October 2008
September 2008
“Monsters show us that if our aims are celestial, our origins are terrestrial.”
– Richard Kearney, Strangers, Ghosts and Monsters.
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and... →
This is the most fun I’ve had reading literary theory in a long time. Haraway takes the metaphor of the cyborg—the coupling of organic life and machine—and runs with it, yielding all sorts of cosiderations about post-genderism and post-humanism.
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without...
Tonight’s literary theory readings:
Gilles Deleuze: “On the Death of Man and Superman”
Donna Haraway: “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Richard Kearney: “Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness”
These all look awesome.
A syntax quiz for our regular readers →
In today’s lead story in the New York Times (“Breakthrough Reached in Negotiations on Bailout”), John McCain is quoted as saying on ABC’s “This Week”:
“This is something that all of us will swallow hard and go forward with.”
Is McCain’s sentence quoted above a parasitic gap, or an instance of across-the-board movement, coupled with right...
“Chomsky covers much more than a refutation of Finite State Grammars in his...”
– A footnote in Whitney’s Psychology of Language.
It sounds like he doesn’t grasp my field’s time-honored tradition of the squib, which is a short, sarcastic form of linguistics writing in which an author shows how another’s theory—to borrow a computer science...
britticisms:
“I Zimbra” by Talking Heads
...
“It’s like Minnesota and Canada had a baby, and Wisconsin raised it.”
– -Robin from work, on Sarah Palin’s accent. (via starline)
Nah, her lower front vowels seem more raised than those of Wisconsin English, though I’m not doing any frequency measurements. Plus, she has merged low-back vowels like most western American speakers (i.e. cot and caught are homophones...
twentysix:
i should probably do another friends sharing music thing, too bad i’m terrible at writing and have to proofread myself 4 times in a row…
Fucking do it.
Awesome
This kid told his mom to “get coited” on House.
Okkervil River - The President’s Dead
Comedy Goldmine: Famous Writers As Children →
The only one that matters is fake David Foster Wallace asking for an increase in allowance:
OK, so bearing in mind the fact that I have spent a pretty-considerable amount of time in what I consider “good” behavior (although by “good” I’m assuming you already have a pretty good handle on most of the ethical philosophies of like all post-19th C. philosophers—...
Times puzzle is clueless about McCain →
“So, it’s proven. Crossword puzzles favor OBAMA over MCCAIN and BIDEN over PALIN.”
“The Court approves the corrected referee’s report and [Jack] Thompson is...”
– Jack Thompson Disbarred
Time To Do Some Research
And by “research”, I mean playing Braid. I’m writing about the game’s ending for my literary theory course.
“As normally defined, taking the life of another in video games (as in acting or...”
– One poster on a Lutheran messageboard tackling the question of whether virtual murder and suicide is a sin. (via Kotaku)
“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”
– Martin Heidigger talking shit about those “idolize facts”. I fucking hate reading Heidigger…
“A player must always feel like the failure of a challenge is entirely his own...”
– Daniel Boutros in Difficulty is Difficult: Designing for Hard Modes in Games. (via Kami)
I read an essay about Valve’s design process during the original Half-Life, and in this essay, they outlined three core ludic principles for fun:
(1) Experiential density — i.e., avoid dull moments...
“… What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all...”
– Just Asking by DFW for The Atlantic
The B-52’s - Party Out Of Bounds
After giving his...
“Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness”
– The Latin epigraph of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”