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Mona is a short story by Leigh Alexander with gorgeous illustrations by Emily Carroll. The story is part sensual urban horror, part homage to the game Silent Hill 2. The story recently went on sale, and I provided the design for the e-book versions. Have a look at the design below, and don’t forget to buy a copy of the story! […Read more…] 
Recently, I had the honour of being guest editor on Memory Insufficient, the games history ezine. I edited the special issue on Language and Games. You can read the editorial from the issue below, but really you should just go and download the whole issue here [pdf], because it’s free. […Read more…] 
Recently, I’ve become more and more interested in book design and typesetting, and I decided that I wanted to become better at it, and offer it as a service to other people. In the growing world of e-books and digital reading, there is something of a dearth of good design, and the aesthetics that I admire in printed books have for the most part not found their way into the digital realm. As an exercise, I’ve started playing around with some public domain fantasy literature that I wanted to read anyway, such as the (early) works of Lord Dunsany. In that spirit, I’ve recently completed a PDF setting of The Sword of Welleran And Other Stories, originally published in 1908. […Read more…] 
Over on First Person Scholar, I’ve published an extensive book review of Nordic Larp, an impressive and beautiful overview of the Nordic live-action roleplaying scene. In it I discuss how the book shows the diversity and experimental drive of the LARP scene in Scandinavia, and approach it briefly from a play-theoretical perspective. […Read more…] 
While reading Annalee Newitz’ intriguing blog post on io9 about the history of the word cyber, I came across the name Norbert Wiener (not Weiner — get it straight, you Englishers) who had introduced the term Cybernetics as “the study of control and communication in machines and living beings”. His other works include the book God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, and that title immediately caught my eye. Studies of the interaction between science, technology, and religion always interest me a lot, as do Golems and Jewish folklore, so Wiener had sold it to me easily. […Read more…] 
Few novels compelled me as much to immediately write my thoughts down as The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Usually I enjoy novels a lot while reading them (or not), but quickly dive into a new one afterwards. In this case, I felt the need to spend some words on it before moving on. I’m pretty sure this means that the book has some sort of clarity and compactness of style that brings across its messages very directly. I sure wasn’t the only one reading The Wasp Factory this month. Banks passed away after a battle with cancer on June 9th, and a number of my online friends and acquaintances made a grab towards his debut novel, like I did. […Read more…] 
It’s been a while since I wrote anything serious about literature, but recently I was reminded of an essay I wrote in 2008, about the question of authorship in the cyberpunk works of Kenji Siratori. I never did anything with the piece at the time, but felt it was interesting enough to brush it up and give it another chance. In short, I question how we should apply the “death of the author” as proclaimed by Roland Barthes to literature that provokes strong questions about the nature of its own author. […Read more…] 
What did I read in 2012? I’ve found looking back at my last year in books helps me chart some themes and developments in my (mental life), so I’ve decided to do it again this year. I read 92 books in 2012, a little fewer than in 2011, but they were bigger books, and my page total ended up higher. This doesn’t count all the articles I’ve read, but we’ve got to draw the reading nerdage line somewhere. It’s all slightly arbitrary anyway. […Read more…] 
Throughout human history, in art and religion, we find a longing for deliverance, the view of a promised land just out of our current reach, whether somewhere else on some part of (mythologised) Earth, or in a world beyond. […Read more…] 
Most people will be at least passingly familiar with the ‘war’ between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ that has been a central theme in the history of the West in the past few centuries. My quotes are intentional because each of these concepts is far more complicated than common usage would suggest. The problem is: most, if […Read more…] |
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