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Lego faces are getting angrier, study finds

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The headline is hype. How about “Lego faces are getting more diverse?” That would be just as true, and less misleading. Many of the recent sets come with heads that you can rotate — a happy face on one side, a scared or angry face on the other side. So it’s also true that Lego [...]

Games | Media | Modding | PopCult

DC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital Comics

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It’s rather hard to believe it took them so long.

DC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital Comics.

Games | Literacy | Media | Modding | Writing

Texty Cloak of Darkness in Prose

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Below is a snippet from “Texty Cloak of Darkness,” which aims to use prose conventions to emulate game-state changes and alternate endings (in a medium designed to be linear).

Since our encounter, such as it is, has already begun, it may as well happen in a place.

The foyer of the opera house is where [...]

Culture | Cyberculture | Education | Essays | Humanities | Literacy | Media | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology

Students say “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right. –Mathematician Paul Lockhart

I am working on some conference papers that touch on coding as a liberal art. While reviewing classics, like Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line and Knuth’s approach to “Literate Programming,”

From the insightful and quirky “A Mathematician’s Lament,” by Paul Lockhart.

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Humanities | Language | Media | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology

Melissa Terras Reports Her Success in Making Digital Humanities More Inclusive

A pleasant little success story. “TEI” is the “Text Encoding Initiative,” an international effort to define and standardize the digital representation of texts.

[I]n 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of ISO5218:2004 to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being given as 1 for male, 2 for [...]

Culture | Essays | Modding | Rhetoric

Fortunate People Say No

A thoughtful response to “Creative People Say No.”

Here’s a different idea about how creativity and success works: you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

10 Developer Tips To Build A Responsive Website [Infographic] – ReadWrite

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The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do.

“I think the challenge for me is to use [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Games | Media | Modding | Writing

Iffy “Cloak of Darkness” on Inform7/Parchment

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“Iffy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification – a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments.

“Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion [...]

Aesthetics | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Games | Modding | Social_Software

Scratchy “Cloak of Darkness” on Scratch

“Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments.

“Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion [...]

Academia | Culture | Essays | Ethics | Modding | Rhetoric | Writing

Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?

Great example of satire. Blogging this so I can find it the next time I need a contemporary example (and when I want to start a class discussion about gender).

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play [...]