With the seconds ticking down to a studio discussion about a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles’ record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication. Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to…
You’re sick, so you stay with your germs in bed. I’ll get you some trail mix so you don’t go poking around the hearse. — my wifeFreudian Slip (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Yes, she really said “hearse.” I’m not that sick, but it’s true that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. I have…
In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist’s zillion competing ideas?an internal, self-contradicting mob?and focus them into a coherent work. Mind you, online collaborators are finding…
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. Why would I go and do that? What are you, stupid? That is so stupid. —Delicious Pundit —Chris Berman Slash Poetry (Deadspin) Student Matt Hampton sent me this link. Thanks for the laugh, Matt!
“A lot of students in their early education do not get a very good grounding from their instructors about when it’s acceptable to use somebody else’s material,” says Jane Kirtley, who teaches Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. “There’s also a sense among students today that if it’s something they can find…
In some respects, the students are right: Professors are to blame. We cultivate students’ unmerited pride with high praise for mediocre work. And we tolerate all of the other sins by abdicating responsibility for the culture of our classrooms. Again and again, I have heard students say their classes are so easy that almost no…
In any field, it’s important to keep track of the underdogs — the new developments and theories, the older hypotheses once thought exhausted of information. Doesn’t matter if you’re in writing, physics, psychology, or athletics, keeping a broad horizon pays off. That’s what I’m doing here — showing you the underdogs of gaming. You might…
This allows us to see the underlying problem of digital game studies: ‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’ alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement. The reason for this is to be found in the history of game studies: once upon a time, videogames were only taken seriously by psychologists. They would…
The archetype of the mad scientist was Rotwang in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Rotwang had unruly hair, a disabled hand, and obsessive research interests. He worked alone, and although he lived in a modern city that his inventions made function, he was like a 16th-century alchemist. —The Scientist on Camera (Slate) Hmm……
Millman, whose essay is called “Game Theory,” sees “Lost’s” structure attracting fans via familiarity: She thinks it works like an interactive video game. “The story line and the action develop on multiple levels. There are hidden clues that function like the Easter eggs in gaming,” says Millman. “‘Lost” is a big game, and the act…
— Reinhold Grether —Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft) Designed for courses “Theater and the Internet” & “The Digital Arena.”
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. “The language is created by the culture,” says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: “Live here and now.” The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being…
—Windows Noises by Colin Staples (Albino Blacksheep) Cool Flash movie.
My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to…
I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that’s a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I’ve been working on…
Timbuktu and SHU (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Seton Hill University’s summer reading book is Timbuktu, a shaggy dog story. (Only the dog’s not so shaggy.) I stated reading while proctoring a final exam yesterday, and I finished it that evening during my son’s piano lesson. Reading the whole book (less than 200 pages) couldn’t have taken more…
Photon vs Electron (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son at age 8 is turning out to be quite the science geek. While I was driving him home from piano lesson today, he asked me whether an electron is the smallest thing in the universe. I took at stab at it and guessed that maybe a photon is…
Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. […] Troubled as the world may be today,…
Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The…
In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground is a hobbit hole. “That means comfort.” —Brian Slesinsky has some fun with Inform 7…