& a blog

or, the perpetual need for binding and boundaries in discourse “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi The book has not, and will not, die. But it will shift forms. This is because a book is not wood pulp glued [...]

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the divide between physical reality and the “second,” virtual reality of cyberspace has been overexposed and polarized, constantly imagining the 21st century citizen at first one end of the spectrum and then dramatically shifted to the other. but this is hardly the  case in practical experience, by which i mean the experience of that same [...]

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Dear employers of the world, Stop cheaping out on the young ambitious people of the world by offering only “unpaid internships.” It’s class warfare anyway you cut it, and unless you are quite literally a mom and pop establishment, I think you can afford to shell out $3,000 for a summer of exploitative work. Don’t [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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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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live from the Radcliffe Gymnasium @ Harvard square. Updates will continue to pipe out as the day rolls on. The one gap will be at my presentation. After a short introduction from Ed Lyons, here is Dave Tosh of Elgg to give the keynote. Discusses pros and cons of web services: Pros – free, easy, [...]

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Now that the internet has become an ambience, we have become enveloped by it. Just ten years ago, society traveled to the internet. It was something somewhat site-specific, a cafe, a library, a corporate office. At that point, the internet still had a certain physicality- one could move into its reach, and, more importantly, out. [...]

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I have long believed that film students and critics need a real (or reel if you will excuse the pun) tool for critically annotating film. Now that DVD technology has advanced enough, I imagined a program or even a simple plugin that would enable movie viewers to take notes on a film. The program would [...]

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