Our new fagreferent buys every book I ask for. Good thing, too, cos the list of new books I want is far too long for my personal book budget. My latest list is below, and do you know, hardly any of these […]

I wanted to find out more about the religious use of “avatar” (it comes from Sanskrit, a deity sends his avatar to our world, avatars cross boundaries between worlds) and instead serendipitously found an article about female golems, dolls and cyborgs in […]

Three students in Sydney are facing jail sentences for having shared mp3s on the web. A primary piece of evidence against them is the essay the student who started the filesharing site wrote for his information technology law course. The essay topic […]

“So is it possible to fail, once you’ve made it to the defence?” I asked, hoping the answer would be no. “Oh yes!” he answered with glee. “Absolutely! Actually, there was one particularly bad case in medicine a while back. Everything looked […]

My camera insists that it knows what the world should look like. It likes strong colours and sharp contrasts. If I point it at the dark grey almost black night sky it normalises the pixels to the blue it’s been programmed to […]

I got my topic for the trial lecture I’ve got to give the day before my defence: îUser-avatar relations in cybertextsî. So now I have a fortnight to write a traditional 45 minute lecture of the sort you read slowly from a […]

Gonzalo’s posted a great trip report from DiGRA, last week’s games research conference which had 500 attendees! Interesting reading, and obviously a conference that it would have been fun to have attended. [update Monday: Andrew’s posted a report on the conference on […]

“Literature may be the only art form that is conceived as platform-independent”, Lars writes, disagreeing with Geoff, who thinks that every form of literature requires interpretation.

One of the reasons I love living in Bergen: I walk for fifteen minutes from my home and I’m crossing a stream on my way up a mountain. Half an hour up I gaze across mountains stacked like dominos.

Oh dear. This excerpt from Oblivio goes with the conversation overheard about breakups and Friendster (sadly the full story is deleted), and with my own (thankfully extinguished) obsessive blogchecking. E said that her instant messaging program lets her know when Jís computer […]