I've been a bit of a mess this week, as I'm finishing up the Newsgames book with my two graduate students and preparing my keynote for SLSA the week after next. Fortunately, interesting things have gone on without me.

As I previously mentioned, on Monday, we hosted a colloquium on "how to think about narrative and interactivity," featuring Espen Aarseth, Fox Harrell, and Janet Murray. I got to be the moderator/inquisitor. The session was recorded, and you can now watch it in its entirety from the comfort of your Herman Miller chair.

Speaking of graduate students, one of my Newsgames co-authors, Simon Ferrari, completed a terrific, subtle interactive fiction piece called End of Life. On first blush it's about euthanasia, but it's really about the weird ambiguities of family life. The writing is very good, and the simulation is unusual. After you play it, you should also read Charles Pratt's thoughts on the piece.

The nice folks at First Wall Rebate hosted me on their podcast this week. We talked about many things, including Racing the Beam, Atari programming, blogging, and more.

Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant has launched some terrific salvos in the ongoing War of the Objects. Some particularly delectable ones: Realism is not a Synonym for Materialism, Speculative Realism, Armies of Objects, and the Social Sciences, and Transcendental Arguments.

Liz Losh attended the Nowcasting seminar at UCLA last week, and covered it extensively on her blog: 1, 2, 3, 4.

The SLSA talk will be my first major public discussion of my new project, which I'm calling Alien Phenomenology. I'm very curious to see how it goes over with the interesting mélange of science studies, animal studies, philosophy, science fiction, and arts crowd that attends the event. It's destined for a book, which I'm finally going to be able to devote my attention to after we ship off Newsgames.