At Boing Boing, Daniel Starkey writes about poverty’s intellectual dead zones and how poverty gave him a future. “I don’t pirate games anymore, and I don’t support pirating games if you can afford to buy them. But when I needed it, piracy gave me hope. When I considered dropping out of high school, giving up on my future, and damning myself to repeat the cycle of poverty, I was able to look back on the sea of literature and countless games I’d downloaded for answers and inspiration. They not only helped me realize that I wasn’t as alone as I thought, but allowed me to develop the fluency necessary to start making informed, critical works of my own.” (via @lexialex)