Writing

I’m behind in keeping up with my corner of the philosophy blogosphere. In part I’ve been distracted by cow clickery, but more so I’ve been spending as much time as possible writing Alien Phenomenology, which I fully intend to complete before the end of August. I’m thus offering two teasers today, in lieu of earnest content. The first is related… read more

I wasn’t entirely prepared for the runaway success of Cow Clicker after it’s release last week Indeed in the near future, I might pose the question of what counts as “success” for such a work. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown of a few of the more lively discussions about the game that might interest some of you: On… read more

A few housekeeping notes this weekend. First, I’ve updated the Speculative Realism Aggregator to include the blogs of Jeff Bell (“Aberrant Monism) and Tim Morton (“The Ecological Thought”). If there are any other blogs that belong in the system that I’m missing, let me know. Second, you may not know it, but you can access a mobile version of this… read more

I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here’s the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games,… read more

Jesper Juul has been organizing videogame theory seminars at NYU. This week, I’m going to be participating in the sixth iteration of said series, “social games on trial.” Aki Järvinen will take the pro-social games position, and I will fill my court-ordered role as naysayer. The official announcement appears below. I should mention that I have a trick up my… read more

Harman links to this lovely map infographic of generic names for soft drinks in the United States (click below for a bigger version). It’s been around for a while but is worth revisiting in light of a few points Graham makes in his post. First, Graham wonders what comprises the green “other” category in these maps, which is far more… read more

After a few days talking about Marxism here and elsewhere, I figured it would be good to spread my wings and pick on libertarians. Here are two specimens. First, from cartoonist Barry Deutsch comes the 24 Types of Libertarians (or click on the cartoon for a legible version at Deutsch’s site). There’s one variety that’s clearly missing, the Palo Alto-style… read more

A lively discussion erupted from my post on philosophy and politics of a few days ago. Among other things, commenters revisited the relationship between ontology and politics, issues OOO proponents in particular have attempted to disentangle. Among the many lengthy comments from David Rylance comes this snippet, which may have finally helped me understand something fundamental about the whole ontology/politics… read more

The topic of World Cup officiating came up in the comments on my recent Gamasutra column. I offered some thoughts there, but given the fact that the quarter final matches will start up today, it seemed worth rescuing those thoughts from the noise of web page comments. Specifically, I’ve been very interested in all the accusation of bad refereeing in… read more

Given that I’m currently completing a project called A Slow Year, and given that it is, somewhat poetically, taking longer than I anticipated to finish, and given that I’m resolved to do it right rather than to do it fast, given all those things I was intrigued to learn of the Slow Media Manifesto from my friend Julian Bleecker. As… read more