My Books

lavender

/S?©gri?®s, June 30/ Row upon row of lavender, a sudden lake of blue in yellow fields of wheat. Lavender’s blue, lavender’s green, I knew that, but until I came to Provence I didn’t know that the blue and the green blur together […]

being lara croft

This evening I was Lara Croft. It was brilliant: all I had to do was walk into the “Kickpuls” session at the gym and bam I was in the midst of a neatly choreographed rectangle of people kicking, punching, lunging and jumping […]

bots

Bots and automated characters are going to be the first kind of digital media we explore in this Autumn’s classes. Obviously we’ll look at Eliza and read some of what her creator, Weizenbaum, wrote about her in the sixties. My daughter’s lent […]

back at work

I’m stitching working minutes together this week: there’ll be fifteen minutes while Aurora pretends to be a baby tiger, half an hour while she plays with her LeapPad, an hour while she plays with lego, forty-two minutes while she’s outside, before it […]

halfbakery

Have you come across the Halfbakery? They collect, critique and vote on half-baked ideas, fictitious inventions. The Film Noir Home, for instance: A very ‘wired’ home which knows what you’re doing and uses voice synthesis to announce, in the first person, what […]

must stop

Emails can be blocked, phone numbers deleted, photos burned, but my fingers keep typing in the URL of his blog before my mind has time to stop them. I need a software equivalent of that horrible-tasting stuff they smear on your fingernails […]

mutilate this

Tinka has embarked on a project to identify and then bend, twist, mutilate and undo the various paratexts of blogging. She’s started with the blogger’s bio, the “about me” section you’ll often find in the upper left corner of a blog. Hers […]

named dread

Hons, do go look at Judy Horacek’s August cartoons and scroll down to the bottom, that one about naming the nameless dread. Not a bad idea, huh?

virtual storytelling

Virtual Storytelling is the name of a conference in Toulouse this Novemeber. I’ve only had a quick look at the list of presentations so I can’t swear to its being relevant, but it’s in France! I don’t think I’ve got any travel […]

fictional friendsters

Friendster‘s been gaining a lot of fictional characters lately, and of course they’re all friends and all write testimonials for each other. I’ve asked Conan the Barbarian and Hermione Granger to be my friendsters. Kind of regret I didn’t ask Snape, but […]