As the advertising copy has it, 18 “updated classics,” 1621 choices, 429 endings, 2022 possible stories.
As best I can tell, these are being released under Ray Montgomery’s (the series’ original creator) own imprint. It’s nice to see ‘em.
(Btw, I’ve used Choose for some very successful assignments in my Computer and Text courses.)
My article “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive” (PDF) is now available online from the journal TEXT Technology (13.2):
“Extreme Inscription” attempts to articulate the grammatological primitives of the hard drive, the inscription technology that has had the single greatest impact on computing in the latter half of the 20th century. Rather than offer up yet another generalized account of electronic textuality, my objective in this essay is to examine one specific writing machine in its unique social, technical, and imaginative milieu. Random access disk storage, I argue, is the technology that embodies the “database paradigm” a critic such as Lev Manovich sees as fundamental to new media. The history of hard drive technology is treated in the essay, as is the cultural impact of new hard drive-based technologies like iPod, TiVo, and Gmail’s massive multi-gigabyte quotas. Ultimately the article seeks to establish a place for the often invisible and certainly unglamorous presence of storage technologies amid the largely visual and screen-based approaches that currently prevail in new media theory.
A more exhaustive discussion of hard drives will appear as a chapter in Mechanisms.
Marc Ruppel’s extended entry “Learning to Speak Braille” which is actually his Ph.D. Qualifying Presentation on cross-sited narratives, a genre whose study he is leading the way in defining. Read it now, or pay to read it later when you go and buy the book from whoever’s publishing the hottest stuff in new media a few years down the road.