An excellent compendium of Krugman’s NYT columns from 1998 through 2002 (and a couple from 2003). I appreciate his sensible economic viewpoints, and his self-appointed mission to wade through the bullshit spouted by the Bush administration has been equally informative.

As a game developer, I am bound to be a bit more critical than average, but I couldn’t help but feel that Koster came up a bit short. He threw in a bit of psychology here, a few numbers there, and an anecdote or two, but the whole failed to gel into anything coherent. I don’t purport to have a textbook length treatise in my own head waiting to be put to paper, and I appreciate that the game development community must take many steps on the road to legitimacy, but neither can I deny having hoped for more.

An interesting work in spite of the author’s lack of pizazz. Having thoroughly failed to achieve a state of flow while reading the author’s previous work, Flow, I was reluctant to pick up another of his volumes. However, the promise of lengthy quotes from the 100-plus creative interviewees gave me hope that Csikszentmihalyi’s dry prose would be frequently interrupted by amusing anecdotes, and indeed it was. That said, neither he nor they had anything terribly surprising to say.

Truly a “noodle western”. At first I thought the Zucker brothers had starting making movies in Japanese, but eventually the film settled down into a slightly less gimmicky comic-style and really hit its stride. By the end I was thoroughly unable to wipe the grin off my face.

Good clean wackiness. One might not appreciate a well-paced drama about a man whose otherwise mundane life is falling apart and embarks on a wacky adventure to try to find some meaning therein, but were one to find out that it involves a woman who periodically fills up with water and has to make wild passionate love to “release the water”, then one might be inclined to start whistling a different tune.

I’ve often toyed with the notion that life is considered too precious in Western culture, in spite of my appreciation of being alive. However, whether or not we are cutting off our nose to spite our face, my unorthodox views on life and death haven’t helped me to understand the peculiar Japanese perspective on suicide. This film presents that perspective compassionately and elegantly, but I still can’t claim to fully understand why one would do it. My best guess is that it is an aesthetic appreciation that supersedes the will to live. That and a tremendous lack of optimism, which I suppose is my real sticking point.