When I was writing screenplays I watched a lot of movies. Binges of them. Blackout binges.

When I’m working on interactive titles I tend to play games obsessively and read up on the latest failed attempts at interactive storytelling.

What’s been really enjoyable about turning toward the publishing industry over the past few months is that I’ve re-established a long-lost love affair with the New Books shelf at the local library. In doing so I’ve worked my way through a surprising number of books, and I’d like to pass along* the titles** of the ones that stuck with me.   Read more

As regular readers know, I’m working my way through a very interesting book called The Black Swan, which was recommended to me in the comments. Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s a treatise on the commonsensical idea that it’s not life’s little ups and downs that are the real threat, but rather the bottomless pits that no one anticipates that pose the greater risk.

When I say that the author is smart I’m not condoning the author’s colossal ego, or his tendency to cloak bullying in humor and pranks. But he really is smart: and particularly so in that outside-the-box kind of way that you need to be to make any kind of difference these days. Which is obviously why Random House, a major publisher, decided to publish Taleb’s book, and why the New York Times made the book a bestseller.   Read more

One of the first comments posted on this site when it launched a month ago mentioned a book called The Black Swan. So I went to the library and checked out a copy, and I have to say that it’s an interesting read written by an interesting person who’s not shy about letting you know how interesting he is.

I agree with the basic premise: that there’s too much attention paid to meaningless detail, when the really important stuff is usually not indicated by measurable shifts in meaningless detail. Rather, it’s indicated by a one-off event that pretty much everyone seems not to have anticipated at all. (My own take on the heavy use of the bell curve — which the author rightly despises in so many instances — is that the bell curve is a useful indicator of markets and demographics. Since most of our lives and the meaning in and of our lives revolves around money, the bell curve is a useful device for both measuring how much we have and whose reserves we can most easily target.)   Read more