Fincher on Taking Responsibility

“What you learn from that first [film] - and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ - is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say, ‘Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,’ and you have to agree with them, you know?”

...and five more thoughts on filmmaking from David Fincher.

Valve's New Employee Handbook

You'll want to read this.

I have so much love for  Valve, I don't know where to put it all anymore. Aside from consistently putting out games that are genuinely innovative and fantastic, to see that they're actually run like this just makes me want to give them a huge hug.

I know a certain game company that I may or may not have worked at, which could do with a quick perusing of this book, and perhaps a few minutes contemplation on whether their practices might need some revisiting. 

The Definitive Mix

At the time, not knowing what the future would hold in terms of widespread adoption of multi-channel sound not only in movie theatres but in homes as well, some members of the production felt the mono mix represented the definitive soundtrack of the movie (not in terms of a sonic experience but, rather, in terms of audio content), and felt that the stereo version was a novelty that select audiences would be treated to only during a brief theatrical run. "George put a lot of effort in that mono mix," Burtt remembers, "and he even said several times, 'Well, this is the real mix. This is the definitive mix of the film.' He paid more attention to it because he felt it was more important archivally."

Unavailable today.

Insatiable Linguists

It’s a noteworthy coincidence that Thomsen, in his opening paragraph, talks about Dark Souls distracting its players from potentially spending time learning a foreign language. In practice, Dark Souls does nothing but tutor players in foreign language. Because games vary in their mechanical rules, each one offers a slightly different ‘dialect’ to master. Some languages are quite different. The grammar of Drop7 is as different to the grammar of Assassin’s Creed as Mandarin is to German. To stretch the analogy a bit further, the gameplay language of Gears Of War and Uncharted would be more akin to the nuances separating Spanish and Portuguese. To adore videogames is to be an insatiable linguist.

Thompson on Nixon

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.