Last year, I began planning a spatial multimedia organization, visualization, and annotation environment with my roommate Cole Krumbholz. It would be useful for everything from spatially arranging various notes and images while writing an article to creating collages to readily navigating through files of similar type. We had mockups and specs written when we realized that this was a huge project and we weren’t sure when either one of us would have the time to devote to such an undertaking. Rather than kill the project, we decided to break it down into smaller pieces, each of which could be sold as shareware to finance further development.
On Alan Kay’s Technological Determinism
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay
Alan Kay’s famous phrase reads as inspirational. I support the spirit of it entirely as it accords with the American spirit, the hacker ethos, the do-it-yourself revolutionary philosophy. It’s comforting and empowering to think that all it takes is some elbow-grease and ingenuity to make a difference, shape society, right wrongs. And although I certainly don’t intend to discourage cultural participation, I find troublesome implications in that statement.
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On Hysterical Realism
As I progress writing my novel, I find that my writing undeniably employs the devices used by the hysterical realists. This comes as no surprise given my literary preferences, yet it is a trait I must acknowledge nonetheless. I will now take a moment to congratulate myself for being sufficiently mature to admit that I am not forging a new school of literature with my first, amateur bit of writing. I am also unable to restrain my analytical impulses, so I’ve spent some time trying to analyze the meaning and constituent elements of hysterical realism and the hysterical realists. I’ve also developed some concerns regarding the implications of the usage of these devices.
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Request For An Honest Interrogation of Games – Counterpoint to Jon Radoff
Jon Radoff’s recent defense of games, “Six Wonderful Things About Games” managed to raise my hackles. In this article, he rehashes a number of contrarian, Everything Bad Is Good For You type assertions (which book is indeed cited in the original post) regarding the theoretical benefits of games: they make people smarter, inspire curiosity, build creativity, aid in socialization, and can even end war. However, he makes the mistake of positing these benefits as present-day real benefits instead of potential benefits. Read More
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Rebalancing Your Media Diet
Wired’s July issue featured a problematic infographic based on the FDA’s food pyramid, Wired’s infographic instead focusing on one’s media intake. It is reproduced below: Read More
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On Wolfram Alpha and the Singularity
Although Wolfram Alpha (WA) entered the tech ideaspace as a revolutionary new tool, it is the latest iteration of a solution to an old problem – the process of question answering (think ask.com), a part of the larger field of information retrieval (think Google).
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E-mail Poetry
This piece was sculpted out of a long email thread I had with a close friend.
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