Oh how these software producers love their page turn animations. They might not make a big deal about their font selection, their crappy justification algorithms or even the number of books you can buy through their store, but they will always make a great big bloody feature of their sodding page turns, even the app I pointed to above. Even if an app doesn’t have these damn things, you get the impression they’re working on adding them. In a book, an actual dead-tree book, you don’t notice turning the page because it’s just part of what a book is. That’s how you get to the next bit of text. The whole idea of pages bound like that is an artifact of a particular printing technology — it’s the nature of the delivery medium, not the message. So when we have a digital book, we’re using technology that has its own set of conventions, its own restrictions and its own freedoms, and every bit of digital technology has some means of moving through any arbitrary content: a keyboard has cursor keys, page up and page down keys, a mouse has a scroll wheel, laptops have trackpads with scroll areas, and smartphones have touchscreens, joysticks or D-pads. But no. Those aren’t good enough. They’re not booky enough. You’re going to be reading Ullysses on this thing, War and Peace, The Illiad with this thing for crying out loud! You can’t sully things like that with a scroll wheel! You’re supposed to be imagining reverentially turning the thick, musty, ancient pages in some great national library somewhere, worshipping at the altar of Knowledge! Never mind the story! Never mind leaving you free to just read! No, every 250 words, perform the gesture, watch the animation!

As for me, I didn’t like it [Howl’s Moving Castle] so much for the first time. But I understood well what Miyazaki wanted to tell. Now I like this movie very much.I know that reason why I didn’t like it so much. When I saw it first time, I was young. Now I’m old enough to feel Miyazaki’s message directly into my heart. I’ll repeat it, this movie was made for older people, Miyazaki said.If you don’t understand this movie now, pleaes see it again when you think you might have grown old.

The second part of the message that Cobb and Saito exchange in their final scene in Limbo — “Take a leap of faith. Come back, so we can be young men together again” — is in direct contrast to Mal’s desire to pull him further into his dream so that they can grow old together. Cobb defeats his regret by finally telling Mal that the two of them did grow old together in their shared dream. In other words, he fulfilled his wedding promise to her. This is, perhaps, the thing that Cobb once knew but had forgotten; it’s also a positive thought that trumps the negative feeling that he betrayed his wife.

[about inception] To me, it’s a far more elegant story if it’s a vast job that Leo has to pull off. The threat is real, the growth is real, the adversary is real. The weakness of “It’s all a dream” — why we hate that, why we feel cheated when narratively anything is revealed to be all a dream — is that you’ve just asked me to spend so much time and emotional capital investing in the stakes of this, and you’ve now swept it away with the most anti-narrative structuralism that doesn’t have anything to substitute in its place. It’s laughing at you for even taking it seriously. You don’t want to feel like a victim of the narrative,

Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.

I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.