Get A Slow Year and Racing the Beam when you support this indie film about videogames in 1982 on Kickstarter
A few months ago Brett Neveu sent me a script for a movie he is producing, about a group of teenagers hoping to get an Atari VCS for Christmas 1982. The script is fun and charming, sitting somewhere just between Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There’s now a Kickstarter for the film, Christmas Bytes, meant to cover… read more
The office work of research
Partly responding to my recent post on ideas versus their commercialization among writers and intellectuals, I came across this excellent and tragic paragraph on the state of intellectual work in this post: รข??Meanwhile, academic life is becoming an increasingly ordinary affair, a job in which you hurry from task to task in an attempt to satisfy the demands of your… read more
The facile scourge of paid speaking
Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson’s letter to the 1%, which amounts to “paid speaking gigs.” Here’s the money quote: Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of… read more
A quick image litanizer
You may be familiar with my Latour Litanizer, a simple example of what I call “carpentry” in Alien Phenomenology. It uses Wikipedia’s API to assemble randomized lists of objects of the sort I refer to as “Latour Litanies.” If you’ve read Alien Phenomenology, you may also remember a related example, that of the “image toy” I made to add some… read more
A lesson in fiction and reality
My kids just delivered some hand-made get-well cards. I was instructed to deliver them to Galen, the main character in the Wizard 3000 videogame series, a series of my kids’ invention which is not only fictional but fictionally fictional. Pop culture being what it is, Hollywood has started to make films based on the Wizard 3000 (fictionally speaking, that is).… read more
On sport, games, success, and failure
On her blog, my Georgia Tech colleague Amy Bruckman writes about her dissatisfaction with this year’s Olympics. While she loved the games as a kid, Bruckman wonders if her new feelings of disappointment arise from watching them as an educator rather than as a little girl: “I look at young people and want to see positive outcomes for all our… read more
A dumb, frustrating prediction about OS X and technology reporting
I made this stupid joke on Twitter today: The primary innovation in OSX 10.9 will be the move to canine product names. I was referring to Apple’s longstanding tradition of code-naming their OS X releases after “big cats”: Cheetah (the original OS X), Tiger, Lion, Leopard, etc.. The thing is, they’re running out of big cats. I don’t think cougar… read more
It’s been exactly eight months since I last dined at Bone’s, a time-honored Atlanta steakhouse. Last time, I took my family and my daughter wrote one of her infamous reviews of the place—giving it a very rare positive review. Today the maitre d’ saw that I was there with my family again, recognized us, and asked Flannery if she had… read more
On Terran Lane's "On Leaving Academia"
Over the last day or so, many of my Facebook friends have been posting UNM CS professor Terran Lane’s reflections on leaving academia for a job at Google. It’s worth a read, and raises some very valid points about the troubles with academia—pay, funding, job security, incentives, isolationism, work/life balance and so forth. But I also find the piece fairly… read more
On massiveness, students, and flipped classrooms
The annual Computing Research Association conference is taking place this week at Snowbird in Utah, and one of today’s plenaries is about online eduction and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Reading the description of the session, I noticed two common positions on MOOCs that I think are rhetorically effective yet misleading. The “massive” numbers of “students” Citing enormous enrollment numbers… read more