"Reviews of This Book" Sample Reviews

From Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas
If there's anything postmodern culture doesn't need is another piece of self-referential pop-culture noodling. And guess who's putting this one together. You guessed it. That prom queen of all things meta - Douglas Hofstadter. Note to Mister Hofstadter: just because Scary Movie 3 talks about how crappy parodies of scary movies are, doesn't make it any better. Still, the book starts out with the best of intentions. Compile a book of literary reviews - reviews of that self-same book. He's even got a complicated algorithm worked out to make it happen wherein the critics send samples of their reviews to each other as they write them. It could have been interesting, but he forgot the most important point; that most critics don't read the book they're reviewing and they sure don't read reviews by other critics.

—July 12th, 2004

Archives

  1. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
  2. Fun With Google Voice Transcripts
  3. Begging the Question
  4. The Hitchhikers Guide to Unseemly Video Arcades
  5. A Self-Replicating Treasure Trove of Oddities
  6. Taking This Writing-Programming Thing Too Far
  7. Socialism American-Style and Post-Modern Industrialization
  8. My First Taste of Unbridled Nerd Wrath
  9. Uncategorized Concepts
  10. The Never-Ending Pixelated Vision Quest
  11. A Cynic's Home Companion
  12. The Over-Quantified Self
  13. The Unspoken Truth About Programming
  14. Sleepwalking in the Insanitorium
  15. Rules For Radicals
  16. An Alternate Guide to the Nation's Capitol (part I)
  17. In the Void of Radio
  18. What is a Depression Hug?
  19. Street Algorithms
  20. Damn, This is Pussy Fever
  21. Un Bon Petit Diable
  22. The Microbe Song
  23. In the Days of Ambergris
  24. Armchair Leftist Options
  25. Art Film Continuity Errors
  26. Overly-Friendly Cashier Obviously the Manager
  27. The Last Frontier
  28. The Originality-Turing Test
  29. Renewing the Social Contract
  30. Paradox of Talent
  31. The King of Mumblecore
  32. Quality Filtration
  33. The Purposeless-Driven Site
  34. Intervention Story
  35. Frenchetarianism
  36. New Trends in +50s Housing
  37. Distributed Social Networking Schema
  38. Interactive Time Consumption
  39. How Clean Was My Alley
  40. Nanowash
  41. Abusing the Lexicon
  42. Sinusoidal Agnosticism
  43. Coincidental Freebasing
  44. Brian Eno's Obsolete Strategies
  45. Magic Rock
  46. Lamentations of Viral Marketing
  47. DIY Aesthetic Pyramid Schemes
  48. Confluence of Aphorisms
  49. Last Ditch Comic Book Adaptations
  50. Most Popular Serial Killer Names
  51. Logical Punctuation Rules II
  52. Logical Punctuation Rules
  53. Mexican Reference Stand-Off
  54. True Mind Hacks
  55. Unique Naming
  56. Social Equivalence Security Regulation via Name Dropping
  57. Miscellaneous Conspiracy Theories
  58. Prefabricated McNugget Shapes
  59. Life in Bill Gates's House
  60. Psychoanalysis of Common TV/Movie Scripts
  61. Strangely Ignored Signs of the Apocalypse
  62. New Urban Legend
  63. The Seven Wonders of the Postmodern World
  64. Overly-Emphatic Newspaper Headline Verbs
  65. How to Dehumidify D.C.
  66. The Different Types of Internet Writing
  67. New Versions of Dungeons & Dragons
  68. Non-Fictional Storytelling
  69. Punchlines Without Jokes For Modern Times
  70. Worst Trick Endings
  71. Improvements to Underground Railroads
  72. "Reviews of This Book" Sample Reviews
  73. LSD Adventures of Note
  74. New Synonyms for Fetish Maneuvers or Ethnic Varieties of Everyday Things
  75. Critical Analysis
  76. Theme Restaurants
  77. Unaired Night Gallery Episodes
  78. Concept Bands
  79. $5 Product Ideas
  80. Useless Political Terminology
  81. How to Gentrify a Neighborhood
  82. New World Order: The Board Game!
  83. NPR Radio Personalities
  84. I Blame Society: College Essays I Have Written