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Author: Paul Stewart
Publisher:
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 68
ISBN-13: 9780816772025
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the second book of this series, the Blobheads reveal their super power called the mental tentacle, which makes electric appliances come to life. Billy thinks that's cool--until all the kitchen appliances start complaining about Billy and his mom and dad. How will Billy explain this to his parents? Illustrations.
Author: Thomas Thwaites
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Published: 2012-03-20
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 161689119X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster." So begins The Toaster Project, the author's nine-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother's backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch. In the end, Thwaites's homemade toaster—a haunting and strangely beautiful object—cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store and involved close to two thousand miles of travel to some of Britain's remotest locations. The Toaster Project may seem foolish, even insane. Yet, Thwaites's quixotic tale, told with self-deprecating wit, helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer culture, and in so doing reveals much about the organization of the modern world.
Author: Thomas M. Disch
Publisher: Doubleday Books for Young Readers
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 88
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFeeling abandoned by their beloved master, a vacuum cleaner, tensor lamp, electric blanket, clock radio, and toaster undertake a long and arduous journey to find him in a faraway city.
Author: E-Flux
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2017-11-21
Total Pages: 613
ISBN-13: 1786633566
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software." Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on-site at Venice. In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons. "I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don't want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time."
Author: Nelson Morgan
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Jack Keely
Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
Published: 2019-05-07
Total Pages: 46
ISBN-13: 1633227812
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLearn the basics of cartooning with Jack Keely and Carson van Osten! Cartooning 1 explores the basics of cartooning, from character construction to figures in motion, and shows you how to create a variety of lovable characters—from a perky puppy to a personable toaster! With step-by-step projects and artist's tips on drawing humans, cute critters, and anthropomorphized objects, you’ll find a wealth of charming cartoons to inspire and guide you as you learn the art of traditional cartooning, step by easy step. In this book, Jack Keely (with some help from Carson van Osten) invites you into the cartooning world and explains his drawing techniques, as well as his methods of developing a cartoon to its fullest. You will learn to impart personality and expression as you discover a host of tips and techniques that will help you bring your cartoons to life. This book will be a welcome addition to any cartoonist's library! Designed for beginners, the How to Draw & Paint series offers an easy-to-follow guide that introduces artists to basic tools and materials and includes simple step-by-step lessons for a variety of projects suitable for the aspiring artist. Cartooning 1 allows artists to widen the scope of their abilities, demonstrating how to animate a character, from character development to movement and dialogue.
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2015-11-15
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 1452949875
DOWNLOAD EBOOKVideogames! Aren’t they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date. Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t. Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”
Author: Jeffry Dwight
Publisher: SFF Net
Published: 2021-08-01
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEighteen mind-bending stories from the imagination of Jeffry Dwight.These stories span multiple genres — science fiction, science fantasy, fantasy, horror, and humor/parody. You will be surprised and delighted by the stories themselves, and impressed by Dwight's storytelling range. From short stories to complete novelettes, there's something here for everyone.
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2007-05-15
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 0374707642
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPassionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author. As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.
Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-11-24
Total Pages: 569
ISBN-13: 0191088625
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines the central concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject. Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of 'dystopia'. By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as 'enhanced sociability', dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of 'enemy' categories. A 'natural history' of dystopia thus concentrates upon the centrality of the passion or emotion of fear and hatred in modern despotisms. The work of Le Bon, Freud, and others is used to show how dystopian groups use such emotions. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by a heightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby 'enemies' are demonised is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy. Part Two surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth century despotisms, focussing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chief excesses of communism in particular. Part Three examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting-point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century down to the present.
