welcome to

t a l l a h a s s e e     b e a c h

j. s. clark, your host

Since retiring in 2020, I've been doing more writing (including a few public performances/readings) and building up my guitar skills with an eye toward eventually playing in public. I've also been geeking out over gardening with native plants. When I was stuck at home during the Pandemic, I got (back) into scale modeling for sanity and have had lots of fun with that--in part a replacement for my erstwhile longtime obsession with antique Volkswagens.

Other than that, I like to travel, camp, paddle, snorkel, bodysurf, drink craft beer, listen to live music, and visit with friends and family—including my two excellent grandchildren. Not necessarily in that order.

Writerly Things. I have a long-term weird-fiction project and am working on ideas for making it more accessible online, perhaps via Substack. Stay tuned; for now you can read some examples here. I've written and edited quite a wide variety of technical, academic, and educational materials over the years. I've posted some of my essays (formal and otherwise) on my occasional blog, What've I Done?.

Photography. I especially enjoy photographing Florida's natural environment and documenting my travels. Simulacra, my Flickr account, is where most of my work ends up, but I've also recently been experimenting with pixelfed.

Previous Life in Academe:

I retired from the faculty at Florida State University in May 2020 after a long career teaching Communication and consulting in instructional technology and online learning, primarily on college campuses. A Curriculum Vitae provides professional details and links.

I blogged and tweeted pretty regularly between 2005-2015 when I was up to my eyeballs in New Media. Much of that deathless prose is archived on Virtually Natural and it's amusing to go back and look at all the stuff that was coming along then.

When I went back for a Ph.D. in 2006—a dream long deferred—I became interested in environmental communication, visual rhetoric, rhetorics of museums and monuments, and gender theory. One thread led to immersive, three-dimensional virtual spaces like Second Life, culminating in a now-archived OpenSim project intended to evoke "Florida." See a video tour. You can also view a rough draft video tour of an OpenSim virtual FSU campus that I created as a sabbatical project. A "fictional autoethnography" about gender performance in virtual worlds, Virtually Queer, continues to get more attention than just about anything else I've published in academia, which tickles me enormously.

Terminal degree: Ph.D. in Communication (2014) with an emphasis in environmental rhetoric and new media. A few publications, including a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks, as well as unconventional things like multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima, are listed in the CV. My dissertation was a critical/interpretive project on the way the natural world is represented in virtual ones—and the resulting ambiguities in the meanings of "natural," "virtual," and "real." Yes, I had a fecking ball with it.