A fantastic book about the Spartans and their tide turning showdown against the Persians at Thermopylae. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy, but the details of life as a Spartan were fascinating. I also recently found out this story is being turned into a film called 300, based on the Frank Miller series of the same title.

I’m a fan of Linklater’s dialogue heavy films and they don’t get much more about dialogue than this one.

I finally put up screenshots on the Bang! Howdy website, ain’t they purdy:

Daniel and I also gave a talk about Bang and Yohoho at the GDC. I’ll get the slides up for that shortly.

A coming of age story in which bunch of Japanese school kids beat the crap out of each other, kill one another and draw graffiti on every available surface. Yet even among the death and mayhem, there are touching moments. And there’s a midget gardner. How can you go wrong with that?

My definition of great art is one that evinces a deep understanding of human nature on the part of the artist. Pinker skips the intermediating work of art and talks about human nature directly, but does so without abandoning the wit, style and clarity that one would expect were the same information coming in the form of an eloquent narrative. His ability to distill mountains of research into a coherent thesis and correlate it with the everyday realities of human experience is nothing short of astounding.