How Disney and Zazzle conspire against me (and you)
I’ve reported twice on my experience selling things on Zazzle, the custom on-demand online print service for apparel and paper goods. First, just over a year ago, I mentioned the t-shirt designs I had made to riff on the Disney World monorail announcer notice, “Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas.” Second, a few months ago, I reported that Zazzle… read more
Making books appealing
Harman offers his thoughts on the virtues of short books, with a mention of the conversation he and I had in Cairo about the constraints of the Atari and how they relate metaphorically to book authoring. The flavor of the genial teasing seems to be “haha, getting lazy there, aren’t you?” But in fact, it is harder work to compress… read more
Generate your own Latour Litanies
In my book Alien Phenomenology, I coined the term “Latour Litany” for the lists of things in writing—whether in Bruno Latour’s or anyone else’s. The philosopher Graham Harman has also adopted this term, and in general it’s enjoyed some success as an appelation for “bestiaries of things,” as I’ve called them. Alien Phenomenology is a book about “pragmatic” speculative realism,… read more
Paper written with Nick Montfort for Digital Arts and Cultures 2009
In this paper, we describe and respond to six common misconceptions about platform studies, an approach to the study of computational creativity. â??Platform studiesâ? is a new focus for the study of digital media, a set of approaches which investigate the underlying computer systems that support creative work. In 2009, the first platform-focused book about creative digital media was published:… read more
A definition for ordinary folk
Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She’s doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it’s become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general… read more
My Contribution to the Speculative Heresy/The Inhumanities Cross-Blog Event
This week and next, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities are running a series on speculative realism and ethics, responses addressing the following question: â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the… read more
A note from my critics
I have many critics. Critics are helpful, wonderful creatures who produce as much pleasure as ire, partly because they provide amusement as often as commentary. Normally I don’t respond to the more vocally invective ones, but I’m making an exception for “videogames bitch-site” Remedial Waste. They offer the Remedial Lexicon, a list of “unsound videogame terminology.” It’s mostly vituperation sans… read more
New in-browser emulators for classic Atari games
Atari has been through a lot as a company. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded it in 1972. They sold it to Warner Communication in 1976. Ray Kassar ran it through the crash of 1983, after which he was forced out due to accusations of insider trading. Warner split Atari into Atari Games (arcade) and Atari Consumer Electronics (hardware). The… read more
Blog Series on Ethics and Ontology
A couple months back, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities announced a cross-blog event for which they invited short but substantive pieces to answer the following question: â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other… read more
Observations from SLSA
This weekend the SLSA Conference is taking place in Atlanta, and a few things of interest to those of you who follow speculative realism are going on. For starters, I presented my keynote yesterday, on alien phenomenology. In general, the audience seemed still unfamiliar with SR and OOO, but also very curious. I took a number of useful new thoughts… read more