A few of my favorites:
The Cold War avante-garde, from R&D to D&D, the secret origins of hex paper, KAAAAHN!
How I spent 1993. Or, why computer games are not effective tools for teaching history and how they could be.
Why don’t North Americans play cricket? And what does this have to do with rebuilding Iraq?
The transnational turn in American history vs. fat, worshipful biographies of the Founding Fathers.
Martin Melosi on “machine space”: Why vast swaths of our cities are inhospitable to human life.
Most recent posts:
Kate Beaton is awesome.
Teaching history from back from front.
A course I’d like to teach on gaming, simulation, and history.
Peeing dogs, Donkey Kong, lesbians, sitcoms, and gin.
Spybots invade English village.
In loose Borgesian categories:
On the whole, I’d rather be in Outeon Eveldo: The Kirchies present Whitwell’s Rational Geographical Nomenclature, a 19th-century (when else?) plan to encode latitude and longitude into the name of every American city or town.
Tags: Asides
Interwob links to confound and bemuse:
The SITI Program
The Search for Intelligence on the Internet: My man Mark Rayner plugs the numbers into the Drake equation, predicts that there should be 2.7 intelligent blogs in cyberspace. Keep watching the skies!
The Tank
Tom Englehardt posts Chalmers Johnson’s review of Alex Abella’s new history of RAND.
Note To Self: Ia Fhtagn
What appears to be H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: creepy images, story ideas, and games he’d like to run. (Via Felix Gilman.)
High Tech Noon
Do not laser-shark me, oh my darling: isn’t everything better with rayguns?
Men In Tights
It’s been well linked (Barista assumed it was taking the piss but I think he underestimates Chabon’s geeky earnestness) but it’s worth it: Michael Chabon on the superhero unitard. PS How good is All-Star Superman, am I right?
The Cardboard Internet
Paul Collins on the Mundaneum, a networked encyclopedia on fifteen million index cards (shades of the Memex?). Plus index cards as (literally) the U.S. War Department’s killer app.
Google Maps of Sci-Fi
BLDG BLOG’s Geoff Manaugh on mapping the fictional onto the real.
More Dick
You heard it here first:* Moby Dick is awesome! (*No, you didn’t.)
Au Clair de la Lune
Feast your ears on the oldest known sound recording–from 17 years before Edison’s phonograph. (Via Corn Chips & Pie.)
The Pickle King of Islamistan
Khalid (née Bertram) Sheldrake, the “power hungry, toothbrush mustachioed, British ninny” who somehow failed to convert western China to Islam.
Invisible elves make our site go:
© 2001–2007 Rob MacDougall
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