Writing

This is already a month old, but I’m just seeing it now: the New Yorker ran a set of satirical New York Times videogame reviews, in response to the Seth Schiesel fawn over The Beatles: Rock Band (to which I responded strongly, in case you forgot). My favorites: A princess has been kidnapped. Her name is Zelda, she is beautiful,… read more

Just to assure everyone that the torch will be passed to the younger generation, behold the following. My seven year-old has been working on analogies in her schooling, and she recently took the opportunity to affirm the wonder of the world of objects. She reads: “Happy is to sad as ____ is to ____.” She thinks. Then writes: “Happy is… read more

I read this article about alternatives to paper business cards yesterday. It mostly covers electronic alternatives to business cards, from social networking sites like LinkedIn to iPhone apps like Bump. It made me think of when I first met Jouni Mannonen, a Finnish game entrepreneur. We met at the 2003 Game Developers Conference, in the unrivaled San Jose Fairmont hotel… read more

There’s been a surge of discussion in the past couple days about the relationship between object-oriented ontology and politics. For one part, Levi Bryant responded to Reid Kane’s concerns about what he perceived to be the “absent political dimensions” and “neoliberal alliances” of OOO and Actor-Network Theory. A liveley discussion ensued, and Levi followed up with some thoughts on the… read more

I do a lot of presentations. They come in various forms: class lectures, conference papers, keynote talks, corporate presentations, and business pitches, to name a few. Often I use slides and visuals in these talks, and I do so in various ways. In my class lectures I try to use slides as a way to reinforce the key ideas from the… read more

If you’re the kind of person who is the subject of Michael Bérubé’s scathing critique of cultural studies in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, then you’ve probably read it already. To summarize via citation, Bérubé argued that the impact of cultural studies “has the carbon footprint of a unicorn,” and yet nobody within the field notices or cares. If… read more

Of the many exciting aspects of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, one of them is the movement’s strong presence online, especially through blogs. I realized that I’ve been having a hard time keeping up with all the SR-related blogs, so I created an aggregator that slurps them up, labels them, and puts them all in one convenient place. Since this… read more

I’m not a big fan of fanfic, but I am quite enamored of appropriations of pop culture that shed surprising new light on their source material. For some time, my favorite example of this sort of thing has been Garfield Minus Garfield. By removing the titular cat from each comic strip, Dan Walsh exposed “the existential angst of a certain… read more

Federico Fasce’s games consultancy Urustar makes videogames for use in communication strategies. As a part of their launch, they have created Urustar – The Game, which you can play from their website. I seem to appear, in pixel form, in the game’s opening. I think it’s a good likeness. As you’ll see if you play through, another, more well-known character… read more