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November 9, 2009

Orienting Ourselves

Thoreau, wood, and axes

In the final Whitehead panel at SLSA this weekend, my colleague Hugh Crawford made an interesting observation about object-oriented ontology during his talk on trees. Specifically, he noted that most interest in OOO focuses on "objects" and "ontology." But another helpful perspective can be gained from attending to "orientation." He ...

September 25, 2009

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski

Schroeder played the piano and all of the girls loved him.

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 ...

August 18, 2009

Objects.... oooobbbjjjeeecccts...

Zombies and Ontology

Over at Un-canny Ontology, Nathan Gale writes a post that responds to and extends both mine on Harman's conception of cuteness and Bryant's on the unheimlich. The uncanny valley rears its head, a concept originally developed by Masahiro Mori about the moment when robots cease to seem realistic and begin ...

August 16, 2009

Amateur Gasbag Blooding

Anagrams and mysticism

Via Graham Harman, I discovered the "best name anagram" generator, which does exactly what it sounds like. For example, Graham Harman's anagram name is HA HA! GRR! MAN AM You may have seen it too, since the site makes it easy to post one's name anagram on Facebook, so anagrams ...

December 21, 2008

Elizabeth Bennet promises never to dance with Mr. Darcy.

Jane Austen on Facebook

In the vein of Hamlet in Facebook, here is Austenbook, a version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Facebook News Feed format. Like Hamlet in Facebook, Austenbook is a hypothetical adaptation of literature for social media; it adds the look and feel of a newsfeed, but the latter's writing ...

August 28, 2008

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float

Hamlet on Facebook

Ian McCarthy just showed me I was happy to learn of Sarah Schmelling's version of Hamlet in Facebook newsfeed form. You can read it over at McSweeney's. Given my interest in Facebook and in adapting literature for the computer, I found it particularly nice to see how Schmelling's Hamlet made ...

June 5, 2008

Twittering Rocks

A reprise of the central chapter of Ulysses, performed on Twitter

Last year, Ian McCarthy and I puppeted over 50 characters from the Wandering Rocks chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses on the microblogging platform Twitter. We're planning a reprise for this year, including much more notice than we gave in 2007 (Bloomsday is June 16). You might want to consult ...

October 6, 2007

Videogames: Can They Be Important?

My plenary address at the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo

The following is the plenary address I gave today at the first SIEGE conference here in Atlanta on October 6, 2007. The title of the session was “Games: Can They Be Important?” My fellow plenary speakers were Ernest Adams and Daniel Greenberg.   Today it is possible to work though ...

June 16, 2007

Bloomsday on Twitter

A performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, and a commentary on both. Created with Ian McCarthy.

I do not like Twitter, the micro-blogging service that allows users to send short (SMS-sized) text-based updates that are displayed publicly and shared with friends social-network style. ...