MachineMachine /stream

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Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.…

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This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable…

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But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up…

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SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer)…

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There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers)…

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There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in…

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When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God's sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive…

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I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being…

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While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on…

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Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend…

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Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

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Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to…

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The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit…

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Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

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Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential,…

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Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

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[ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues…

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R. Gerald Nelson’s DDDDoomed essay has been making the rounds lately and it sparked a healthy amount of curiosity and note-taking on my part that I felt I wanted to…

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Maybe you’re young enough to remember Blue’s Clues, or old enough to have a little one hanging on the mystery-solving adventures of Steve and Blue as you read this. If,…

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Albert Angelo is the second novel written by the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson (1933–1973). Published in 1964, the book achieved fame for having holes cut in several pages as…

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But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production…

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That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in…