Category Archives: Essays

David Graeber on Ethnography

Taken from the Preface to his 2009 book ‘Direct Action, An Ethnography’ all about the 2000/2001 protests and riots against the WTO, etc., pages vii-viii: Call this book, then, a tribute to the continued relevance of ethnographic writing. By “ethnographic writing,” … Continue reading

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Transcription: highlights from Timothy Morton’s Q&A session after ‘On Entering the Anthropocene’

On Friday, August 24th 2012 Tim Morton gave a rapid fire talked entitled ‘On Entering the Anthropocene’ as part of the launch of the new UNSW based journal of Environmental Humanities. I went along to the talk which was typical … Continue reading

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Comparative feelpinions about Far Cry 3

Most of my readers will remember that I’m known as one of the biggest fans of Far Cry 2 in the world, having done my ‘Permanent Death’ saga in which I played through the game in one life and documented … Continue reading

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[talk] Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm

So I gave a short paper at CODE last week entitled ‘Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm’ and got lots of positive comments and questions afterwards. Here’s an embed of the audio, and here’s a direct download. The slides to … Continue reading

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Žižek on Lacan on being unblockable on twitter

“Indeed, as Lacan put it: a true Master is the one who cannot ever be betrayed – the one who, even when actually betrayed, does not lose anything.” -Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Actuality of Ayn Rand’, The Journal of Ayn Rand … Continue reading

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Some comments on, and two reservations about, #AltLit

I’ve recently joined (found?) the massively distributed online (sub?)culture that calls itself (is called?) Alt.Lit. My journey of discovery is not so important, but it started on twitter, moved to Facebook and now I see it everywhere. And let’s be … Continue reading

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Jon McCalmont on Prometheus, Myths and Calvinball stories

At his consistently exceptional ‘Ruthless Culture’ blog Jonathan McCalmont has a great meta-review of Prometheus, in which he locates the film within the broader constellation of ‘myth-making’ in films and modern popular culture that is so prevalent right now. Having … Continue reading

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Attention and Immersion

A video essay about the term ‘immersion’ and why I think it should be replaced. While video of Richard Lemarchand’s GDC talk is behind the GDC Vault paywall, his slides and text from the talk are online here. I’ve received a few very … Continue reading

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Determinism (mostly for Jenn Frank (but you might be interested also?))

So Jenn Frank wrote an astonishingly great piece ‘On games of chance, cheating, and religion’ and JP Grant added some thoughts of his own about the notion of ‘fairness’ in games, in an equally excellent response, ‘Fair Play’. Go read … Continue reading

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Audio: Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind

On Wednesday the 9th of November I presented a paper to the Knowledge/Culture/Social Change International Conference at UWS Parramatta. The title of my paper was “Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind” and I recorded my talk which you can listen to … Continue reading

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