The recent Onion story “Mom Finds Out About Blog” echoes a line from an (apparently genuine) web diary I came across in 1999, where the writer actually considers having two diaries, “so I can have a slightly censured version for my mothers […]

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.