My Books

blackboard

The NY Times tells us about a protoblogger decides to run for governor and therefore starts blog – I particularly noticed the nature of her preblogging: [A] few times a week on a blackboard next to the daily drink specials, she recalls, […]

nobody believed

Two years ago today the sun shone and in the afternoon, when everyone knew what had happened but not what would happen, we sat outside in the sun, our kids playing oblivious to our concerns, and we were joking as one does […]

zone

Jesper‘s got three weeks left of his PhD grant and is in that zone where everything is connected, and even procrastination is weirdly productive: [Playing Virtua Tennis] was meant to be a pure waste of time, but Iíve already written about how […]

beadgee

Tamar Schori‘s Beadgee (or fullscreen, Windows only) lets you play with images and words just as a child plays with her beads: making patterns, stringing and restringing, standing back to look at your creation. Here’s how it works: At first you see […]

fremmedpolitiet

One and a half hours waiting in line at fremmedpolitiet. A minute at the counter. Half of that was spent listening to a Norwegian who’d matter of factly by-passed the queue to complain loudly about some foreigners who were misusing her address […]

australian diaspora

Good heavens: there are 800 000 Australian citizens living abroad! That’s five percent of the population. We’re the Australian diaspora! I belong to a community! With a mailing list! And my community actually fought for me to be able to be a […]

fraud no more

I’ve been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I’m writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one’s on cyberpunk (the genre) and I’ve never published a thing on cyberpunk. Except for a hastily written definition I sent to […]

stamps

I need to go to the police to get my residency permit stamped into my new passport. They’re shut today but having got my passports out, old and new, I leaf through the pages. Each stamp brings back memories: Rome in March, […]

martian romance

“Knowing what I now know about Martian history, of course, it all seems crystal clear to me. But at the time I was surprised how quickly I was able to pick up Martian with just a smattering of Klingon and Basque.” (from […]

make something

I showed my students Dakota and Genius and Ashcroft Online, asked them to brainstorm ideas for their term papers, and fifteen minutes later almost all of them told me “I want to make something!” I’m amazed. I think I’m so stuck in […]