mobius strip

The Art of New-Atheism

After two frustrating days of visiting local gaming stores, I’ve given up on trying to find a copy of Spore for the moment.  For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, Spore is the new epic evolutionary based strategy game by Sim City and The Sim’s designer Will Wright.  You get to take a living cell all the way through the chain of evolution- where you actually build your character to adapt to the environment- from a single-celled organism to a galaxy-faring explorer. As frustrated as read

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

Maverick American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist David Foster Wallace was found dead of an apparent suicide on Friday. He was forty-six years old. Wallace’s spiralling, digressive, prolix style infuriated as many readers as it delighted, but at his best, he was one of North America’s most incisive critics of our out-of-control consumerist lifestyle and the attendant addictions to all manner of distractions: television, drugs and alcohol, sex, religion. In his non-fiction he was equ read

Alt.NET UK Summer conference

The second Alt.Net UK open conference took place on Saturday in London, with about 100 people attending and 16 sessions. The event, at least for me, felt much more like an informal get-together then a software conference which was a great thing. All the sessions were organised as discussions, not presentations, with people just exchanging ideas and experiences. The conference started with a very controversial topic on what Alt.NET actually represents. Most of the people at the conference had read

Reviewing the David Foster Wallace Obituaries: September 14 2008

I occasionally grazed a David Foster Wallace book, but I never finished one. The New York Times writes in a brief death notice today that Infinite Jest was “roughly, about addiction and how the need for pleasure and entertainment can interfere with human connection”. I didn’t know that, probably because I only got through the first 50 pages of the 1079-page book. As far as I could tell, the book was about footnotes. The brief death notice above is better than the Times obituary by Michiko Kak read

kakutani on dfw

Michiko Kakutani on David Foster Wallace: Much of Mr. Wallace’s work, from his gargantuan 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” to his excursions into journalism, felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head, about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many vide read