Quotes

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

– Dead Poet Society

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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

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What AI cannot do is ‘be prepared to die.’ You have to suffer, suffer, suffer, and think it through. Then, when you think ‘This is really dying,’ there comes a point where you say, ‘This is what I wanted. That is what it means to have a soul.’ I want to please all the readers with a picture that has that soul in it. For that reason, I put my life on the line, abandoning my own greed and killing myself. No matter how painful it is, I will do it. That’s all I can do.

– Tetsuo Hara

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Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc of a film or films you love… you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.

– Guillermo del Toro, on content streaming services.