Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: MIT

Back from Beyond.

…And that’s why the secret of the universe is a combination of quantum entanglement, interpersonal relationships and the square root of 1,764. What’s that? The signal cut out? Oh, how embarrassing. Sorry about that – let me try and catch you up. Over a year ago, I posted that 2010 would be different. Boy, I […]

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2010: The Year We Make Up

This is one of my favorite times, the liminal space between one year and the next. For most people, this time for intense thinking and planmaking runs from Christmas through New Year’s, but at MIT this period is extended through the beginning of February. (Yet another reason I love it so much here at MIT.) […]

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Strange Little Beast: On Newly-Owning a PSP.

It’s been something I’ve waffled over doing ever since I first joined up with GAMBIT. Should I? Shouldn’t I? It’s a lot of money, the ROI is somewhat questionable, but… But… Finally, yesterday the stars aligned, the proper slot machine tumblers of fate finally clunked into place, I was in the right place and the […]

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Free Public Lecture Tonight: Jeff Vandermeer on Transmedia

In the Boston area tonight for Futures of Entertainment, or a C3-minded local who can’t make it to the conference? This evening from 5-7, the novelist, anthologist and cross-media storyteller Jeff VanderMeer is giving a free, open-to-the-public talk as part of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Colloquium lecture series and the unofficial kickoff to Futures of […]

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The Future of Publishing.

A few months ago, I had the honor of organizing and moderating a keynote panel for the sixth Media in Transition conference here at MIT. Our title (and topic) was “The Future of Publishing”, and MIT World has just published the video recording of it online. I’ve embedded a copy of it here (all 94 […]

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On storybots.

Yesterday I had an amazing meeting with several of my friends and coworkers to discuss a new possible project coming down the pike, and although I can’t tell you what that project is yet, it wound up triggering some intense late-night thinking. How do robots tell stories? We’ve all seen robots as characters – C-3PO […]

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April: The Month That Got Away. (Kinda.)

Rabbit rabbit! OK, now that that’s out of the way… Great Caesar’s ghost, what a month. Alas, the 2009 30|30 project didn’t work out, as I’d feared – still, eighteen poems is better than I fared last year, when I petered out at thirteen (yet still not as good as the first year I did […]

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[C3] The Future of Entertainment is… Paper?

I have a new post up today over at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium weblog, “The Future of Entertainment is… Paper?” In it, I basically stare agog at the awesomeness that is PaperCamp, a one-day event that went down on January 17th in London and that I’m kicking myself for having missed. At the end […]

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On Literature and Comparative Media Studies.

(Note: I should preface this bit of writing with a warning: what follows is a first attempt to set down some things I’ve been struggling to articulate for the past couple of years. As such, it may be slightly less than ideally coherent, but hopefully out of it some clarity will emerge.) What is literature? […]

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Antici…

This is a tiny little thing, but I was thinking this morning about how the GAMBIT website uses funny terminology for each of its sections. Back when Philip and I were first designing it, we wanted to name each section after a component of the gaming experience, so “News” became “Updates”, “Careers” became “Join Game”, […]

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