Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Monthly Archives: October 2008


As longtime readers of this blog know, I started my Master’s degree at MIT in 2005, finished it in 2007 and then immediately went to work at MIT as the Communications Director for both Comparative Media Studies (the program where I’d earned said master’s) and for the newly-formed Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was completely […]

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While reading this Mediabistro piece on Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Ford and why genre tags don’t matter, I found myself reflecting on Borders’ current struggles with solvency. I’d be devastated if Borders and Barnes and Noble went under due to Amazon, just as I’ve been deeply mournful of all the indie bookstores put under by Borders […]

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I haven’t done one of these in a while now, have I? The new Weird Tales website. Oh, there’s neat stuff a-brewing here. Abney Park. The sound of steampunk. Myke Amend’s The Rescue Unlimited. The art of steampunk. The Humanities Review: Why I write horror. Insightful piece, if occasionally off-base. Web posts earn deals for […]

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This has been an amazing month for attending lectures. First there was Kelly Link at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote her new book Pretty Monsters; then there was Jonathan Carroll at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote his new book The Ghost in Love; then this week there was Maria Tatar and […]

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Courtesy of the lovely Small Beer Press newsblog comes my discovery of a new favorite group. Ever heard of the Winterpills? No? Then get thyself over to their official site or their Virb.com page and give their stuff a listen. Close harmonies, beautifully wistful and poetic lyrics (as SBP notes, yes, “You were born immortal […]

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A new piece for my portfolio: the artwork that I created for the ABSINTHE multimedia arts salon that I emceed this past weekend in Union Square… Big props to Joelle for putting together this awesome event! (And, for the curious, a link to the original beautiful art that inspired this piece. The original is full […]

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Here’s some juicy news concerning last year’s “pay what you want” experiment from Radiohead: according to Rolling Stone and musically.com, Radiohead’s publisher Warner Chappell confirmed yesterday that “Radiohead made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on the previous album Hail To the Thief“.

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If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said “Who’s Kelly […]

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Over at the C3 blog, I’ve just posted a quick write-up (with photos!) of Bruce Sterling’s excellent keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference. You can find the entry under the title Metafun for Metaplayers.

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Bruce Sterling‘s keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers’ Conference. (I was there co-presenting a video game adaptation workshop with Matthew Weise, a comrade-in-arms of mine at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.) Sterling was, as ever, utterly brilliant; given my previous exposures to Sterling […]

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