CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
The Dictionary Game (see also Fictionary) turns a serious reference book into a gaming generator; the dictionary is playfully transformed from a tool for decoding puzzling words into a puzzle-making machine, where whimsically fake definitions take the stage. But could any book, spontaneously pulled off the shelf, be transformed into a playfulness machine? Could one’s entire home library be a gaming center? That’s the lofty goal of a new publication that offers, among other oddities, cut-out paper spectacles for seeing more than is readily apparent in any book.
Please note that our Machinarium Verbosus is a book for the few—the very few. If it’s important to one’s psychological well-being that the machinations of the Universe be neat and
tidy and wholly comprehensible by the human mind, then absolutely do not proceed with
this book’s experiments. Let this constitute a very serious warning: do not take these experiments
lightly, as any one of them may induce an existential crisis.
![The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine](/weblog/images/covers/ghost-scanning-machine.png)
