Technology: May 2004 Archive Page

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I've created or added to a handful of Wikipedia articles over the years (usability, interactive fiction, Elia Kazan, Rossum's Universal Robots), and I've also (briefly) had students work on articles for brief exercises.

One day I hit the the "random article" button and found myself reading a creepy but very informative article about snipers... then a few months later, when the Beltway Sniper was in the news, I felt very informed about the whole matter.

It looks like Wikipedia has recently added community and magazine-like features, in an apparent effort to compete with pay sites like the one for Encyclopedia Britannica.

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations. --How to become an obnoxious internet cam whore in five easy steps.  (Maddox)

Just in case this professor gig doesn't work out, thanks to Torill, I might have an alternative.

The pictures on the site are hilarious -- and the text is spot on.

The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" said one message. "Yes," came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder. --Helen Carter --Bizarre tale of boy who used internet to plot his own murder (Guardian)

There's a postmodernist seminar paper in this news story. Talk about "death of the author". Definitely a made-for-TV movie, since it confirms all the worst fears that the traditional media like to stoke regarding the Internet.

This detail stuck out to me:

Police were able to link all the fictional characters back to John because Ms Hogg's analysis discovered common features in the typing style, such as the misspelling of "maybe" as "mybye", of all the characters.

Traditional sources of water collection are from dams, springs, rivers, streams and farm reservoirs, with the introduction of boreholes where these traditional sources of water are unavailable. Until now such boreholes have been operated by handpumps as the use of modern alternatives such as diesel, petrol or electric pumps are costly to install and have the concomitant constant financial burden of fuel and maintenance costs. --Children's roundabout solves the water problem in remote areas (www.roundabout.co.za)

Harnessing the energy of kids playing. Not as efficient as the system featured in The Matrix, perhaps, but still innovative.

I wonder, though... if, as the manufacturer's website says, the chore of carrying water has traditionally fallen to women and children, what will happen when a community depends on a patented roundabout play pump for its water?

My culture teaches me to let kids be kids, and not to give them too many chores. I don't know enough about the cultures being served by this invention to know whether people really would starve, or perhaps not draw enough water for proper hygeine, if the kids didn't have "fun" while doing it. By making water-drawing "fun", is that training a generation of kids not to do anything that isn't fun?

The pump installation also features billboards, two of which are designed to carry health messages, and two more designed to carry local advertising. The income from the advertising is supposed to pay for the maintenance of the facility.

In America we tend to be very sensitive about the presence of advertisements in playgrounds. I personally feel like a sell-out whenever I take the kids to a McDonaldland play gym.

Via metafilter, which points to some interesting discussion on worldchanging.

Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years. --Carolyn Thompson --Spammer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison (AP/MyWay)

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Should you happen to find yourself captivated watching slender Lara bound lithely through Tomb Raider's dark, moist-looking caverns, you will do so without quite forgetting that Lara is, in a sense, you. Like the stranded Marine in Doom, the progenitor of first-person shooters, Lara awaits your input before she makes her decisions. Lara and Doom's Marine both look where you look, and their bodies intrude on the screen to stand in for yours. A primary difference is that the sole bodily presence of Doom's Marine is a hirsute arm, gripping a phallic, super-lethal weapon that bobs stiffly in time with his stealthy walk. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't rather be Lara. She is far more nuanced. Self-possessed in her hip-swaying walk but spry and potent when she leaps and scrambles, she has the build of a rock-climber and the carriage of an elegant socialite. --Mike Ward --Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi (Pop Matters)

As Mike Vitia notes in a recent comment, this pre-Jolie article is dated now, but it's well worth reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

I do find it limiting when I consider the set of assumptions that cinema experts bring to videogames. For example, Ward here waits until near the end to dicsuss the controls (keyboard in this case, when most dedicated players are probably using a hand-held controller).

As Peter Rojas points out in Engadget, it was not actually a mainstream news source which first reported Rumsfeld as saying: "To protect the Iraqi prisoners from any future abuses; any digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones with cameras are strictly prohibited anywhere in any military compound in Iraq." That statement was actually a satirical story from The Daily Farce.

Now, a series of other reports and comments have followed, suggesting that reality may have imitated comedy. Over the weekend, several news items appeared, which seem to quote Rumsfeld, but actually use the phrase from The Daily Farce word for word. --Guy Kewney --Did Rumsfeld ban Iraq camera phones? (Register)

The perception and use of an avatar - as the primary means of agency in online environments - might be expected to be shaped by the motivations for participating in the environment. In particular, goal-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as tools/pawns to achieve goals, thereby encouraging a preference for 3PP that objectifies and externalizes the avatar, whereas relationship-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as representations of themselves in a social environment, thereby encouraging identification and treating the avatar as the self through 1PP. This would also be supported by the age differences given that younger players tend to be more achievement-driven. In other words, I argue that more fundamental motivational differences are driving the gender and age differences. --Nick Yee --It's a Matter of Perspective (Terra Nova)

Interesting data... Male users were more likely to prefer third-person perspective, while female users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective. Older users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective, while younger users were more likely to prefer third-person.

How much of this is simply becasue it's much easier now to render 3-d worlds on the fly, and to rotate these worlds or make parts of it transparent, so that the player's perspective isn't blocked by walls or other obstacles? Thus, those of us who played graphic games in Ye Olde Days were playing on systems that forced designers to conserve resources whenever possible, and hiding the player (except for an animated shield or sword sweeping through the frame) freed up precious resources for the animation of opponents.

Of course, if it's true that the old gamers included a higher proportion of men, is it significant that new gamers are more likely to prefer the perspective more frequently favored by women? Does it matter whether the men are playing perhaps a half-naked elf babe, as opposed to a muscle-bound, attack-abosrbing brick who wasn't designed with aesthetics in mind?

I just noticed in the discussion at Terra Nova that women are actually more prevalent among the older gamers. Go figure.

I've been playing Morrowind in brief snatches... when I'm up close and in person with the bad guys, I find it disorienting when they slip around behind me or sidestep. I haven't thought of switching to 3PP for battle sequences, because I'm playing a mage and thus would prefer to shoot fireballs from a distance. Still, the occasional rat who scurries about my ankles is annoying enough that maybe 3PP would help.

It looks like the charts on the site were initially posted incorrectly; they've been corrected (according to Yee) but that makes some of the first comments confusing.

Since I started using computers, they've become almost a million times more powerful. Although big computers can be alienating, their evolution generally leads to a better user experience.... Although the bigger, newer mainframe had an actual CRT screen, it also had obscure commands and horrible usability. Worst of all, it was highly alienating because you had no idea what was going on. You'd issue commands, and some time later you might get the desired result. There was no feeling of mastery of the machine. You were basically a supplicant to a magic oracle functioning beyond the ken of humankind. --Jakob Nielsen --Thirty Years With Computers (Alertbox)

3.5 million for heaven.
3.9 million for hell.
9.4 million for Florida. --Bruce Stockler --On the Web, in the HeartNew York Times)

An extremely interesting example of using rhetoric to organize data.

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which will be artistic contributions themselves. --Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short --Mystery House Taken Over (Turbulence)

This proposal is one of several that garnered $5000 from the 2004 Turbulene competition. Congrats!

A Requiem for the Bookmark: Refresh That, Favor This

From time to time, when teaching students about the Internet, I catch myself telling students to "hit reload or suggesting that they "bookmark that."

These are Netscape-era terms, and while Internet Explorer is dominant now, I can't seem to unlearn those terms.

It's a simple matter to correct myself and say, "Sorry, I meant, 'hit refresh,'" but saying 'Add it to My Favorites" is clunky, and telling them to "favor it" is meaningless.

Microsoft uses "bookmark" to refer to something completely different.

Flames shot up around a 21-year-old college student whose cell phone rang while he was pumping gas.
--Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire (http://www.cbsnews.com)

I'm glad the guy wasn't hurt.

If we could rig up something similar in classrooms and theatres, I bet people would remember to shut off their ringers.

The graphic shows what looks like a female hand covered in flames behind a fancy flip-tip PDA phone that's hovering in the air. It's a right hand with a ring on it... and are those age spots? I wonder if viewers ask themselves questions about whether the graphic artist knew what brand the telephone was? Is this particular cell phone is recognizable enough that people may be put off from buying it, perhaps associating "big flip-up screen" with "will cause gasoline to explode"?

While I recognize that people like having images, I'm always suspicious and annoyed at the graphics that are created out of thin air to entertain TV viewers who will switch to other channels if there isn't enough eye candy. The fact that the stations have to put resources into the creation of fictionalized graphics in order to keep their market share, rather than hiring more reporters or fact-checkers, is one reason why it's so easy to produce polished TV that is shoddy journalism. (I don't mean that this particular story is shoddy journalism... it's the graphic that I'm talking about.)

--Playing with 'Web Album Generator'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've got a huge backlog of digital images that I've wanted to post online... I'm using Web Album Generator, which automates the navigation and the thumbnail.

Now making a collection of images is a lot less fiddly -- though I wish it offered some way to add a comment to the main page, or at least a way to link out to some other page besides Web Album Generator's home page. I can probably figure out a way to do that through the style sheet, but I wish there just a box to type in.

But the surprise for Xbox was Advent Rising from Majesco, a super-stylish "Star Wars"-meets-"The Matrix" action adventure, which is being written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, best known for the "Ender's Game" series of novels. When writers of his caliber want to work on videogames, it's more proof that electronic entertainment is no passing fad. --N'Gai Croal
--Technology: Your Next Videogame (http://msnbc.msn.com)

Movable Mena?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Six hundred trackbacks, and Six Apart backtracks... partly.

You are a student. That should be enough to depress you in these tough economic Liberal dominated times, but you are troubled by a weightier burden - ITEC802. What you though would be a nice little romp in the woods has turned out to be tougher than finding weapons of mass distruction.

You want your life back. --Dave's Stupid Adventure Game Final (IETC 802, Macquarie University)

A final exam in this programming course is to create an interactive fiction game... the excerpt is part of the game's prologue. The original file is a PDF.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.

More simply, Wordpress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. --WordPress

Well, that's enough MT freakout for today. Still waiting to hear back form SixApart.

mmmmmmm Free beer..... GULP GULP GULP.. mmm MORE free beer GULP GULP GULP... (footstep) (footstep) (footstep) "HEY! stop blocking the bathroom door man, i gotta pee... What do you mean its $25 to use the bathroom!!! This is an OUTRAGE!!!" --Re:Good example of why open source != free (Slashdot)

Movable Type isn't an open source product, but this is an interesting comment attached to discussion of the Movable Type pricing change.

Last night I got word from our ISP that blogs.setonhill.edu will be down sometime this weekend.

The reason is that the physical machine on which our blogs reside is being transferred from one owner to the other.

The new owner plans to continue service as usual, so if all goes well, your blogging pleasures will be briefly interrupted, but should continue as usual.

I'm backing up the site in another window as I type this, and the ISP is burning a copy of the whole thing onto a CD which will go along with the machine, but it wouldn't hurt if you backed up your own site, too. --Blog Outage Coming (Really) (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

FYI... since the announcement won't actually be visible on the site when it goes down.

MT has become crippleware, and *expensive* crippleware! No one is happy about it, and I only wonder what Six Apart were thinking when they did this.

[...]

I find it difficult to believe that Six Apart have done this ... after the history of offering a fully featured free version, I suspected that they may have a more featured pay version, but not a limited, restricted release. The present free version, limited to one author and three blogs is great, fine, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's needs it fits, but it doesn't fit mine.

I'm actually quite appaled by this move. I've been watching the alpha, and beta forums and blogs, I've reported bugs etc, and not once did I see this coming.

The community is in uproar right now, I can only imagine the droves of people who will abandon MT now. I'm sticking with this, fully featured, non crippled beta for a while, it does what I need, but eventually, I may have to leave for something else. --Show me the money! (Blogroll.org)

Oh, crap. This doesn't look good...

Previously educational versions had been free, but now educators are invited to contact the company for discounted pricing.

I don't begrudge a company trying to make money from its software, but I certainly hope the pricing is reasonable.

It's rather amusing that MoveableType's own "trackback" innovation shows how many bloggers are unhappy with the announcement on the MoveableType website.

Search giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches and for keeping its home page religiously free of banner advertising. --Google to sell banner ads (ZD Net)

I'm still waiting to hear back from Six Apart regarding their educational license fee, but here's hoping that Six Apart and Google will both resist the power of the Dark Side.

Today I'm feeling something like the way I felt when I learned the sweet, intelligent Catholic girl I had a crush on the summer after high school was a fan of heavy metal music. More pedestals have come crashing down!

Blogging since 1999 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It occurrs to me that it was shortly after I turned in my final grades in Spring, 1999 -- six five years ago -- that I started tinkering with the table of contents page for my collection of online handouts. I thought that, instead of just posting links to the resources I recommended, I would write a short evaluative blurb. I kept doing that on a regular basis, and before I knew it, I was blogging.

And I mean "before I knew it" in the literal sense -- I didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, and that was only in a reference to a Wired article on the weblog phenomenon. What I did on my site changed as I came into contact with other blogs. Of course, my former student Will Gayther's addition of the code for attaching comments to blog entries less than a year ago was also a big change. (I can't thank him enough for his creativity and generosity.)

I started adding dates on July 20, 1999 (when it seemed important to note that I was writing a brief blurb on the history of the moon landing on the 30th anniversary of the event).

I won't bore you with a repeat of the history of my blog, but hey, what's a blog for if not a repository for one's random thoughts.

Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It just occurred to me that for someone who's supposedly a core member of the online group F:F:F, Cayce Pollard doesn't really spend that much time reading or posting.

I've spent most of this academic year away from the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, and as I finished grades for this term, I spent just a few days in lurking mode on several of my favorite blogs, and I feel so far behind!

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

• 100% of entering college freshman play games
• 65% call themselves regular game players
• 48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"
• 32% play during classes

With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them. --Education Arcade, day 1 (Water Cooler Games)

Glad to see Ian is braving "The Dangers of Academic Blogging" to give his ground's-eye view of what looks like an important conference. Perhaps Wired will have more later, but at the moment I'm not impressed by its coverage.

One panel featured Wagner James Au, James Paul Gee, Warren Spector, and Brenda Laurel. What a line-up! I'd also like to have heard what Royal Shakespeare member Tom Piper had to say about a collaboration with MIT.

Europe's Mars Express probe has sent back detailed images of a region of the Red Planet that was shaped by intensive continental plate activity.

--Image Reveals Mars' Active Past (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Neha.

The truth about the campaign, which Mini USA and Crispin Porter call "interactive fiction," is to be finally revealed this month. Wall posters are to go up in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, featuring the Mini Cooper logo above images of the "motorbots." Those images will also turn up on the brand's official Web site (miniusa.com).

The goal of the unconventional campaign - the most recent in an innovative series from Crispin Porter since the Mini Cooper came out in March 2002 - is to help generate that elusive quality known as buzz for the car, particularly among mechanical-minded male drivers who may be put off by women's praise of it as cute. --Stuart Elliott --Pursuing Marketing Buzz (NY Times (will expire))

An ad agency has "concocted an elaborate advertising campaign disguised as a debate over whether a British engineer has built robots out of Mini car parts".

The retro design of "Colin Mayhew's home page" is appeaing, though overall the whole thing is so slick with advertising money that it simply doesn't look cheesey enough to be real.

All in all this campaign is very reminiscent of Bigredhair's more engaging and creative treatment of "Biolerplate."

I'm not at all comfortable with the the ethics of putting deliberately false information out there on the Internet, when the purpose is to draw attention to a real product. For some reason, I was less bothered by the hype around the Blair Witch Project or the game that went along with the movie Artificial intelligence. But this seems somehow to be crossing the line.

Imagine how quickly the slaughter of innocents at My Lai would have become known had it been captured by a palm-sized digital camera (or phone) instead of reported by letter.

What does this mean for journalism?

First, it converts all camera-toting participants of an event into potential irrefutable witnesses and therefore sources.

Second, these witnesses also have the capability to become citizen reporters (who may or may not attempt to "report" journalistically and instead prefer to "show" a version of an event from their own viewpoint).

Third, it further dilutes the traditional role of mainstream journalists as the primary providers of news. As more citizens become not only subjects and sources but also reporters, professional journalists are increasingly disintermediated.

The deflation of high technology into everyday tools usable by anyone redefines journalism's core function (reporting what happened) from the practice of an elite few to a possibility for many.

--Tim Porter --Digital Proof, Human Source (First Draft by Tim Porter)

A provocative discussion of how technology is changing journalism. The simple fact that anyone can be a journalist does not devalue the training that makes a journalist fair and comprehensive in his or her coverage... in fact, greater access to technology means that more people shoudl be exposed to that kind of training (if only so they can recognize biased or suspect sources when they encounter them, since they are less likely to be filtered out of the news pool by gate-keeping professionals).

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Sheet music began to have cars on the cover almost as soon as the automobile was invented. Some songs, like The Swagger Two-Step, didn’t have lyrics, and so the car on the front, along with the opulently dressed couple, seem to have been part of the illustrator’s attempt to make the tune symbolize wealth and class privilege.... Despite the fact that there were only about 8,000 cars in the United States at the time, the illustrator made the automobile more visually prominent than the trolley, perhaps to suggest that the song was modern and urbane. --Cars! Cars! Cars! (Smithsonian Institute)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Because digital cameras have features like automatic focus, they have made it easy for anyone to take technically good photographs. "You no longer have to have someone standing in bright sunlight to get a good picture of them," Howe said.

Combine that with Internet connections that have made it easy to send pictures in seconds, and images of the war that previously might not have been seen have found an enormous international audience. --Digital Cameras Change Iraq War Perception (Newsday/AP)

After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever. Just as TiVo lets you watch TV more efficiently, RSS readers do the same by letting you scan your favorite blogs and news sites faster or letting you cast your net over a wider range of material. --J.D. Lasica --Surf's Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing (Online Journalism Review)

I'm only just starting to get into this habit, but I will probably try to use it to keep tabs on my student blogs next fall.

From the "Throwing it Out There to See What Sticks Deptartment" here are some very raw thoughts about the various types of Weblog posts for teachers and students and where they fit on my very indistinct blogging scale:

• Posting assignments. (Not blogging)
• Journaling, i.e. "This is what I did today." (Not blogging)
• Posting links (Not blogging)
• Links with descriptive annotation, i.e. "This site is about..." (Not really blogging either, but getting close depending on the depth of the description.)
• Links with analysis that gets into the meaning of the content being linked. (A simple form of blogging.)
• Reflective, meta-cognitive writing on practice without links. (Complex writing, but simple blogging, I think. Commenting would probably fall in here somewhere.)
• Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience response in mind. (Real blogging)
• Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments. (Complex blogging)

--Will R. --Blogging Thoughts...Again (Weblogg-ed)

A very useful off-the-cuff taxonomy.

I'd disagree that "This is what I did today" is necessarily not blogging. How many of us have reached for a kitchen knife when we know we've got a little plastic box with screwdrivers of different sizes in a box somewhere in the basement? In a pinch, I'll use a rock if the rock is handy and the hammer isn't. Thus, a blog can still contain some traditional journaling (and some postings of assignments and traditional "lists of links") and some and still be valuable as a blog. The problem is if the educator doesn't do (or hardly does) any of the advanced things that blogs really are good at doing.

Update, 08 May: Will follows up with a good explanation of his position.

Right now, roses can be grown in lots of different shades, including pink, yellow, peach, and even green. But blue roses can only be created artificially; one way is to fresh cut flowers and put their stems in blue-colored water. This is not permanent, and doesn't create a true blue rose. --Karen Lurie --Roses are Blue  (Science Central)

In Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, the gentleman caller remembers that his nickname for the wallflower Laura was "Blue Roses," because that's what he thought she said when she told him she had been absent on account of "pleurosis". It's a touching scene, especially because Jim only remembers it haltingly, while Laura recalls more details, as if it only happened yesterday for her.

Note that this article is a summary of scholarship published elsewhere. I wish more online journalists would credit their sources this way, though I recognize it's not the responsibility of web designers and journalists to correct the sloppiness of students who mistake journalism for academic research. I also appreciate the caption beneath the image of the blue rose, that indicates the picture is fake... still, that caption isn't a part of the image file itself, so this image might still be mistaken for a photo of the real thing.

On another note, I don't like like the sound of the merged verb "to fresh cut". Ah, well... every profession has specialized language. I remember my brother bursting out laughing when I told him about "deproblematize". (Fortunately, I wasn't acutally using the word at the time, I offered it as an example of jargon.)

So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which it handles language. And yet it continues to draw devoted practitioners and interactors. It is, in Montfort?s view, a still vibrant tradition.

Why does IF work despite these design difficulties? Perhaps the answer lies in its structure as a riddle. Riddles, unlike puzzles, are always verbal and are based on a conversational exchange. They are intrinsically interactive, and have a formal syntax, a variant of call-and-response structure. A riddle is a word-puzzle, framed as a conversation. --Janet Murray --Janet Murray responds to Nick Montfort (Electronic Book Review)

Murray notes that the interface innovations that made IF a breakaway success in the 70s (specifically, the fact that the user communicated with the program by typing words that followed a syntax that was at least recognizably a subset of English) is the source of its awkwardness today.

When I first started teaching IF, I noticed newbies tried to use MUD syntax to get around in the world. More recently, students who are used to text messaging each other have to unlearn their IM syntax (which is itself a simplified form of English, with creative spelling "rulz"). Thus, they are so used to communicating with each other via short textual bursts, and they are so used to assuming that the recipient of these messages will be able to deal with typos and irregularities of every sort, that the command-line interface appears much more stringent. Thus, it's an increased familiarity with the command line (as employed in purely social contexts) that distances them from the command line as used in IF.

The discussion also includes Brenda Laurel and a response by Nick Montfort. Part of Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Great reading! But I've got to get back to grading now...

While there might be a future for narrative and new forms of storytelling in this cornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, the largest potential seems to be in new types of games, forms that blend the social and the aesthetic in creative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a new generation of gamers grows up, the word ?game? will no longer be as tainted as it is today. Then euphemisms such as ?story-puzzles? and ?interactors? will no longer be necessary. Games will be games and gamers will be gamers. Storytelling, on the other hand, still seems eminently suited to sequential formats such as books, films and e-mails, and might not be in need of structural rejuvenation after all. If it ain?t broke, why fix it? --Espen Aarseth --Espen Aarseth Responds [to Murray's First Person essay] (Electronic Book Review)

Aarseth responds to an essay by Janet Murray in the Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Murray responds to Aarseth).

I wish this online collection hadn't appeared in the very week when I so desperately seek distractions to help me put off marking huge stacks of papers.

Soon Phyllis has figured out how to use Ellery's credit cards, order a cookbook and prepare a purée of parsnips for the neighbors. "Phyllis was grandstanding as a newlywed," Ellery tells himself. "Was that good or bad?" Either way, it's all too appropriate to the six-person dinner party under way. It later turns out that two more of the six guests also happened to be animatronic, and that one of them was purchased on eBay. --Janet Maslin reviews Thomas Berger's Adventures of the Artificial Woman.

--Sexy and Battery-Operated, She's Too Good to Be True (NY Times (will expire))

From the review, it looks like the book contains enough twists and turns that it might be interesting. I find the whole notion of sexual robots extremely creepy, but I gather this book is trying to be a satire, not a realistic work of speculative fiction. Via Machinewatch.

Sadly, commercial publishing threatens the very system it exists to support. When expensive commercially published materials cannot be bought, when university presses cannot afford to publish monographs for junior faculty, everyone suffers. Students and scientists cannot gain access to badly needed materials; scholars cannot get tenure for lack of that first published monograph. The modern university, modeled on the ideal of the Greek temple where thinkers and learners pursued knowledge so that society could reap its benefits, is losing ground to crass commercialism. At risk is the very culture of the academy. --Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System (Syllabus)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.