Greg Linch's Commonplace Book

Oh, hello there. Welcome, interweb traveler. Here's where I share interesting and inspiring links. I hope you enjoy!

readers should not define reading as the act of divining an author’s intents. Readers are co-creators of a fiction, and should be empowered.

Questions about The Fault in Our Stars (SPOILERS!)

via Brigid Slipka from Snarkmarket Seminar week on Worldbuilding led by Matt Thompson

A master theoretician more often than a masterful poet, Mallarmé pushed boundaries in writing. His most famous poem, “Un Coup de dés” (1897), incontrovertibly enlarged the possibility of the page, freeing words from the puritan stocks of line and stanza, and putting them back into orbit. It is a method that would inspire Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the open-field poetics of Charles Olson and the post-war American avant-garde, and the Concrete Poetry of Brazil in the 1950s, among many others, including, perhaps, hypertext.

The Mathematical Regularities Underlying Both Biological and Social Systems (by santafeinst)

Time and time again, implementing my ideas has forced me to understand them better. A common scenario is that something that sounded reasonable on paper suddenly feels unwieldy when you must implement it.

even given radical differences between games that attempt veracity and those that eschew it entirely for the abstract, their mechanics are surprisingly similar, and similarly different from literature and film: make a world, give it rules, give the player some goals and aims, and then ask the player to progress through that world using a system of challenge and reward.

Don Norman: The three ways that good design makes you happy (by TEDtalksDirector)