Been thinking a lot about augmented reality recently, for fairly obvious reasons. The other night I was talking to Yiying Lu at the first LaunchUp Las Vegas about AR and the possibilities inherent in it, and it got me thinking. I’ve always had a big interest in ambient information interfaces and what is apparently called […]
Category Archives: Essays
Ten Years On
I’m going to write about something I’ve never really written about before. I had just moved back to Las Vegas, to my parents’ house, after a disastrous stint in Seattle. I had ended up homeless up there as a result of a lot of bad craziness, most of it mine. I’d ended up sitting in […]
Tully Goes Down To The Docks
So, I’ve released a new track for sale on Bandcamp, entitled “Tully Goes Down To The Docks”. It’s priced at a minimum of $1.00, but you can pay whatever you think it’s worth. This piece (arranged for toy piano and strings with some digital effects) is one of my generative pieces, meaning it’s entirely composed […]
Stikki and Hauntology
[If you don’t know what Stikki.me is, now you know. 🙂] Last night, I was trying to sell a very important investor on what Stikki is — namely, my wife Rosalie. (She’s not investing money, but I take up a serious amount of our shared living space and time working on Stikki, so in that […]
Why cloud storage for music is really an opportunity for labels
As anybody who knows me knows, I am profoundly ambiguous about the effects of the network on the music industry — particularly the independent bits of it, such as artists (like myself) who fund, produce and distribute their own music without the benefit of big labels. However, I am completely unambiguous about the recent explosion […]
Random Ontologies, Entry 2
When I was a very young kid, maybe five, I found the book Stranger Than Science by Frank Edwards — a sort of compendium of Forteana, UFO tales and ghost stories. There was one story in the book about two American women — schoolteachers, as I remember — who were visiting Versailles on vacation. As […]
How can we go from 419 to Web 3.0?
Here’s a quote from an amazing TechCrunch article about former and current Nigerian 419 scammers by Sarah Lacy: Boakye’s sheer hacker genius was the most astounding. It’s not just technical ability– he tries to figure out how the person who set up the security system he’s trying to break thinks, and outsmart him at his […]
An Immodest Proposal: iqCAPTCHA
One of my friend Alex’s hard and fast rules is: never talk to the Internet people. Don’t read blog comments, don’t reply to blog comments, don’t get in flamewars. It’s a rule I follow myself, by and large; I almost never read blog comments (Update: except here, of course) and never, ever, ever engage in […]
Random Ontologies, Entry 1.
I’ve been thinking about writing down some of my thoughts on philosophical/scientific things that interest me…or rather, the questions that I ask and the responses I’ve come up with to them. This is not meant to be any sort of formal essay or argument; merely a collection of ideas I’ve had. Feel free to think […]
An Open Letter to Rep. Shelley Berkley
Dear Representative Berkley, My name is Joshua Ellis. I’m a writer and web developer from Las Vegas. You may or may not know who I am — I was a opinion columnist for many years for the Las Vegas CityLife and I’m also somewhat well-known for co-authoring a series of articles about the homeless people […]