Nikhil Murthy
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murthynikhil.bsky.social
Nikhil Murthy
@murthynikhil.bsky.social
140 followers 240 following 320 posts
Experimental game designer currently working on Hoop Dungeon. Previous games: Syphilisation, The Quiet Sleep
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murthynikhil.bsky.social
Weakness Behind Cruelty at MNAC, Barcelona
Cartoon of Hitler behind Goring with the legend Weakness Behind Cruelty
October 14, 2025 at 1:07 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Techno Banter is completely correct that people who like Joy Division shouldn't be allowed in the club (I am the person who likes Joy Division)
Man wearing an Unknown Pleasures T-shirt being denied entry into a club.
September 27, 2025 at 2:43 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
I finally started the excellent Gameworld Interfaces and I quite like it but this is gaming exceptionalism.
When the game addresses the player directly through verbal responses or symbols integrated into the world, this approach is pragmatic, not avant-garde. It is not a curiosity but a convention for this medium. As participatory media that must communicate gameplay-relevant information to the player, digital games do not have an imaginary fourth wall that can be broken. For this reason, the presence of system information must be considered a medium-specific and necessary functional and aesthetic practice.
July 29, 2025 at 8:59 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Jahangir had a dodo in his menagerie.
Painting of various birds in Jahangir's menagerie, including a dodo.
July 19, 2025 at 7:26 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
This is how you open a book
Preface This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiog-raphy. It poses the question What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? To answer involves ideas as well as facts. The autobiographical framework shows the ideas more or less in the sequence that they developed in relation to the events, the facts and the personalities which prompted them. If the ideas originated in the West Indies it was only in England and in English life and history that I was able to track them down and test them. To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew. C.L.R. JAMES London
June 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
This bit from the Power Broker illustrates a central failing of centralizing decision making in a single person; you get more imaginative work when you have more minds on a problem.
He was already, with his use of his limousine as an office and conference room, making use of every available minute; there were no more minutes to be found unless he drove himself beyond the limit of his physical and mental and emotional strength - and the "almost nervous breakdown" of December 1934 had shown how close he was crowding that limit. It was lack of time more than any other single reason that accounted for an astonishing fact about many New York park projects: they were banal.
June 4, 2025 at 9:56 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Chinua Achebe on Jospeh Conrad.
As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.
March 31, 2025 at 9:26 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
I really enjoyed this one. At once a travelogue, a history lesson and an epic quest in search of a monument of hubris and bureaucracy, I highly recommend it.
The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham
March 23, 2025 at 10:18 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Salt taxes in 17th Century France
An unusual feature of the French tax was that people had to buy a prescribed minimum weekly amount of salt. Failure to do this was an offence. This system of enforcement made collection of the tax considerably easier. The actual collection a the gabelle was usually farmed out to the highest bidder. The owners of the rights would then make every effort to maximise their profits. No allowance was made for calamities, sch as crop failure. To support the system, the state installed is own inspectors, who were backed up by detachments of the military. Heavy fines were imposed on those who smuggled or otherwise tried to evade the tax. Those who did not, or could not, pay were whipped and imprisoned. In 1680 the penalties were increased. 'Simple contraband' was punished br being sent to the galleys, and 'armed concraband' by death. It is believed that one-third of all French galley slaves had been convicted of salt offences.
March 23, 2025 at 7:43 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
It’s tough when you’re trying to construct a 2,300 mile hedge across India and the Assistant Revenue Surveyor in the Bah Pinahat Tahsil of the Agra division shows up.
White ants will attack large and vigorous looking tres, causing them to dry up and decay; the hot winds often blast a number of them, making an unsightly gap where none existed a short time before; parasital creepers, if not watched, will envelope and blight a length of the hedge, leaving us no remedy but complete eradication of the bank. trees attached ere we can destroy the pests; locusts will, as in 1872-73, settle in the hedge, and, if they do no worse, check its growth; and finally, we have the natural decay of the trees to encounter, keeping us continually planting and transplanting without cessation or inter-mission. In 1872-73 we had one more scourge in the shape of an Assistant Revenue Surveyor in the Bah Pinahat Tahsil of the Agra division, who, before I could communicate with his superior, had cut gaps in the Bah and Tathiabad beats in four places at his will and plea-sure, destroying wantonly what it has cost us, of all grades, years of labour to rear and bring to perfection.
March 20, 2025 at 9:19 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
I’ve never seen a ceramic caricature before. This is from the Bordalo Pinheiro museum in Lisbon.
Ceramic depicting a very inflated Viscount da Faria
March 19, 2025 at 5:28 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
For Syphilisation #screenshotsaturday here's Ambedkar talking about the conflict between Gandhi as a Mahatma and Gandhi as a politician and how that kept him from fully opposing caste.
February 24, 2024 at 10:48 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
A Syphilisation fact about the power of Gandhi. #screenshotsaturday
February 17, 2024 at 12:56 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Today in literary criticism in Syphilisation.
December 29, 2023 at 2:02 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Here's a Syphilisation fact on how even conservatives Britishers in India disagreed as much with Churchill as Gandhi.
December 25, 2023 at 10:21 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Today's Syphilisation fact is a small one but one that's easily overlooked - the reactions in Pakistan to the assassination of Gandhi.
December 23, 2023 at 10:14 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Today's quote is from Naipaul, who was surprisingly enamored with Gandhi, highlighting the parallel with the Buddha. This comparison was sometimes made early in Gandhi's career to dismiss him as a spiritualist and not a politician, here used in practically the opposite way.
December 11, 2023 at 11:38 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Here's a quick point by Sonja Schlesin, who worked with Gandhi in South Africa, feeling misrepresented by his autobiography.
November 22, 2023 at 4:59 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
This is a quote from Sartre on how colonizers must treat humanity as an enemy force.
November 18, 2023 at 12:36 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Here is Gandhi refusing to condemn Palestinian violence in 1938 and calling for nonviolence from the colonists there.
November 16, 2023 at 9:54 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
My copy of Arroyo's version of Ulysses finally came!
November 2, 2023 at 8:14 AM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Screenshots:
October 29, 2023 at 5:43 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Nobody Knows For Certain had me pulling out my copy of When Daddy Was A Little Boy.
A physical copy of the book When Daddy Was A Little Boy by Alexander Raskin
October 29, 2023 at 5:43 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
For a quick Syphilisation fact, this is Sartre on how the colonies in Algeria cost more than they brought in.
the repression that we exert for [the colonists'] benefit makes them each day more detestable; to the same degree that they protect them, our troops increase the danger they are in, making the presence of the army all the more indispensible. This year, the war will cost, if we continue with it, more than 300 billion francs, which equals the total Algerian revenue. We are reaching the point where the system destroys itself. The colonies are costing more than they bring in.
October 4, 2023 at 2:02 PM
murthynikhil.bsky.social
Today's Syphilisation fact is from Edward Said on Kim. It both showcases Kipling's ability to coin phrases and the damage that did.
September 20, 2023 at 6:15 PM