I'm Patrick Mooney, a graduate student in the M.A./Ph.D. program offered by the English department at UC Santa Barbara. I'm broadly interested in modernism, including broad social changes throughout the 19th century and the way that the later 20th century responds to later socioeconomic changes in the postmodernist movement. I'm a materialist critic and theorist with an interest in mythology and other broadly constructive systems; in epistemological questions, especially relating to identity; in sex and sexuality; in technology; and in Utopian literature and science fiction.
I did the first half of my undergraduate work at Southwestern Oregon Community College, graduating valedictorian and Phi Theta Kappa, with several awards from various departments. I did the second half of my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, graduating with a B.A. in English literature after spending a semester at the Universität Bayreuth in Germany and writing a bachelor's thesis on Oscar Wilde. In June 2011, I passed my oral qualifying exams, the last requirement for my M.A. in English at UCSB, and will begin working toward my Ph.D. at UCSB in the fall of 2011.
Make America Sad! Again, another experiment in automatically generated text. This one trains a Markov chain-based text generator on the tweets of Donald Trump.
The Worst of Bad Lovecraft, a Tumblr account containing automatically generated short stories based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
Ulysses Redux, a blog consisting of novels written automatically by training a Markov chain–based text generator on James Joyce's Ulysses and on a rotating selection of other texts.
Libido Mechanica, a blog consisting of love poems written automatically by training a Markov chain–based text generator on a changing selection of human-written love poems.
personal Tumblr account, which is more of a commonplace book and collection of short snippets and observations than it is anything else.
Finally, you may wish to download a vCard for me, or use my PGP Key when reaching me. You may also want to point some sort of tool at my FOAF description. (If we're personally acquainted, you may want to be referenced in my FOAF description, as well. Let me know if this is the case.)