Download or read book Acedia s Avatar Fashion written by Acedia Albion and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acedia Albion - fashion designer and digital personality inside the world of Second Life presents her selection of Avatar Fashion. Fashion created and worn by avatars who are all real people with real lives. This edition showcases fashions from August 2005 - January 2006. www.acediaalbion.com

Download or read book The Age of Em written by Robin Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks. Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems. While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear. Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship and love. This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.

Download or read book How to Sound Really Clever written by Hubert van den Bergh and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides more than six hundred words, offering a definition, examples, and an etymological description.

Download or read book Medieval Saints and Modern Screens written by Alicia Spencer-Hall and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.

Download or read book The Disenchantment of Art written by Rainer Rochlitz and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1998-02-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years after his death, Walter Benjamin remains one of the great cultural critics of this century. Despite his renown, however, Benjamin's philosophical ideas remain elusive--often considered a disaggregated set of thoughts not meant to cohere. This book provides a more systematic perspective on Benjamin, laying claim to his status as a philosopher and situating his work in the context of its time. Exploring Benjamin's theory of language, spoken and nonspoken, Rainer Rochlitz shows how Benjamin reconceptualized traditional ideas of language, art, and history. Offering an expansive assessment of a unique twentieth-century thinker, this volume provides an indispensable guide for readers of Benjamin's recently released collected works.

Download or read book On Boredom written by Rye Dag Holmboe and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Or when we find a subject boring? Contributors to On Boredom: Essays in art and writing, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages – by Mathew Hale, Martin Creed and Susan Morris – help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. With other contributions from Josh Cohen, Briony Fer, Anouchka Grose, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Tom McCarthy and Michael Newman, the book will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies and visual culture, from undergraduate students to professional artists working in new media.

Download or read book Southern Lady Code written by Helen Ellis and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that are "like being seated beside the most entertaining guest at a dinner party" (Atlanta Journal Constitution), from the New York Times bestselling author of American Housewives “Thank you Helen Ellis for writing down the Southern Lady Code so that others may learn.” —Ann Patchett, bestselling author of The Dutch House Helen Ellis has a mantra: “If you don't have something nice to say, say something not-so-nice in a nice way.” Say “weathered” instead of “she looks like a cake left out in the rain” and “I’m not in charge” instead of “they’re doing it wrong.” In these twenty-three raucous essays, Ellis transforms herself into a dominatrix Donna Reed to save her marriage, inadvertently steals a Burberry trench coat, avoids a neck lift, and finds a black-tie gown that gives her the confidence of a drag queen. While she may have left Alabama for New York City, Helen Ellis is clinging to her Southern accent like mayonnaise to white bread, and offering readers a hilarious, completely singular view on womanhood for both sides of the Mason-Dixon.

Download or read book Seven Deadly Sins written by Kevin Vost and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seven deadly sins are generals leading a vast and deadly army. The soldiers are a variety of sins and misdeeds, and the capital sins are the officers who sent them on their nefarious tasks. With the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas as his guide, best-selling author Kevin Vost tackles the deadly sins one-by-one, showing how they take root in our soul and give birth to offspring — other sinful thoughts and deeds that help it reach its sinful goals. You’ll learn how they attacks us, and how they become ingrained habits that prevent virtue from raising us to heaven. Indeed, these sins hold us down to earth — and possibly, ultimately, even much lower. The deadly sins can be conquered, and in these pages you’ll learn the methods employed by saints to vanquish vicious habits and replace them with virtuous ones. Follow the advice in this book, and you’ll soon strike at the head of sin and walk more positively in the light and love of Christ. You’ll also learn: Which sin can truly be called the deadliest in the world Why there are only seven deadly sins What takes place within our souls when we grapple with sin The relationship between vices and sins - and how to sever their bonds How each and every deadly sin is outnumbered by several opposite virtues Six deadly dominoes: Do you know the sins that almost always cause us to commit additional sins? How “the mother of the virtues” dethrones “the queen of the vices” Seven sacramental and saint-sanctioned strategies to call forth God’s graces to grapple with each deadly sin

Download or read book The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions written by John R. Clark and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Mann predicted that no manner or mode in literature would be so typical or so pervasive in the twentieth century as the grotesque. Assuredly he was correct. The subjects and methods of our comic literature (and much of our other literature) are regularly disturbing and often repulsive—no laughing matter. In this ambitious study, John R. Clark seeks to elucidate the major tactics and topics deployed in modern literary dark humor. In Part I he explores the satiric strategies of authors of the grotesque, strategies that undercut conventional usage and form: the de-basement of heroes, the denigration of language and style, the disruption of normative narrative technique, and even the debunking of authors themselves. Part II surveys major recurrent themes of grotesquerie: tedium, scatology, cannibalism, dystopia, and Armageddon or the end of the world. Clearly the literature of the grotesque is obtrusive and ugly, its effect morbid and disquieting—and deliberately meant to be so. Grotesque literature may be unpleasant, but it is patently insightful. Indeed, as Clark shows, all of the strategies and topics employed by this literature stem from age-old and spirited traditions. Critics have complained about this grim satiric literature, asserting that it is dank, cheerless, unsavory, and negative. But such an interpretation is far too simplistic. On the contrary, as Clark demonstrates, such grotesque writing, in its power and its prevalence in the past and present, is in fact conventional, controlled, imaginative, and vigorous—no mean achievements for any body of art.

Download or read book Teachings of St John Cassian written by John Cassian and published by . This book was released on 1977-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Return of the Real written by Hal Foster and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-09-25 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Download or read book If I Survive You written by Jonathan Escoffery and published by MCD. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION. Finalist for the 2023 Pen/Faulkner Award and the Southern Book Award. Nominated for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the 2023 Pen/Jean Stein Open Book Award, the 2023 Pen/Bingham Prize, the 2022 Story Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. National Bestseller. IndieNext Pick. One of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2022. “If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level.” —Ann Patchett A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper, Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin Cukie looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net. Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

Download or read book 1990 Census of Population and Housing written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Memory of Old Jack written by Wendell Berry and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century.

Download or read book Mermaids in Paradise A Novel written by Lydia Millet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hilariously funny. . . . Lydia Millet’s novels raise the bar for boldness.”—Rene Steinke, New York Times Book Review On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip—our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who's friendly to a fault—meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef. As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex–Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park. Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet's funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, darkly comic on the surface and illuminating in its depths.

Download or read book The Twittering Machine written by Richard Seymour and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Download or read book Poetry and Class written by Sandie Byrne and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.