Notes About Networks

This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs, a project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term. Where Do Cyborgs Come From? The term cyborg is as evocative and cuts as elusive a figure now...

Posted by mistersquid on September 29, 2010 9:09 AM

“The San Francisco Roach is Generally German or Oriental in Derivation”

Pacific Heights»Pacific Heights. Dir. John Schlesinger. 1990.« is a vastly underrated psychological thriller. Part of the problem likely is the wooden acting by Matthew Modine and the unconvincing ditzy by Melanie Griffith, though Michael Keaton plays creep quite well.1...

Posted by mistersquid on January 8, 2010 9:30 AM

In the Future Everyone Will Have Their 12 Seconds of Fame

Prelim Watching a video debate about whether President Obama should shame unprincipled detractors by identifying them, I came across a video that asks “Is Lady Gaga Sexy Or Just Crazy?” The moment I saw this picture Lady GaGa in...

Posted by mistersquid on November 16, 2009 6:27 PM

Dittohead Forever: Rush Limbaugh Dropped From Bid for NFL Rams

Yesterday Dave Checketts, the executive leader of a group bidding for the N.F.L. Rams, announced Rush Limbaugh would be dropped from the group. Writing for The New York Times, Judy Battista reports that once word leaked last week that...

Posted by mistersquid on October 15, 2009 11:09 AM

The Decline of the English Department

Early in his analysis of The Decline of the English Department, William Chace asserts that what is at the root of the decline is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books...

Posted by mistersquid on October 10, 2009 11:57 AM

Some Thoughts Regarding the Creation of Text-to-Speech Audiobooks Using Consumer-Grade Software, or One Possible Outcome for Academic Professionalism as a Result of Fully Digitzed Text

Codex Books, Audiobooks, and Assistive Devices: A Tale of Near Misses The last book I checked out of Alden Library while still a faculty at Ohio University was Clay Shirky’s 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without...

Posted by mistersquid on September 17, 2009 9:47 PM

Simpleminded

After finishing the major work for a new web page, I discovered the page wasn’t properly rendering on Internet Explorer. I expected some discrepancies because the page layout used some moderately advanced CSS. What I didn’t expect was that the...

Posted by mistersquid on October 31, 2008 10:53 AM

Leopard is Incomplete

I lived with Leopard as my only operating system during 28 October - 8 December 2007. Yesterday, I spent a few hours reverting the data on which Apple's Mail and iCal depend into formats suitable for Mac OS X v....

Posted by mistersquid on December 13, 2007 10:17 AM

Adventures in Paper Print

My disaffection for paper print and manuscript has been building, I suppose, from the very first time I ever tried to start a journal. In my second year of Junior High, I tried to start a journal using one of...

Posted by mistersquid on November 6, 2007 10:40 PM

Project R

This entry contains spoilers.One of the problems I'm addressing in Zombie Nation is the way in which North American racial history is cinematically encoded into George Romero's Living Dead Series. There is little dispute that classic zombie cinema (prior to...

Posted by mistersquid on September 7, 2007 8:13 AM

The Twilight of Capitalism

Introduction: Zombie NationIn the last decade, zombies have taken a place of cultural prominence that in some ways is incongruous with their low culture origins. Among other things, this essay accounts for this increase in scholarly interest by examining the...

Posted by mistersquid on August 27, 2007 7:29 PM

Spider-Face

--> This morning between midnight and 02:00 Eastern, I saw Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. 1 The film weaves together storylines from the Spider-Man comic book and graphic novel sagas (both largely unfamiliar to me).2 One story arc in the Spider-Man...

Posted by mistersquid on May 4, 2007 8:15 PM