My last development diary entry looked at the origins of Babyface, my submission to the 2020 Interactive Fiction competition (IFComp). This dev diary entry looks at one of the first things reviewers say about Babyface: that it’s mostly linear. Usually this comes as a simple description of the game’s format, rather than a criticism. Because… Continue reading Babyface Dev Diary #2 – Choices
Category: Creative Coding
Babyface Dev Diary – Origins
So, Babyface is a thing I made. It's a creepypasta-style Southern Gothic horror story. I've entered the game into the 26th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp for short). You can play Babyface right now! I've followed IFComp for years—since at least 2007—but this is the first time I've made anything for the competition. Not that I… Continue reading Babyface Dev Diary – Origins
An End of Tarred Twine, a Monstrous Moby-Dick Hypertext
In my previous post I listed all the digital creative/critical works I've released in the past 12 months. (Whew, it was a lot, in part because I had the privilege to be on sabbatical from teaching in the fall, my first sabbatical since 2006. I made the most of it.) Now, I want to provide… Continue reading An End of Tarred Twine, a Monstrous Moby-Dick Hypertext
Play This Stuff I Made
When you're a college professor, you follow a different calendar from the rest of the grown-up world. There's school and there's summer, and that's how you plot your time. Of course, a global pandemic wreaks havoc on this calendar. But usually, somewhere about now I stop thinking about the previous academic year and start looking… Continue reading Play This Stuff I Made
Speculative Surveillance with Ring™ Log
Over the weekend I launched Ring™ Log, which is simultaneously a critique of surveillance culture and a parody of machine vision in suburbia. In the interactive artist statement I call Ring™ Log an experiment in speculative surveillance. "Speculative" in this context means what if? What if Amazon's Ring™ doorbell cams began integrating AI-powered object detection… Continue reading Speculative Surveillance with Ring™ Log
Things Are Broken More Than Once and Won’t Be Fixed
I don't want to get into everything that's broken with Twitter and has been for a long time. I don't even especially want to get into that small slice of Twitter that was once important to me and is broken, which is its creative bot-making potential. I've written about bots already once or twice, back… Continue reading Things Are Broken More Than Once and Won’t Be Fixed
A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit
A Call for Bots of Conviction In 1965 the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told an audience that “a protest song is a song that’s so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit.” Ochs was introducing his anti-war anthem “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”—but also taking a jab at his occasional rival Bob Dylan, whose expressionistic lyrics by… Continue reading A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit
“Deep” Textual Hacks
A computational and pedagogical workshop
I put "deep" in scare quotes but really, all three words should have quotes around them—"deep" "textual" "hacks"—because all three are contested, unstable terms. The workshop is hands-on, but I imagine we'll have a chance to talk about the more theoretical concerns of hacking texts. The workshop is inspired by an assignment from my Hacking,… Continue reading “Deep” Textual HacksA computational and pedagogical workshop
Closed Bots and Green Bots
Two Archetypes of Computational Media
The Electronic Literature Organization's annual conference was last week in Milwaukee. I hated to miss it, but I hated even more the idea of missing my kids' last days of school here in Madrid, where we've been since January. If I had been at the ELO conference, I'd have no doubt talked about bots. I… Continue reading Closed Bots and Green BotsTwo Archetypes of Computational Media
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a massive novel about, among other things, a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems about, among other things, the expansiveness of America itself. What happens when these two works are remixed with each other?… Continue reading no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass