It’s story-time! In this first episode of a new arc that I’m going to entitle “WordPlay”, I tell the story of my weirdest, most intertextual essay ever and how it and Postmodernism and my studies of literary critical theory helped me to see the ultimate Truth of Orthodox Christianity.
In which we review the characteristics of the World of Code we’ve covered so far, add “data” into the mix, and examine – by applying this understanding to a single simple and personal experience of it – how understanding the World of Code and its limitations can help us maintain our humanity.
To exist and to interact with the world around it, computer code needs to be “embodied” in (of course) computers, and, despite its virtually infinite extensibility (at least in theory), the nature of code’s embodiment has a limiting and determinative effect that we need to understand if we are going to fully grasp the impact of computer code on the world around us.
What value can we find in video-games? My talk at Doxacon Seattle 2025 mines my experience as a gamer, focussing on Starflight, and as a Minecraft Server Administrator for theological and experiential insights.
In this introductory episode, we begin a second “season” of the Geek Orthodox podcast, “The World of Code”, with two new summaries of the first season: one generated by AI, the other by yours truly.
This guest-lecture at Simon Fraser University on Biblical intertextuality in fantasy and science fiction focuses on three excerpts from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chapter 20 of Out of the Silent Planet), and John Wyndham (an excerpt from The Day of the Triffids). For those interested, the relevant excerpts are collected in this PDF.
The lecture, along with the subsequent Q&A, can also be seen on YouTube.
The keynote address I gave at Doxacon Seattle in 2019 on the trope of transformation in fantasy literature and its importance, alongside the importance of our embodiment, for our identity.
