Manifesto Games

PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! —Manifesto Games Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture.

To Boldly Go: The End of Star Trek and Star Wars

No individual has made billions off Star Trek—although that franchise, too, has its own mountains of merchandise, including toys, video games, and hundreds of books. More impressive than its merchandise and its profits, though, is its monumental amount of screen-time. Since the first broadcast of the first episode on September 8, 1966, there have been…

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution

WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought…

Comfortably Numb

I wonder what they call it when you can’t think of what to write in a weblog? Writer’s Blog, weblock? —Anna-Marie —Comfortably Numb (ilex) One of Mike Vitia‘s students coins a term. Students in several of my classes are engaging in drive-by blogging, which is the flurry of entries that one posts just before the blogging…

Video games actually can be good for you

In addition to a Sony PlayStation 2, the family has some special equipment: a S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames system that consists of a special controller, a helmet with built-in sensors for monitoring brain activity and a Smartbox that receives the brain signals. As long as the boys remain calmly focused on the game, it plays normally, says…

Austrian national anthem 'sexist'

—Austrian national anthem ‘sexist’ (BBC) Should that caption read “Austrian schoolchildren are taught the national anthem during solar eclipses”? I can’t imagine why else they might be wearing those goggles. I don’t mean to make light of the subject. I’ve written a handout on gender-neutral language, and in my American Lit class, we discussed the ritualistic…

What is Uni-Screw?

Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?. Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As…

The road less traveled: telegraph stamps

In these days of instant messaging, e-mail, videophones and nearly instantaneous satellite communication with all parts of the world, the idea of communicating by telegraph is perhaps best described as “quaint.” However, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact that the telegraph had on worldwide communications at the time of its introduction. —The road…