The Sunday Rumpus Essay: I Died of Dysentery
The glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
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Posts Tagged: computers
Weekly Geekery
Our intimate lives feed the meat grinder of big data. The first casualty of climate change: this adorable rodent. Racial bias in healthcare research, and why it’s dangerous. An exoplanet could soon go the way of Alderaan. The next great American novelist might be your computer, not you.
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There is a looming rift in science journalism. Also, a looming rift in journalism journalism. Letting the robots take over. Brains are not computers. Death, plutonium, and our nuclear history.
...moreFrom Pen to Pentium
For many writers, after all, a word processor was as much an appliance as it was a deeply individualized instrument—more fax machine than fountain pen. … Still, the plastic, glass, and silicon devices had stories to tell, just as did the people pictured with them. Over at the Paris Review, University of Maryland Professor Matthew […]
...moreWhen Computers Choose Which Novels to Publish
We’re used to Amazon producing recommendations alongside books we buy, but are we prepared for a world where computerized data also picks what gets published? Inkitt, an electronic publishing platform, has announced that they will be utilizing algorithms to pick novels to publish in the interest of “fairness and objectivity” that can’t be found in […]
...moreAuthors and the Automated
The Believer Logger contributes more insights into the never-ending conversation on the role of technology in our writing. Does it mean demise? Or can authors persist on in the face of an ever more autogenerated world?
...moreThe Page Is Mightier than the Screen
For Lit Hub, David Denby reflects on the danger of losing young readers because of the influence of cell phone and computer screens: Electronic utopians say, “Calm down, nothing has been lost. If anything, the opportunities for reading have become much greater…” In the literal sense, this is true. You can find almost any book you […]
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Computers know images better than you. Is virtual reality better than books? Stop calling it science fiction. Raising the minimum age of social media. Star Wars and predictable stories.
...moreRise of the Poetic Machines
For Motherboard at VICE, Elizabeth Preston profiles the work of Sarah Harmon, a programmer in the field of computational creativity. Harmon has taken significant steps in designing programs that can learn the rules of language and literature to create their own attempts at figurative language and poetry.
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The Rumpus Interview with Louisa Hall
Author Louisa Hall discusses her latest novel, Speak, the future of artificial intelligence, and how playing squash taught her a love of literary technique.
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The Rumpus Interview with William Gibson
Legendary technomodernist William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, talks about his latest book, The Peripheral, predicting the future, and how writing about Silicon Valley today feels like his early work.
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How Gone Is My Valley?
It does us all a disservice to separate the Valley’s current industrial action from that of its natural environment, human history and broader political context.
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Computers are judging you. Sexy robot story! Sexy robot story! “Trolls of mine, so undivine…” A wasteland of bodies. If it’s between money and trees, take the trees.
...moreHandwriting is Dead; Long Live Handwriting
Type is the same, instance after instance, and the font you choose today will look the same when you type in it again tomorrow. The same is not true for crafting prose or poetry by hand, each looping connection between letters mapping out the inherently linear, temporal nature of language: the fact that for it […]
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Your new lesson plan: Be smarter than a computer. John Henry. But instead of a railroad, it’s a computer. And instead of John Henry, it’s NPR’s Scott Horsley. Your stories may not persuade like you thought they did. The charming tale of a robot coming to destroy you. You aren’t measuring your baby right. This could be […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of Ex Machina
Ex Machina is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.
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Rewriting Barbie. Unlocking your Internet password. Unlocking your soul. Trolls then and now. Science of your spit. Who runs the web? This is your face on Facebook.
...moreThe Operating System for Grief
I was handed that toy, sitting on Tom’s porch, in 1992. A person offering another person a piece of advice. Life passed through that object as well, through the teddy bear as much as through the operating systems of yore. Now that I have children I can see how tuned they are to the world. […]
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We have the technology, so where is the free time? Writing a better future. Women, the Internet and games. More corrosive than bleach, ammonia and your bathtub. The Internet goes back to the future. Keep your pants on, computers are not ruining literature.
...moreAuthor Roboto
At Melville House, Liam O’Brien delves into the fictional and factual history of book-writing computers, from Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” to the Russian computer that rewrote Anna Karenina in the style of Murakami. With some media outlets already using bots to pen articles, he wonders if the robots will be coming for literature […]
...moreArtificial Intelligence Writes Fables
A new computer program can write fables, reports the Guardian. The Moral Storytelling System, devised by Margaret Sarlej at the University of New South Wales, chooses a moral and determines a sequence of events. But the resulting stories so far remain fairly basic and Sarlej doubts the software will ever replace novelists. She instead sees […]
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Will computers replace teachers? In Silicon Valley, ladies don’t get no respect. And that difficult intersection between women, Silicon Valley, and speaking up every time is embodied in one woman: Shanley Kane. Crowdsourced editing and fact-checking. It’s a thing now. The holy and the soulless sit down to write the Torah. The ghost towns of […]
...moreWhy is Your Keyboard Weird?
Key arrangement isn’t the only thing modern keyboards borrow from a bygone age. We get the term “shift key” from the way a Remington Model 2 Type-Writer physically shifted the printing bar between uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase and lowercase are themselves much older terms, referring to a 15th century method for keeping track of the […]
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Face-Off: Facebook vs. Reality
Facebook connects people every damn day. It’s just not how I personally want to connect. I trust that I’ll still wind up with valuable, lasting connections without the aid of online networking, and not waste so much steam in the process.
...moreDigital Age Changes Writing
Technology has changed the way writers write, and that change is not just about the rise of e-books. Composition in a digital world is much more malleable and fluid, and changes in methodology alter the structure of sentences and words. Author Tom McCarthy tells the Guardian: Writing with word processors has given a new organisation […]
...moreThe Sins of the Father
Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace, was just as swashbuckling and as tragic as her father. She was also a card shark, drug addict, and computer genius.
...moreWhen Racist Stereotypes Work in Your Favor
At Slate, computer-science professor Philip Guo discusses an odd side effect of stereotypes about Asian men: when he was first learning to code, they actually worked in his favor. Even when Guo was a novice, people gave him the benefit of the doubt, which allowed him the time to learn everything he needed to learn. Friends […]
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