Writing

Food Insofar As They Give You Food

A tiny note on first class air travel

I fly a bajillion miles a year and as such I have access to the first class cabin on almost every flight, which makes me a lucky bastard as much as a privileged one. I thought I’d share, from a plane of course, just one humbling notes on modern first class travel just to assure the purported-rabble that things up… read more

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

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

Royalty Rate Reset

A question for authors...

I’ll admit it, I don’t usually read my book royalty reports. Sometimes I look at the total sales, but the rest is too complex and detailed to bother with. I deposit the checks. But today I received one and noticed something that I’d never really thought about before. A bit of background. Most book contracts are insanely complicated in their… read more

Rocks are Rocks

Response to "Aliens, but definitely not as we know them"

I received a great email response to my recent New Scientist column on alien phenomenology. I thought I’d share a part of it anonymously just because it felt so shareworthy. Rocks are rocks. They are rocks in relation to humans, and they are rocks in relation to birds and they are rocks in relation to anything else that turns up… read more

Star Castle for Atari VCS

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

The Future Was Here

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

My Spam Readers

...might be more interesting than my human ones

Yesterday I participated in a panel on the life and work of Alan Turing, for whom 2012 marks a centennial. As you’d probably expect, the discussion included conversation about artificial intelligence, what counts as “intelligence,” and when AI is “good enough.” The Turing Test, of course, is famous for reframing “thinking machines” as imitating machines. The machines must have been… read more

OOO and New Aesthetics

Three links

There’s been a small flurry of discussion about the New Aesthetic lately, several takes on which have connected it to object-oriented ontology. If you don’t know what “the New Aesthetic” is not to worry, the articles linked here explain it in addition to arguing for (or against) its relationship to OOO. First, Greg Borenstein’s response to Bruce Sterling’s New Aesthetic… read more

The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder

From the New Aesthetic to Alien Aesthetics, at the Atlantic

You know that art has changed when a new aesthetic movement announces itself not with a manifesto, but with a tumblr. Manifestos offer their grievances and demands plainly, all at once, on a single page—not in many hundred entries. “Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber,” wrote Filippo Marinetti in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto. “We want… read more