admire how a few pixels can combine do to the same.
    PIXEL ART TUTORIAL: BASICS
  • The smaller a sprite gets, the less your sprite looks like what it's supposed to represent and the more responsibility each individual pixel has.
    PIXEL ART TUTORIAL: BASICS