Writing

Here’s a lovely specimen I hadn’t seen before: a board game released in 1970 about Nixon’s then-forthcoming (and ill-fated) reelection. The game seems to resemble Monopoly, although its unclear how the game works from just the board. According to the game’s Board Game Geek entry, the game’s events (driven by Event and Media cards) “are so heavily tilted against Nixon… read more

In a reflection on all the recent hubbub about the sordid state of the humanities and the recently proposed possibility of a cure in the form of the “digital humanities,” Cathy Davidson offers the following lament: When I think of what the humanties offer…it is astonishing to me (and tragic) that we are not central. We are very, very good… read more

Back when the Nintendo Wii first came out, I wrote about a hope for it, specifically for its Virtual Console feature. Here’s what I said: Without exception, the Virtual Console has been touted as a digital distribution channel for new games and “classic” games from vintage consoles. But the Virtual Console suggests an application for serious and independent games that… read more

The Independent Game Festival (IGF) has announced finalists for the 2010 competition. I’m happy to say that my game A Slow Year is among the finalists in the Nuovo category, designed “to honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.” The Nuovo jury has also issued a statement about their… read more

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

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

I read Mark Fisher’s excellent little book Capitalist Realism this week. It’s a short book long on insights, many of which provoked me, some of which I disagreed with, and a few of which I want to share. Here’s the first of the latter kind, from a discussion of the post-disciplinary nature of contemporary higher education. Ask students to read… read more

As we do most years, we opened Christmas crackers—those little cardboard tubes that pop when pulled, revealing small toys, paper crowns, and jokes. I thought I’d share a particularly brilliant joke from one cracker, one that made me think of object-oriented philosophy as much as it did Christmas (even if it mistakes an object for its attributes). Here goes: Why… read more

Thanks to the work of Paul John Ennis, a graduate student at University College, Dublin, there is now a new online, open-access journal for speculative realism: Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Ontology. Here’s a blurb about the project: Speculations is the journal of object oriented ontology. We hope to provide a forum for the exploration of object oriented ontology,… read more