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Drexel University's Essay Writing Strategies did a great job illustrating in Layman's terms a simple step by step procedure for writing a paper. I found a ton of Youtube videos and instructional writings on how to be a good writer, but they were boring and difficult to engage with. I felt this spoke directly to start with a "shitty first draft" and gave great pointers on formatting, revising, and even just getting started. The author of this list of strategies provided thorough insight into questions you should be asking yourself to make a solid, structured essay. For example, after getting the "shitty first draft" out of the way, the author suggests beginning the first draft and to do so, it's helpful to start asking yourself questions about your topic. From there, those questions can help point you in the direction of your thesis where the author offers: "Work on the big picture first - don't get too committed early on. Plan to experiment and try completely different versions of your essay. Don't be afraid to toss out drafts that aren't working." Although these seem straightforward, and this pertains to application essays, I think they're great pointers for any paper developing and prove to be helpful for this essay on net.art. Drexel University, "Essay Writing Strategies." Last modified 2014. Accessed March 3, 2014. http://drexel.edu/fellowships/applying/essay/strategies/.

This short essay by Julian Bleeker talks about exactly what is insinuated in the title design, science, fact, and fiction, and how all of these components come together in order to form what we know as design fiction. This short essay is not very short but there are a lot of interesting points and picture about how and why design fiction functions. Bleeker, Julian. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf (accessed March 20, 2014).

When reading "Open Source As Culture/Culture as Open Source" by Siva Vaidhyanathan I was very interested in the quotes and sources taken from Richard V. Adkisson. When doing some further research I came across this link, which when clicked on, downloads a PDF of his essay "Intellectual Property and Eminent Domain: If Ever the Twain Shall Meet." This essay discusses that strict protection of intellectual property will kill creativity and the government's attempts to take control of the private property. Adkisson also discusses Eminent domain which gives the government access to private material for public use.

Write or Die is a browser based application that encourages the user to set goals when writing and achieve them, or else. The interface is relatively simple: the user defines how long they would like to write, the speed at which they intend to write, and the consequences for maintaining or dropping below these parameters. There are three basic modes: Reward, Stimulus, and Consequence. Reward mode displays positive reinforcement for completing your goals by displaying photos you happen to like in whatever frequency you think would best suit your Pavlovian response. Stimulus mode supplies nice, calming backgrounds and sounds as you maintain your words per minute, but if you drop below, they disappear. You can also include your own music, if you want the extra motivation to keep it playing. Finally, there is consequence mode. This mode punishes the user for dropping below quota by turning the screen bright, angry colors, emitting a horrible, grating tone, and finally slowly dissolving the vowels in your completed text. This mode isn't for the faint of heart. Supply your own corporal punishment! Good art hurts!

That sounds really terrifying and awesome. What would be difficult would be determining the sweet spot between pressure to work and a mental breakdown.

Tailorized Taylorism!

Along with my other post, this one goes hand in hand with that. I felt that including this one as well would be good and would help elaborate in the stages of prewriting and preparing for the first draft. I know out of experience and from others that simply getting started can be terrifying and quite frustrating. This link offers that aid for getting started and offers simple solutions like the basic structure for developing a solid paper. Prewriting exercises such as "brainstorming, free-writing, listing and clustering" act as the catalyst for developing ideas, or points and ideas at least that can be expanded later. As applied to this essay, you might start with different net.art pieces that you saw, made an impact, and then further refine and discover richer ideas you want to develop a paper around. It's helpful not only for this class but for writing in general! University of Maryland University College, "Prewriting and Outlining." Last modified 2014. Accessed March 3, 2014. http://www.umuc.edu/writingcenter/writingresources/prewriting_outlining.cfm.

Ctheory is a long running journal of theory, interviews with artists and critical essays on technology and culture. At least two decades of material here! We read the Paul Virlio article "Speed and Information" from this site. There are many great and illuminating articles and essays to be found here. You might try running some keywords from your research and see where it takes you. Ctheory ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Accessed April 25, 2014. http://ctheory.net/home.aspx

Here's a clip from the World's Fair of the late 1930s, demonstrating the "voder." This speech synthesizer is one of the inventions referenced in Vannevar Bush's essay this week. He was envisioning ways that it could be combined with other contemporaneous devices to make a sort of auto-stenography possible. The name is peculiar, a variation on the more familiar 'vocoder'. Operationally, it consisted of an elaborate mix of buzzing and hissing blasts of air and electrical vibrations, producing vocal formations by way of pedals and keys! It's voices are familiar, even iconic, but mostly by way of electronic pop music from the 1970s and 80s,bands like Kraftwerk amplifying the connotations of the robotic, and generally, the future. "VODER (1939) Early Speech Synthesizer. Youtube Video. 00:44. Posted by VintageCG on April 4, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

Zotero is a plugin for Firefox (or stand alone program for Safari and Chrome users) that integrates bookmarking, old-fashioned note taking, and utilities like bibme.org into a single, user friendly interface. A button imbedded in the corner of the browser saves a website into your Zotero catalog, and does its best to peel off all the available metadata and organize it into convenient, easy to see categories. It enables the user to organize sources with full notations and (very exciting) export them into a bibliography in whatever style you prefer. As an added bonus, it can also catalog media: .pdf, images, audio, video. Your library lives online, affording very easy access. Additionally, there is a group function in the case that research need be shared. This program is a very fine add-on to our more accident prone organic brains and beats the hell out of cocktail napkins and self-addressed emails full of cryptic links any day.

Here's a great essay by Carrie Lambert-Beatty on Parafiction. She discusses the "Nikeplatz" work we saw in class along with several other works by various artists. Parafictional endeavors negotiate context collapse as strategic asset for opening up dialogue and debate. As noted in class, this particular genre of contemporary art has many similar goals and intentions as Critical Design. Carrie Lambert-Beatty "Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility" October 2009 129, 51-84

An echo of early net.art initiatives, the contemporary INC was established in Amsterdam in 2004, in effort to extend research "to design, activism, art, philosophy, political theory and urban studies and [it] is not confined to the Internet alone...the INC maintains that the Internet can only be understood at the conjuncture of these various fields and lines of inquiry." This site is an amazing resource for research and reflection on new and emergent network cultures. The politics of search engines, Wikipedia, social networks, bitcoin, Internet of Things, Gaming and more! The ongoing conferences are backed with anthologies of related essays, most made available for free download on their site. Institute of Network Cultures "Publications" n.d. accessed April 25, 2014. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/