Photography, Flickr, and Me
As regular readers may have noticed, I have an interest in photography. I’ve started a photography section on this website, where you can view some of the photographs I have taken. Right now I’ve added galleries for Objects, Places, and People, as well as a photo project I’m slowly working on called Street Portraits. Over the last year I’ve gone… read more
Sam Waterston in pumpkin, on my stoop
We take our jack-o-lanterns very seriously at my house. It’s a challenge of skill, wit, and patience. One year, for example, I had to make a Harry Potter Dark Mark. This year, Abbey got the idea for a Jack McCoy-o-Lantern. You know, featuring Sam Waterston. From Law & Order. Here he is, glowing of gourd just outside my front door.… read more
My plenary address at the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo
The following is the plenary address I gave today at the first SIEGE conference here in Atlanta on October 6, 2007. The title of the session was â??Games: Can They Be Important?â? My fellow plenary speakers were Ernest Adams and Daniel Greenberg. Today it is possible to work though an entire undergraduate and graduate education in videogames. Whether thatâ??s… read more
Built-in DVD players forbid screen captures with software constraint
Recently, I had the need to capture a still from a DVD a Persuasive Games client had sent over as guidelines for some game assets. I didn’t want to rip the whole DVD, so I went to use the built-in screen capture facility in Apple OS X: the old standby Command-Shift-3. I was surprised to see the following result. The… read more
Reflections on making books that work more like software
What I have in mind is not much different from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a configurative sonnet of 1014 possible configurations. Queneau’s composition is a bit too configurative for my purposes, but the principle is instructive. What if we could take core principles of an argument like the one I make in Unit Operations and offer different… read more