& a blog

we are tired of division: media, culture, society, law, meaning, humanity, and so on. these are interconnected terms, defined by one another. they must be re-united.
explication has been held prisoner by written language for too long. as if we only understand words. as if true meaning were only possible to produce there. we do not [...]

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It has become completely impossible to ignore the massive social, economic, and cultural implications of video games. It is an industry that has outsold cinema and publishing for years. Its myths and characters have escaped consoles and computers for popular culture at large. And more and more people are becoming “gamers” everyday. Revolutions in casual [...]

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Terry Gilliam is the last surrealist. His latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, confirms such an assertion with its dazzling and disorienting visual effects. In “the imaginarium” Dr. Parnassus brings visitors into a world of the dreams, an inversion of those intimate possessions as they are made an entire, external world. These spaces are [...]

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If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion [...]

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At a recent Philadelphia Flyers game, in which I saw no less then eight goals (and no more than four fights) I came to the conclusion that not all sports are created equal. In some, scoring is something routine and expected, something that defines the pace of the game. In others scoring is something extraordinary, [...]

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In 1993, Cyan published a game called Myst marooning the nascent gaming world onto a mysterious island whose parts interacted like some sinister engine waiting to re-stoked after countless years un-used. The cover featured a perspectival overview of the island, with a shadowy man falling down towards it. The island was the game, the player [...]

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scholarship on sherlock holmes has always been preoccupied with two themes: the question of the sleuth sexuality (or, what’s all this about Watson then?) and the idea of Holmes as a rational, modern individual who is frequently made to deduce (and thus digest) what appear to be irrational, supernatural, and terrifyingly pre-modern cases. in guy [...]

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over the summer, i got a chance to see gustav klimt’s beethoven frieze nestled in the basement of the architecturally stunning (but otherwise uninteresting) secession building. having had no idea before of the mere existence of the beethoven frieze i was totally stunned by the beauty and scale of frieze. measuring at least 6 feet [...]

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my dream of assassin’s creed
when my a good friend of mine first got assassin’s creed, i was enchanted by its premise. as a serious lover of medieval history, particularly the crusades, the concept of gaming a 12th century jerusalem was immediately attractive to me. when i finally saw the game, i realized that the power [...]

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when i decided to buy a nintendo dsi (see previous post for a re-cap of my logic) i knew i needed a killer app, to make me feel that the purchase was justified. thoroughly, conscientiously, i researched the available games, seeking a game that would help me to immediately dig into the potential of the [...]

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