Writing

This is the post in which I point to the latest installment in the almost-infamous 2010 Derrida Debates without commenting on them: Derrida’s supposed textualism, by Adam Kotso at An und für sich Realism is de rigueur, by Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects What, you didn’t believe me?

What is Cow Clicker? Is it a satire? Yes, but it’s more complicated than that: it’s also a real game that people can (and as it would seem, many thousands do) play “in earnest.” That’s caused a number of people to ask if it ought to be taken seriously as satire. We tend to throw around words like “satire” and… read more

Mark Nelson wrote up an interesting bit on design as the third discipline, in which he suggests that design is a kind of third-term offset against the old science/humanities split. Mark notes that Whitehead is a precursor to such thinking, albeit in his educational writings rather than his metaphysics: There are three main roads along which we can proceed with… read more

The Old Fashioned is one of a few common cocktails for me, both when I’m at home and when I’m out. However, when ordering one at a bar, the likelihood of something going mildly to terribly wrong is disturbingly high. That in mind, I present the Top 10 Ways Bartenders Screw Up My Old Fashioneds, followed by instructions for how… read more

If you follow the speculative realism blogs you know this already, but many readers here who don’t might be interested in this anyway: the first issue of the new journal Speculations has been released. The mission: “a journal of speculative realism that hopes to provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.” Paul Ennis is the… read more

Tim Morton has just announced his “coming out” as an object-oriented ontologist. For those of you haven’t been following Morton, he’s the author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature, and his views on an interconnected “mesh” of life forms is one you should know about. There is something both wonderful and horrifying about having to “come out” as… read more

Cow Clicker is now officially a real Facebook game. How do I know? Because it’s been copied! Christian Primozich has created Fish Feeder, which takes Cow Clicker’s “innovative” cow clicking mechanics and applies them to the equally common social game genre of fish fondling. You can play it here. It’s… well, it’s Cow Clicker, but with fish. What did you… read more

Harman points to Figure-Ground Communication’s interview with Eric McLuhan. It includes a question from Harman about Laws of Media, namely “why did they they the tetrad to human artifacts?” Of course, this is also the question Levi and I will pose in our planned book on McLuhan. McLuhan doesn’t really answer the question, from the very beginning seeming not to… read more

Ed Fries, who used to run game publishing for Xbox, has created a demake of Halo for the Atari 2600. I’d talked to Ed about the project when I was exhibiting A Slow Year at the IGF this year, and he’d been kind enough to show me some late stage builds of the game. The result is excellent, both as… read more

Television scholar Jason Mittell doesn’t like the television show Mad Men, and he’s written an article about why. It wasn’t news to me; indeed, I’m one of the interlocutors he mentions having argued with about the show on Twitter and elsewhere. I knew Jason was writing this piece and I’ve been eager to read it. Now that I have done,… read more