Grand Text Auto

Jesper Juul has an amazing new book:

Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 !

Just in case you thought I was the only one blogging these days — no, Jesper has a post in which he describes the book and lists talks he is doing about it. In the book, he considers how the C64 was different things to different people over time, with five main sorts of media imaginaries (or computational imaginaries) at work.

I’m in Canada today — Toronto, specifically — to celebrate the publication of

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. (ed. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, MIT Press & Counterpath 2024) in conversation with Matt Nish-Lapidus and with a reading by Kavi Davvoori. I haven’t been here very long, and the Output event doesn’t start for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’ve already enjoyed walking from the airport, and then around town, not to mention consuming a smoked meat omelette.

All the Way for the Win was just published by Penteract Press — today! It’s available for sale from their online store.

This book of poetry begins by narrating the birth of the universe and concludes after describing the eradication of the last human-authored poetic text.

While it doesn’t deal with everything in between, it’s mean to touch on many aspects of human history and experience.

The poems in the book consist entirely of three-letter words.

Six of the poems from it were published at the very end of 2024 in DIAGRAM.

The book has received two great endorsements:

It’s already been a full month since the most recent

National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo 2024). I surely should have written up some thoughts sooner. Other computer-generated texts have kept me busy, though!

The anthology I edited with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, was published on November 5 and we’ve been going to discuss it, read from it, and hear people’s reactions. More information about Output can be found in my previous blog post, which I’m updating to reflect upcoming events.