A wild find at a comic book store yesterday: The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, a doorstop volume, devoted mostly to complete reproductions of early versions of the game, from typewritten drafts to published booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a presentation of real archival material. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.
It occurred to me, deep into a really wonderful experience, of reading and thinking and wondering and feeling, that if Wizards of the Coast had published exactly the same material online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the website, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the digital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.
[…]
[W]e can see plainly the value of the book as information technology: a mechanism for accessing a bundle of material, for spending time with it, for investigating and considering it. Still unmatched!
There are books I like to own as a physical, printed copy. And there are books where I don’t bother, books that I prefer to read on my trusty eleven-year-old old Kindle.
Like Sloan’s copy of “The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons”, the books I buy in a shop are those that are highly visual, containing many photographs, maps, and graphics. The books you come back to, in an idle moment, to flip through its pages, go back and forth in a non-linear way. Whereas a novel? That I get digital. It’s likely I’ll only read it once and never touch it again.
— The weather is miserable, it’s the middle of winder, it’s cold and wet. The light is bleak, although the movie is shot in colour, it feels like a black and white movie. There’s snow. These are the conditions where just want to get on with things and go back home. And so does this movie. It gets on with it, no fluff. The story unfolds quickly and straightforwardly, there are no distracting love interest, and very little dialog. Every word spoken is important. Not banter. No one speaks during the heist. This is my kind of heist movie. Who needs Ocean’s 11 to thirty-nine, if you’ve got Melville’s Red Circle?
(1970) Director/Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville. Cast: Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonté.
Saturday, 20 September 2025
— Work culture has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Before it was obvious that you’re working for “the man.” In today’s hustle culture, you work for yourself, first and foremost. Your employer’s success is your success. You don’t progress? You’re not seeing the opportunities. Still on a shit salary? You’re not working hard enough. Mandy Brown writes:
The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.
I noticed this in previous jobs. People, who primarily define their role as “entrepreneur of the self” and shoehorn their actions under the disguise of “the mission,” start working against other people or teams. They prioritise outcomes that prove advantageous to themselves. And management doesn’t figure it out because they play the same game. And we end up with two groups. One that gets ahead, and another that ships actual work but slowly burns out.
— Lessons from Robert Redford’s impeccable fashion sense. (Side note: I wish Derek Guy would put this kind of content on his blog instead of Bluesky, which I have blocked on my devices along with other social media platforms to stay sane. And the way the thread is presented here, interrupted by irrelevant comments by his followers, just doesn’t make for a good reading experience.
Good Internet is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital biannual magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.
— Those were the days; when bored rich men would develop elaborate ploys to rob a bank, and then fall in love the with insurance investigator hired by the bank to recoup the money. A lot less damage done than today’s Thomas Crown, who would probably force his way into politics hoping to replace government with an AI.
(1968) Director: Norman Jewison. Screenplay: Alan Trustman. Cast: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston.
— I don’t have much to say about Bullitt. Not because this was a bad movie. I spent 113 minutes being bedazzled by Steve McQueen’s impeccable style, which is why I need to keep this short. I’m out shopping for a turtleneck jumper and a brown blazer.
(1968) Director: Peter Yates. Screenplay: Alan R. Trustman, Harry Kleiner. Cast: Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset.
Wednesday, 03 September 2025
— Another photography post: Stephen Shore’s Early Work includes photography documenting everyday life in the 1960s New York :
Early Work collects for the first time the entirely unseen photographs created during Shore’s early teenage years between 1960 and 1965, a period of rich experimentation that precedes his time working with Andy Warhol at The Factory.
