Before we had any idea how dangerous it was to bolt human beings to exploding tubes and launch them into space, when inventions like the lightbulb and airplane and telephone were warping the planet at a ferocious pace and escaping the earth’s gravity well suddenly seemed possible —we imagined that exploring the Universe would be a lot like the famous expeditions we had seen before.
James McGirk
Writer specializing in finance, energy, emerging technologies, development, and longform content.
Writing and the World of Tomorrow
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Interactive Serious Games
ImpactGames
PlaytheNewsGame, Winner of a James Knight Foundation Best News Game)
GeoVol
All that remains is this news story.
WikiStrat
Most of the older blue bordered reports have substantial contributions from yours truly.
Parametric Press
NB: This is a work in progress, Parametric Press has commissioned this game and I’m in the process of working with them and their team. (Link to working outline)
The story I want to write is very location- and decision-based which is why I think it needs an interactive interface – plus I like the idea of the decisions being made having consequences for the reader/player. There was a Native American college in Oklahoma (Bacone College) that used to be one of the best in the country, particularly for a kind of peculiar style of art called Flat Style painting — a kind of sleek modern 50s interpretation of Native American visual culture — they used to let artists live on the campus in exchange for letting them teach a few classes and that they left some of their work. Fifty years later and the campus is destitute, they can’t pay professors, yet it’s filled with dusty, decaying art.
You play an adjunct art professor. I’d like to write what seems like crime drama taking place in the college (in that the inciting incident would be deciding to make off with some art work) but gradually would explore some of the complex racial and financial dynamics at play in a ruined Southern Baptist tribal university. South Eastern Indian culture was so thoroughly eradicated that what remains is largely a construct; there’s also the ethics of stealing, and then the escape itself.
My technical skills aren’t too bad. Besides a somewhat experimental body of work (my most recent creative essay was for a cryptocurrency magazine and was a ‘decentralized history of Bitcoin’) I have experience writing copy for games (I used to be the editorial lead for a serious game called PlaytheNewsGame). And I would imagine keeping this to about four potential endings (meaning lots of overlapping forks). My programming skills are limited to basic HTML for now but am willing and eager to learn.
Read his writing…
There’s a lot of it. You’re welcome to dive into the pile. But the damn thing is riddled with bit-rot and paywalls. So let me offer suggestions and an occasional link to a Google doc or Web Archive.
Care for some awful situationist poetry? (Why We Trash Hotel Rooms). This one is better: (Armour Brand Thyroid Bottle). This one was given the Gordon Lish treatment by a teenage editor but was better for it: (The Op in the Expanded Field) and reprinted by Wake Forest Press in a handsome volume.
Before I forget: here’s a combination of personal memoir with archival images I found from grandfather’s exploration of the Amazon: My Grandfather’s Imposter.
Here’s a link to my Amazon page: (James McGirk) There you’ll find my Kindle Singles. Here’s a piece I did for The Paris Review. (Satan Comes to Oklahoma City: Facing Fears in the Sooner State).
If you read my personal statement you’ve already read the first place winner of the 2016 Oklahoma Society for Professional Journalists Best Writing Award. This one, published in the much-missed THIS LAND PRESS, is typical of what I enjoy writing the most: (The Horror of the Ouachita Mountains). Here’s one about Vaporwave: (The New Flesh PDF, page 95). I gave a condensed version of it as a speech at the Oklahoma Innovation Institute’s annual conference — which was a massive thing sponsored by Texas Instruments and I was sandwiched between three pipeline corrosion experts and my slide show of “sexual golf” was deemed quite peculiar.
Let me close with a link to my last Bitcoin story, it’s interactive, I wrote a deconstructed history of Bitcoin for 21Cryptos Magazine (A Deconstructed History of Bitcoin’s Last Decade). 1F24KqhGNCnEVvAPcq2Z41BkrAb8PRq91h
Exchanges in the Crosshairs
Check out my latest article in 21Cryptos describing the SEC’s crackdown on the crypto.
The Next Bull
October’s Issue of 21Cryptos
Check out my latest cover story in 21cryptos magazine. I spoke with a couple of experts who were approaching crypto from different philosophies and found they both came to a remarkably similar conclusion. Plus analysis with behavior economics, 4chan/biz mythology and tiny bubble lore.
Supermodel!
The Plot(s) to Stabilize Venzuela
Latest article for 21Cryptos magazine. Saving the world’s worst economic crisis with Cryptocurrency – discusses a few recent attempts by crypto-currency companies and foundations to stabilize Venezuelan hyper-inflation by increasing the adoption of crypto-currencies.
“The New Flesh” essay in Angel City Review
PDF link to the magazine.
Awarded Art 365 Grant
Amy and I were selected as 2017 Art 365 artists by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.
South China Morning Post Reviews “A Grand Theory…”
Grand Theory of Everything
by James McGirk
Amazon Digital Services (e-book)
Perhaps “strange chemicals”, and large quantities of alcohol, have affected the way James McGirk thinks. For A Grand Theory of Everything is odd – deep but also shallow, and meaningless, unless you too have careened through life trying to make sense of stuff. That will include many, although few will have had his upbringing, living as a “princeling”. As an Anglo-American teenager growing up in New Delhi with journalist parents, his was a third-culture existence, heightened by hard drugs, which he took to expand his mind and become a psychedelic astronaut. Then, everything was like an onion, wrapped around a core of nothingness. His theory of everything shifts when he encounters Colonel John Boyd, developer of the OODA loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. The premise is that by acting faster than an opponent you will appear unpredictable to them and have the upper hand. Readers will wonder whether this Kindle Single was the result of a bad trip.