Boundless pain
Boundless joy
Boundless monotony
Boundless novelty
Firmly planted
Observing everything at once
Each passerby’s situation both familiar and unknowable
Hopes of the future
Dreams crushed
God is in his heaven and all is right in the world
The conditions aligned just right
But tomorrow, or next month, completely unpredictable
Certainly sorrow or depression can not be too far away
Still, the joy of now worth the [...]

What is The Question? You have probably asked it many times before. It takes different forms such as: What is the purpose of life, What is “it” all about, Who am I, or any other existential question.
Many people have questions like these and there are no shortages of people selling answers or cheap solutions.
Some examples [...]

Dancing is a series of videos on wherethehellismatt.com. I found out about this on my friend Dan’s blog. These videos, which have gotten progressively better, are really amazing. If you have time I suggest watching them in this order: Dancing 2005, Dancing 2006, Dancing 2008; if you’re short on time then you can just watch [...]

This past Saturday was perhaps the last time that there would be training at my Zen Master’s house. He’s fixin’ to sell the place and immigrate to France. While I was serving tea, he corrected my form, and I was struck that there would not be many of these opportunities left. After sitting, while we [...]

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives a passionate first hand account of a stroke that affected the left hemisphere of her brain—and the resulting subjective experience—in this recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
This could be, and apparently has been, the spring board for many conversations.

Ian Bogost wrote an article for Gamasutra about “Zen Games”. I disagree with his interpretation of Zen—and thus the article’s thesis—so I wrote the following letter to the editor. The stuff in quotes is in reference to Ian’s article, so you’ll need to read it to understand my critique fully. The image above is from [...]

My friend David Sirlin has released a free web version of his popular book. In it he discusses the virtues of “Playing to Win” in competitive games and the path of continual self improvement. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in competitive gaming or self improvement.
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

There has been a lot of public mourning across America this past week in response to an event at Virginia Tech that has spawned a media frenzy. The amount of attention that this shooting has garnered took me by surprise as day after day the talking heads on commercial television and talk radio could talk [...]

To blog is to flex your ego.
Screaming out, not just to the people in your vicinity, but to the entire potential web browsing populace: “I exist!”
Zen is about breaking free of the meme machine of mistaken narrative and self replicating ideas. Blogs propagate memes.
Can you propogate the anti-meme without creating a meme? I’m inclined to [...]

Will Wright has some interesting things to say about education in a recent interview with Popular Science about Spore:
And a lot of it also is… you know, some of the most effective education is failure-based, where you’re given a system and you can manipulate it and explore different failure states and success states, and all [...]