From the Italian news and an online reading group
Today yields two humbling approaches to Alien Phenomenology. First, an article by Evan Selinger in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, L’anima delle cose (“the soul of things”). It’s in Italian, but I’m sure you can figure out how to read it somehow. Corriere della Sera is a very old and respected Italian daily, so it’s particularly nice to see… read more
On failures to communicate
There’s a great article by Monroe Anderson at The Root titled ‘Obamacare,’ the Video Game?. Anderson recalls asking Obama strategist David Axelrod “why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term.” Axelrod’s response: “information gridlock.” Essentially, the White House hadn’t been able to communicate effectively with the… read more
Reflections on Twittering Rocks
In 2007, Ian McCarthy and I launched Twittering Rocks, a live performance of the central “Wandering Rocks” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which we executed every Bloomsday (that’s today, June 16) from 2007 through 2011. Last year, due to a change in the Twitter API (the move to OAuth, which requires that all users authorize applications rather than applications passing… read more
A response to Cameron Kunzelman
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly sure what blogging means to me these days. But whether by accident or design, I’ve been avoiding some of the back-and-forth debate that both helps and hinders the work of philosophy online these days. That said, this is one of those back-and-forth response posts, this on answering some of the… read more
On the surprising design features of Johan Sebastian Joust. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
In 1987, game designer Chris Crawford introduced the concept of process intensity, “the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data.” Process, Crawford explains, involves “algorithms, equations, and branches,” while data refers to “tables, images, sounds, and texts.” A process-intensive program “spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes… read more
A new book in software studies
My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more
D. Scott Williamson's "impossible" adaptation
In the fifth chapter of Racing the Beam, Nick and I discuss Howard Scott Warshaw’s popular Atari game Yars’ Revenge. The game is often called Atari’s most successful original game for the Atari 2600, but in fact it was originally meant to be an adaptation of Star Castle, a then-popular vector-graphics game by Cinematronics. But, because of the very different… read more
Jimmy Maher's Platform Study of the Commodore Amiga
I’m very happy to announce the publication of the latest book in the Platform Studies series, Jimmy Maher’s The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. It’s a terrific book about this influential multimedia microcomputer. As someone who never had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s, but who was often surrounded by them, I can vouch for the effectiveness of… read more
Initial reactions to Alien Phenomenology
This is just a quick post to point you to a few early reactions to Alien Phenomenology. First, Levi Bryant has two posts up, From an object’s point of view and A brief note on units and operations. Substantive stuff as usual. Levi draws productive connections to Jakob von Uexküll, for example. Second, Alex Reid discusses the connections between alien… read more
In the New Scientist "Big Ideas" column
Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens? It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing. This essay appeared in the