December 2006 Archive Page

In the established magazine category, it's a buyer's market. That is, the publishers control it. In the new magazine category, it's still a buyer's market, but it's as close to a seller's market as magazines will ever get. And you're the seller. Whether you're new or well-published, you've got more power when dealing with new mags than you do with the venerable establishment. Remember that. But know what you're getting into.

If you're analyzing a brand new market, the first thing to do is to closely read the new magazine's guidelines, trying to intuit their editorial slant and publication value. This should be obvious; since there is no "sample copy" available, the editorial guidelines may be all you have to go on when deciding whether you want to do business with them or not. You can rely on market listings and trade magazines to find these guidelines, but you might want to also check the publisher's websites and even write them by mail. A block of text in Writer's Market only gives you language -- the publication's website or printed matter will give you insight into their "image." You might also find that "on site" they're offering more in-depth guidelines, messages from the editors, or even a list of specific editorial needs -- information you wouldn't find in the market listings themselves. --Michael A. Arnzen --Approaching Brand New Markets (Handy Job Hunter for Writers)

A few months ago, I was in an unfamiliar store with a coupon for a particular item. I looked through what I thought was the right section three times, shelf by shelf, and couldn't find it. When I asked an employee for help, the employee smiled at me in a funny way, and gears started turning in the back of my head. The distinctive design of my former student's website appeared in my brain first, followed by memories of the student's performance (lots of promise, little discipline). "This is what my English major has done for me," my former student huffed, turning back to work stacking items on shelves.

As I finished my shopping, the student's name and more details came back to mind. So as I passed by that area on my way to the checkout, I tried to strike up a conversation (using the student's name, as it had returned to me by then). As it happened, I knew of someone locally who was looking for freelance writers, so I gave the student my card.

Shortly thereafter, an e-mail arrived. My former student apologized for making the English major crack, and asked for tips in getting started as a freelance writer.

I couldn't help but think of Willy Loman, who had dismissed the studious and serious young Bernard as a worthless worm, and who later finds Bernard is a successful professional, and asks "What's the secret?"

There is no secret. Luck does play some role in it. You knock on a lot of doors that don't open, and maybe you come across one door that opens today because someone needs something and you just happen to ask at the right time. But if you ask at 10 doors, you've got a better chance of success than if you ask at just one. If you ask at 100 doors, you might have to put up with 99 door slammed in your face before you are lucky enough to be the first person to ask at door #100. But that's really about self-promotion and dedication.

I'm beefing up the professional development unit of the "Intro to Literary Studies" class I'm teaching this spring, and I was delighted that my Google searches brought me to this newsletter article, written by my colleague at Seton Hill University.

The course I've got in mind is, in its present incarnation, only required for lit and creative writing majors. Our new media journalism major is also housed under the English umbrella, but since the journos get lots of practical experience working on the Setonian and taking Media Lab, initially the journalism majors weren't required to take the intro to English course. But I put through all the paperwork on the new media journalism major before I actually taught EL150. Now that I've taught it several times, and now that I see how often the creative writing and lit majors end up taking on important positions in the paper, I think it's a good idea to get them building up cross-major relationships early in their careers.

Professional development is something you should be thinking about late Sunday night when you're asking yourself whether you should bother to get up for your Monday morning classes. It's what you should be thinking about Thursday night when a friend stops by and invites you to go to a party, but you haven't finished the readings that are due on Friday. It's what you should think about when you go to the student club fair and see all the organizations that are looking for people to take on positions of responsibility. It's all about managing your time and planning your fun, so that it doesn't interfere with your obligations, or your potential to develop skills for future use.

Whoops, speaking of obligations... my daughter just woke up from her afternoon nap. I was going to write more about the actual advice that I gave the former student who asked for tips. I can't go into that now, but I will say that the encounter made me think a lot about professional development in English.

I'll close with a quote from Avenue Q, that I plan to play during the opening class... "What do you do with a BA in English?" Let's hope that future SHU English graduates won't find themselves singing, "it sucks to be broke and unemployed and turning 33."

--Antoine Bardou-Jacquet --The Child (YouTube)

Now there's an interesting idea for a text-based mod of Half-Life 2. Hmm....

In reporting a story for the Web, the interview process does not end with publication. When writing a piece, always include an invitation for knowledgeable readers to add more to the story. Writers who fail to do this invite suspicion that they are more interested in promoting (and protecting) their own point of view, instead of allowing their work to compete in the marketplace of ideas. --Robert Niles --Top mistakes made by new online publishers (Online Journalism Review)

This is an important concept. In the print world, once something has been published, you can more or less forget about it, because you are already deeply involved in the planning of the next publication. But publishing an electronic document is, ideally, just the start of your relationship with that document.

I still maintain web pages that I published years ago. If the site is popular, if I notice a teacher or student somewhere has found it useful in a class, or if I Google a subject and find my own work near the top slot, I will often take a bit of time to revisit what I wrote and refresh it. Typically that just involves checking the links, but sometimes my opinions have changed or my approach to the subject matter is more complex.

I recently wrote a bit about minimalism in video game design. While it only took a few minutes, I designed some bookshelves for a virtual living room, but now I've got to spend a lot of time designing stuff to go on the shelves. (In the picture, you can see I put a cylinder on the mantel... it might become a tankard or a candlestick, but I don't know.)

But I would have been better off designing closed cabinets. If I need to put a concealed object in this room, I can make one of the cabinets openable, and put the thing inside. All the other cabinets could just be facades.

In a similar way, it's important to learn to write an online document so that it has a long shelf life. I have handouts on basic skills such as how to write a thesis statement, or how to integrate quotations from academic sources. Nobody but my own students will need to read a specific assignment description, but I've re-used this explanation of "close reading" so many times in different classes that I should probably move it off the individual course blogs and work on a more substantial handout for my permanent site.

A few years ago when fiction blogs were still getting a lot of attention, I imagined that one summer I would pretend to quit my job, run away from my family, and blog as if I had joined the circus, and stumbled upon a centuries-old cult (or maybe got involved in an international spy ring, or found a government conspiracy, or whatever). To do that, I would need to plot out the work of fiction in some depth, so that I could seed my personal blog with details that would make the whole story seem to come together -- such as creating a fake website that had clues, then creating a fake blog that asked a question and attracted a comment from a fake visitor who linked to the fake website, so that later when the plot required me to Google something, I could link to it from my blog.

I never got much farther than the "what if" stage, in part because "she's a flight risk" was already doing this in 2003. Since then, commercial productions like "I love bees" and "Lost" have made those gimmicks fairly well-known.

It does take a bit of unlearning print media ways of thinking in order to keep a bank of old material fresh by pointing to it with new links. But blogs are great at contextualizing -- linking to contrasting, supporting, and amplifying material which will help readers gain a broader understanding of the subject. Most readers will just skim the entry, a few will briefly visit the sites, but a small number will read, think about, and comment on every item you have linked to.

For instance, on the day that I am writing this (Christmas Day, 2006), the big news story is that James Brown, one of the greats of rock 'n roll music, has died. As an individual running a news web site -- or as a student running a news web site -- I probably would not have any pictures of James Brown that I could use if I wanted to post something about him.

When I searched through Flickr for "James Brown" and used the Creative Commons filter, I came up with more than 1,000 that people had decided to share. --Photos you can use (JProf)

A great item about how indie newsbloggers can find free images for their online publications. (See also Mark Glaser's article on the same subject.)

Hammer, 3D Design, and the Virtues of Minimalism (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For the past month, as preparation for teaching a brief Hammer unit in my "New Media Projects" course, I got pretty good at Hammer basics -- in part because I recorded a series of Flash tutorials, and doing so really solidified some basic design skills.

I hadn't really realized just how comfortable I'm becoming with Hammer until yesterday, when I roughed out this interior while my daughter was napping. Today (during another nap) I added some special effects (including snow, not visible in this photo). I had already sketched out the floor plan on paper, so it was really quite easy to implement it.



I'd have gotten a lot farther today, but for some reason when I loaded it up Hammer couldn't find where I had placed the custom textures that I had downloaded. I recall being so frustrated with the numerous steps I had to do in order to get a new texture into Hammer that I never even tried to teach that to my students. But at least now I think I understand the complex file system that Steam creates. (I'm also starting to max out my laptop's hard drive. Time to do some file-shuffling.)

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with lighting (I have four lights in the fireplace -- three of them flickering in different colors and a fourth that's a steady yellow-orange). I had made an automatic door a few months ago, and it only took me a few tries to refresh my memory.

When my students began programming text adventures in Inform 7, it took a while for them to learn that every concrete object they mention in the description of a room ("The professor's bookshelf is cluttered with a bewildering array of papers, notebooks, reference books, and letters.") means that the player is going to want to take, read, examine, smell, eat, and burn every one of them. To implement each and every object in a cluttered study would take forever, but mentioning an object by name and then refusing to let the player interact is sort of cruel to the player. Rather than come up with a long list of things that the player will want to interact with, it's better to write a general description that reveals the character of the person who uses the study. A player who reads "Everything is a bit tweedy and fussily organized, but just a bit sloppy around the edges, not unlike Prof. Sneedlewood himself. An ivory-handled letter opener catches your eye." will immediately take the letter opener, but will probably not bother trying to rifle through the professor's things.

In a similar way, while creating an environment with pixels rather than words, I've learned that instead of open (bare) shelves I should probably instead have more closed cupboards, with just a few decorative items to personalize the space.

Hammer (the Half-Life 2 map editor) is good for constructing anything that you could build out of wood in real life. While the world allows for subtle and complex motion and beautifully interactive physics (hinges, ropes, gravity, friction, etc.), the resolution of the world-builder is chunky and blocky.

I've got a kind of creative vision, too, but I've been frustrated by how restricted I feel when there isn't a good ready-made texture (the 3D colors that go on the flat surfaces) or model (the map of points and planes that make up an object, such as a chair). So I've spent too much time online surfing for ready-made models and materials.

I have taught myself Blender3D and am working with the XSI Mod tool, so I know I've got everything I need to design complex objects and import them into a Hammer map.

If the case goes to trial, its outcome will be important both to bloggers and to people who chronicle their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he may teach the Washingtonienne case this spring during his class at Georgetown Law School.

"Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life," he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn't make it one. "It's not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It's online where a million people can find it." --Former Capitol Hill Aides to Air Dirty Sex Details in Blog Trial (AP | Fox News)

I blogged about the "Washintonienne" story when it first broke... thanks for the update, Karissa.

Your mission is one of the most important mission that has taken place every year for hundreds of years. This mission requires you to do the impossible: DELIVER PRESENTS TO ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS ALL OVER THE WORLD. You must position your distribution system before Christmas Eve. It's Christmas, and everybody wins. But maybe - just maybe - you can show your generosity the most. --DEFCON Chirstmas Mod (Kotaku)

I love it when the children cheer and stats pop up showing how many happy children there are in the target city... Merry Christmas!

The CRPG is the spine of the electronic gaming industry--and it's not hard to see why. You just can't have more fun with a computer or a console than when you're engrossed in a well-crafted CRPG. But where did the CRPG come from? From what deep, dank dungeon did they crawl? How has the genre evolved into the amazing games we enjoy today? --Matt Barton --The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part I: The Early Years (1980-1983) (Arrmchair Arcade)

I tried posting a few comments on Barton's weblog, but I got an SQL error.

Good work. I can understand his desire to focus on one particular genre, so I wouldn't expect him to mention every single computer game that features a heroic quest or that involves fantasy combat, but I think it would also be worth looking at "Wumpus" (1972), mainframe "Zork" (also known as "Dungeon," several informal releases, as early as June 1977) that would later be split into three parts and released as "Zork I," "Zork II," and "Zork III," and Scott Adams's "Adventureland" (1978).

The designers of Zork explicitly credited both Adventure and D&D, and wrote an academic article about the possibility of expanding Zork to make it more like the role-playing games we know now. It's likely that their article was read by just the kind of person who would actually go on and do such a thing. See "Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game."

Zork itself has nearly reached the practical limit of size imposed by MDL and the PDP-10's address space. Thus the game is unlikely to expand (much?) further. However, the substrate of the game (the data types, parser, and basic verbs) is sufficiently independent that it would not be too difficult to use it as the basis for a CFS language.

There are several ways in which future computerized fantasy simulation games could evolve. The most obvious is just to write new puzzles in the same substrate as the old games. Some of the additions to Zork were exactly this, in that they required little or no expansion of the simulation universe. A sufficiently imaginative person or persons could probably do this indefinitely.

Another similar direction would be to change the milieu of the game. Zork, Adventure, and Haunt (the CFS games known to the authors) all flow back to D&D and the literary tradition of fantasy exemplified by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber. There are, however, other milieus; science fiction is one that comes to mind quickly, but there are undoubtedly others.

A slightly different approach to the future would be to expand the simulation universe portrayed in the game. For example, in Zork the concept of "wearing something" is absent: with it there could be magic rings, helmets, boots, etc. Additionally, the player's body itself might be added. For example, a player could be wounded in his sword arm, reducing his fighting effectiveness, or in his leg, reducing his ability to travel.

The preceding are essentially trivial expansions to the game. A more interesting one might be the introduction of magic spells. To give some idea of the kinds of problems new concepts introduce to the game, consider this brief summary of problems that would have to be faced: If magic exists, how do players learn spells? How are they invoked? Do they come in different strengths? If so, how does a player qualify for a stronger version of a spell than he has? What will spells be used for (are they like the magic words in Adventure, for example)? How does a player retain his magic abilities over several sessions of a game?

As can be seen, what at first seems to be a fairly straightforward addition to a game that already has magical elements raises many questions. One of the lessons learned from Zork, in fact, is one that should be well known to all in the computing field: "There is no such thing as a small change!"

A still more ambitious direction for future CFS games is that of multiple-player games. The simplest possible such game introduces major problems, even ignoring the mechanism used to accomplish communication or sharing. For example, there are impressive problems related to the various aspects of simultaneity and synchronization. How do players communicate with each other? How do they coordinate actions, such as attacking some enemy in concert?

The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed. They lowered the backhoe scoop and strapped the rock to it. Grinding and whining, the machine pulled free the biggest meteorite Arnold had ever seen.

Its shell was mottled, stippled like ground beef. That's a pattern typical of pallasites, the rarest type of meteorite on Earth. One side was rounded and streamlined by passage through the atmosphere. "It's oriented, Steve!" Mani shouted. "It's oriented!"

About the size of a beer keg, the rock weighed 1,430 pounds, the largest pallasite ever found in the US. By Arnold's reckoning, it was worth more than $1 million. --Ben Paynter --The Meteor Farmer  (Wired)

Does it matter that most films offer such an unrealistic depiction of usability? Mainly, no. A movie's purpose is entertainment, not task performance. So, go ahead and employ user interfaces and interaction techniques that are entertaining and would never work in the real world.

Films are littered with so many other unrealistic plot details: you'd imagine, for example, that the ability to shoot straight might actually be a primary job requirement of Imperial Stormtroopers.

In the film context, unrealistic usability is only to be expected. --Jakob Nielsen --Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers (Alertbox)

A great pop culture-meets-usability article.

Guiding a single point of light seems most suitable in a highly abstract game, and the pixel has shined in several of these. The driving real-time puzzle game Qix, a coin-op game from the 1980s, is a notable one. (Admittedly, the player's pixel is highlighted with a surrounding diamond, but it's still reasonably considered a dressed-up pixel.) The choice of avatar clearly didn't come about because the programmers were too lazy to punch up a spaceship bitmap or something - the pixel makes sense within the scheme of Qix. The point naturally is moved to draw a line, which is naturally connected to another line to shade a region. --Nick Montfort --A Pixel is You! (Grand Text Auto)

But wait, you might ask, don't people accidentally repeat each other's sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.

It: Rejected--too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself ... unusual. --Paul Collins --Dead Plagiarists Society (Slate)

After learning a bit about IF and playing a few games, you might think to yourself: hey, I could do this! And the best part is: you're right. The modern IF scene is so vibrant largely because it's quite possible for a single author to build a game from start to finish. It's easy for new authors to get discouraged, however, so here's some advice to make sure your creation makes it to the finish line. --Vestal and Maragos --Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century -- Make Your OwnBrass Lantern | 1Up)

A few months ago, I was looking for the illustration found on this page... I think it's a great introduction to the concept of attaching descriptions to individual objects.

When my students created IF games, they sometimes had trouble understanding the difference between a textual description of an event that should only happen once, a description that the computer would produce in response to a command such as "examine thing," and what to leave out (such as lists of things that are contained by other things, or the status of things such as doors and such) because the computer automatically keeps track of such things.

--Choose Your Own Adventure with bees, lasers, zombies, robots, hot scientists...

No time to check this one out... blogging it for later.

Consider their treatment of Mr. Spock. Almost every episode, Dr. McCoy heckles him over his logic and even uses "green-blooded" as part of his threats. Captain Kirk, ostensibly Spock's greatest friend, takes any opportunity he can to point out problems logic causes, and on more than one occasion makes Spock the butt of race-based jokes in front of the entire bridge crew. Several members of the crew question his authority on the basis of race in many different episodes, and no one thinks to reprimand or stop them until the situation becomes serious for other reasons. Finally, let's not forget Mr. Stiles' suggestion that Spock just be killed off in "Balance of Terror."

It is clear that in the 23rd century, over 100 years after first contact with the Vulcans, humans are still an extremely xenophobic species. --Damn Vulcans, ruining this federation... (Not In Cardiff)

This author makes a good point about the difference between the attitude of the show and the characters represented in the show.

Whoopi Goldberg found her way to Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) because she says she loved that TOS actually showed black people in the future. Having a black bridge officer was a prominent statement. Having her in a hot miniskirt was making another statement, but let's tackle one thing at a time. Consider also the part of Richard Daystrom -- the inventor of the M5, who happened to be black but whose race had nothing to do with the plot.

Yet The Original Series (TOS) was created for a 1960s audience. Whites and blacks had been living in supposedly legal equality for 100 years, yet racial tensions were hardly a thing of the past.

DeVito mentions the one-time character Stiles, who makes racist statements about Spock in "Balance of Terror" (an episode in which we see what Romulans look like for the first time and learn -- surprise -- that they look just like Vulcans). Stiles is far from the voice of authority; he's an angry minor character, attacking a major character, and he gets upbraided by Kirk for it.

(TNG expanded on this theme with the young officer who claims to be part Vulcan but turns out to be part Romulan. There is a long tradition in American literature of light-skinned people with black ancestry "passing" for white, even though according to the laws in place at the time they would be considered legally black.)

And yes, Gene Roddenberry was fond of saying that there are weren't enough aliens in the Screen Actors Guild. Quite honestly, the forehead bumps and facial spots got to be boring after a little while... I like what Babylon 5 and DSN did, namely having a small number of aliens that recur more frequently, so that we can really get the sense that we really do have to learn to live together, rather than just tolerate each other's differences until the closing credits roll.

For a moment, let's run with the idea that Star Trek should show more aliens... what would a show that was entirely set on Vulcan be like? Would the general audience of TV viewers who are used to emotional conflict be able to comprehend the story? Are there enough actors who can play Vulcans in such a way that viewers would identify with the characters? Any story set on Vulcan (or the Klingon homeworld, or a starship) is going to be created, produced, and interpreted according to how it reflects on the society of the humans who created it. In a similar way, the alien or the robot or the mutant in science fiction is interesting, in the sense of story, because it can teach us something about ourselves. Yes, of course, some people watch or read SF for the technology, but good special effects won't make a successful TV series.

On the topic of violence... Since Westerns were popular at the time the original show aired, audiences would have expected gunfights and fistfights. And they got them. But I think TOS was more varied and sophisticated in its approach to violence.

In "The Man Trap," we hear McCoy give an eloquent defense of the salt vampire's actions -- it's just doing what comes naturally in order to survive. But at that point, the creature has actually drugged McCoy and is impersonating him in the briefing room. The creature needs more than salt to survive; it has for years been impersonating Dr. Crater's wife Nancy, and Crater knows this and accepts it. The creatures prefers to be the Nancy that McCoy remembers (they used to be an item) than the Nancy that Dr. Crater knows is only an alien counterfeit. In this episode, we several scenes in which the creature is alone, so we know its motives better than the heroes do. This is unusual in a science fiction/action show -- we are more sympathetic to the monster than the heroes are. But of course the episode was designed so that in the climax, McCoy has to use violence to destroy the possibility of a future with Nancy, or stand by and watch his captain die.

That was good drama -- Kirk, the unfliching man of action, was helpless by this point, and McCoy, the healer and lover, was forced to use violence. But we see how much it costs him.

Yes, this is violence, but it is not the same thing as cheering when Scotty punches an obnoxious Klingon in The Trouble with Tribbles. It's a well thought-out theme that recurs frequently in the Star Trek universe. (Well, not universally... in "Up the Long Ladder," Riker and Pulaski destroy clones of themselves without batting an eye; yet Odo tells a criminal in "A Man Alone" that "killing your own clone is still murder." I am not one of those retconners who obsessively looks for reasons why what appears to be an inconsistency is really coherent and fits into an ordered plan.)

It's easier for me to accept that some action stories require the heroes to be aggressive, or the action premise of the show loses focus. (Consider the running joke about Picard repeatedly solving crises by surrendering.)

And while the Star Trek movies were getting pretty tired by "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," having Kirk brooding over the murder of his son and hating the Klingons made for a good dramatic plot, made even more powerful because by that time we had seen a lot of development of a Klingon culture that many fans grew to enjoy immensely.

Back during the TOS era, it was apparently still OK to hate the Klingons, since they were universally bad in every encounter -- and perhaps Roddenberry meant to atone for that. Yet even in the TOS era, the Organians showed up to force the Federation and Klingons to adhere to a peace treaty. Thus, while the Federation and the Klingon empire don't get along, the moral perspective of the show itself, the spirit that we can recognize as Star Trek -- forced them to do so, in order to find rich dramatic material in the ongoing conflict.

I recall reading that the idea of having a Klingon as a character in TNG was just intended as a walk-on part, just to establish that things have changed since the era of Kirk.

Consider Spock's refusal to use violence against the primitive creatures that threatened the Galileo 7. McCoy has to be harsh with Spock not because McCoy wants violence, but because the story demands it. Spock is on his first command, his non-violent response is seen as weak by the people he is supposed to lead, and people die while following his orders. In other cases, again when the story demands it, McCoy attacks Spock for being heartless and cruel abandoning what looks like a hopeless search for missing officers in order to carry out some other duty.

Remember also that the groovy episode with the singing hippies have Spock naturally "reach" the anti-establishment sensibilities of the young people (who obviously were intended to reflect the political and social concerns of 60s youth). And Spock himself chose to go against Vulcan tradition and join Starfleet rather than enter the Vulcan Science Academy -- an act which causes his father to cease to speak to him for years. (Even though Sarek's isolationism is softened by his having a human wife.)

One of the things I liked least about TNG was the milksop perfection of Federation society. Thank goodness DSN -- a much more racially diverse core cast (Odo, Kira, Quark, Dax, and eventually Worf all non-human... add in the Cardassians, who started of in TNG as generic bad guys, but whose culture became even more developed than the Bajorans).

And naturally, with a more diverse cast, the writers could do more kinds of tension than the human-Vulcan tension that was part of what made TOS the success that it was. Thus, as the TV casts got more diverse, the opportunities for tension increased -- and the writers used those opportunites to their advantage.

(Disclaimer... once I started teaching full-time, I lost track of the second half of Voyager, though I kept reading the plot summaries on the internet; and I don't even know what channel Enterprise airs on, so I can't speak from an informed perspective about that series.)

Electronic text in general is a volatile medium, where conventions often emerge and change before they can be translated successfully into print. Further, IF in particular has attracted only sporadic academic attention. Therefore, this bibliography includes useful information that can be gleaned from non-academic sources, including popular periodicals, fan tributes, and authors' manifestos. Excellent theory, critical classification, technical advances, and textual analysis also spring from a devoted community of IF aficionados, mostly centering around the newsgroups "rec.arts.int-fiction" and "rec.games.int-fiction." In reproducing quotations from the various sources, I have made no effort to standardize such things as whether computer game titles should be set off by quotations, by italics or underlining, or (as is common in non-scholarly sources) not at all. My annotations employ terms which may be unfamiliar to non-gamers; these include "PC" (player-character, the main character of a computer game, whose actions are controlled by a human being sitting at the controls) and "NPC" (a non-player character, or supporting actor, whose actions are controlled by the computer). --Dennis G. Jerz (2001) --Interactive Fiction: An Introduction to Scholarship(Minor HTML Editing))

While settling my thoughts to write something else, I decided to make some HTML edits that fixed some annoying problems that popped up when I transferred this site from its first home to its present home. I haven't updated the content on this site since it was first published, though I have been keeping track of titles I need to add.

Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps. --Joseph Rago --The Blog Mob  (Opinion Journal)

Well, yes... some blogs that focus on critiquing (or just ranting about) what the mainstream media produce certainly do piggyback upon the accomplishments of, and rush in to fill the gaps left by, professional journalists.

Just a few years ago, it was not at all uncommon to find local TV news outlets and local papers spreading spoof stories as if they were true. (See "Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11") And then there is Dan Rather's reckless defense of suspicious documents related to George W. Bush's National Guard service -- suspicions which were raised by bloggers.

I don't intend to repeat a litany of important stories that were ignored by the mainstream media until bloggers had already waded into the fray. That's because doing good journalism is time-consuming and costly. No matter what the big news organizations decide is worth covering, somebody somewhere will have the time and the inclination to sift through stacks of documents or make enough phone calls or simply be in the right place at the right time. In the past, the local amateur historian or neighborhood sleuth would have to call up a reporter in order to get an audience and the reporter would get credit for breaking the story. Now, those people can put their work in front of an audience. And sometimes that work is shoddy, ridiculous, malicious, and a waste of time.

But not always.

In every class that I teach, I try to make the point that anybody can post whatever they want online. It is easy for the naive reader to be fooled. Bloggers who think critically and link critically actually affect Google's results for other internet users who may not be sophisticated or diligent enough to be skeptical about what they read.

That's why I spend so much time teaching basic research practices (citing your sources, checking for good sources before you cite, understanding that the first amendment doesn't make it legal to lie about people, to expose their private affairs, or to slander their character or professional competency). My students are, of course, free to blog about whatever they wish, but I evaluate them based on whether they actually include a quotation from the material they are writing about. I like to see it when they link to people who agree with them, disagree with them, or have done extensive background research on a subject.

I am glad to see Rago's observation that blogs are better at transmitting opinion than doing reportage, since at the very least he is at that point recognizing that there are more ways to evaluate a blog than how well it does the job that professional journalists are supposed to be doing.

And "Charlotte's Web" is a sneakily sophisticated fable. White certainly appreciated the joys of life on the farm (while evading some of its bloodier aspects), but the book is really about the benevolent, even miraculous power of celebrity. It is, most simply, the story of a spider, Charlotte A. Cavitica, who saves the life of a pig named Wilbur by making him famous. She is a gifted writer whose chosen genre is what we might now call the pull quote -- her oeuvre consists of the words "terrific," "radiant," "some pig" and, in a stroke of public relations genius, "humble," all emblazoned in webbing for the world to see. Charlotte is a self-effacing manufacturer of celebrity. An eight-legged flack. It's not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good publicist. --White's Country Critters, Still Humble (New York Times)

That's a bit of a cynical take on the story, but it was interesting review nonetheless.

I just got back from a matinée showing of this film. It held the attention of my four-year-old, and there was enough action to delight my eight-year-old. I confess that I missed the lilting song about the cycle of life that Debbie Reynolds sang in the animated version (this one isn't a musical), but Julia Roberts did an excellent job with Charlotte's voice. The computer animation of the webs blowing in the wind was fantastic, but I thought some of the camera work (zooming into dew drops and the like) distracted from the beauty.

This movie paid a bit more attention to the concept of words and writing than the animated version did, but I think I still prefer the animated version to this one. (The book, of course, is best.)

"Is There A Santa Claus?" was published 21 September 1897, more than three months before the Christmas holiday. It was placed in the third of three columns of editorials that day, subordinate to seven other commentaries on such matters as "British Ships in American Waters," ambiguity in Connecticut's election law, and features of the chainless bicycle anticipated in 1898. [2] Although it was published at a time when newspaper editors routinely commented on--and often disparaged--the work of their rivals, the oddly timed editorial drew no comment from the Sun's bitter rivals in New York. For its part, the Sun mostly ignored the editorial for the next ten years. --W. Joseph Campbell --The grudging emergence of American journalism's classic editorial: New details about ''Is There A Santa Claus?'' (American University)

Ah... nothing puts me in the Christmas spirit like a meticulously researched article (over 80 footnotes!) documenting the origin of this famous "Yes, Virginia" editorial.

"Here are my keys, Dr. Jerz. I think I will miss these most of all. Thank you for everything that doesn't fit in an envelope. Thank you for being my teacher, and friend." --Amanda Cochran
Here are my keys, Dr. Jerz (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This was a difficult good-bye. I've gotten to know many fantastic students here at SHU, but Amanda is the first freshman I have seen all the way through to graduation.

She rose through the ranks at the student paper, all the way to editor-in-chief. She earned top-notch grades, and graduated in three and a half years.

Yesterday, she graduated summa cum laude. And today when I got to the office, I found this note -- and Amanda's keys to the student publications office.

I blogged about Amanda a few weeks into my first term here at Seton Hill, when Amanda was just familiarizing herself with the brand-new SHU academic blogosphere, and settling into her own blog, which she called "Girl Meets World."

Throughout her Seton Hill career, Amanda has done wonderful things with the keys she was resourceful enough to use. And now there's a world out there that she -- now an accomplished woman -- is more than ready to meet.

Thank you, Amanda!

We need a return to the core values of social responsibility. We must unite our voices and demand that society's wrongs be righted, before our priorities as a people are forgotten forever.

I speak of nothing less than the need for justice, and I demand justice-themed TV action-adventure dramas--not two seasons from now, not three seasons from now, but this fall!

What do I want? JUSTICE! When do I want it? PRIME TIME! --I Demand Justice-Themed TV Dramas (The Onion (Satire))

There are remarkable parallels between "The Canterbury Tales" and modern rap, Brinkman said at Wellesley College during a recent stop on his tour of high schools and colleges across the eastern United States and Puerto Rico.

"Chaucer and rap are both performance-based and they're both battles of words where your proficiency gets you by," said Brinkman, whose master's thesis compared the two.

[..]

Brinkman performs the "Pardoner's Tale," the "Miller's Tale" and the "Wife of Bath's Tale." His one-man show, with recorded music and a few props that include a couple of chairs, a bottle of water and a bandanna, is constructed much like the pilgrims' journey in "The Canterbury Tales." He acts as the narrator -- a stowaway fan on a tour bus -- and plays the part of three rappers on the bus engaged in a rap battle. --Mark Pratt --Rapper finds inspiration in Chaucer (Yahoo! News (will expire))

New to me: the lit-hop genre.

The recent conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran should be viewed by the world as exactly what it was: nothing more than a propaganda effort by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to bolster his own political agenda and image as someone willing -- even if ignorantly -- to confront the United States and Israel.

While Ahmadinejad called his conference a "scientific" inquiry, its participants included a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, other racists and Holocaust deniers from around the world. His inquiry was anything but scientific. It was an abhorrent distortion of history, an abomination and an insult to those who died in the Holocaust and their families and to all educated people. --Peter N. Berkowitz and Fred Zeidman --We must answer Holocaust deniers (Chronicle (Houston))

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for instance, Disney was inundated with letters from outraged parents who felt that Snow White's flight through the woods or Pinocchio's excursion on Pleasure Island or the devil in "Fantasia" or Bambi's mother's death were all too real and terrifying and hardly a gloss. Disney would typically respond that he didn't make films for children and that, in any case, children had to learn to deal with the terrors of the world.

Despite this, "Disneyfication" became and remains a dirty word -- the primacy of false experiences over so-called real ones. --Walt Disney: man or mouse? (LA Times)

The course I had planned to teach on Disney in culture has been canceled. Students were very interested in the subject, but apparently the cost of spending a week in Florida was prohibitive.

I'm still in the habit of blogging thoughtful essays on the subject. I'll probably try to offer the course again in some other format.

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. --Person of the Year: You (Time)

This is a kind of milestone, in that a mainstream print magazine assumes that its target readers are not only users but creators of the internet.

I'm not so sure I like the use of the word "camcordered." but otherwise this is a welcome article.

Of course there are still consumer drones out there, ready to follow the pied pipers of Madison Avenue whither they might lead. And the internet is not really ubiquitous enough that we can ignore issues of class and accessibility, but the article speaks to the potential of the creative commons and the two-way web.

"I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid." --Cover Letters from Hell (Killian Advertising)

That is... laid off.

Blogging this to save it for a professional development unit in "Intro to Literary Study" next term.

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge --Bibliographia Literaria (1817)

I had never before bothered to look up the full context in which the term "willing suspension of disbelief" first occurs.

Underneath the veneer of "natural language," Inform 7 actually has a pretty rigorous syntax, and it can be very picky about how you word certain kinds of phrases. But then there are other areas where the syntax is very loose, and it's easy to be fooled into thinking that you can write your game in any sort of casual English, only to have it break down when you try to compile. This can be a source of frustration to both newcomers and experienced programmers who are accustomed to writing in languages with a more consistent syntax. However, I think that people will grow accustomed to this learning curve. Figuring out Inform 7 is not unlike figuring out how to play text adventure games for the first time: at first it seems like it will understand anything, but eventually you get an intuitive feel for how things must be phrased. --Mike Gentry --Interview: Mike Gentry (Game Couch)

The author of the acclaimed horror IF game "Anchorhead" offers an excellent assessment of Inform 7 (a robust programming environment designed specifically for the creation of text adventure games).

Our story about the the most popular Halloween costumes of the season, first published Oct. 14, misidentified the super-speedy The Flash and Boy Wonder superhero Robin as Marvel comics characters. In fact, they are DC Comics superheroes. We regret this error; it is against Bankrate's policy, and just plain unwise, to cause offense to superhumans and superheroes. --Bankrate editorial department corrections policy (Bankrate)

Best. Correction notice. Ever.

"Vote with Your Feet" Discusison

I was reading a forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a poster asked for tips on teaching long night classes. I came across a reference to a "'vote with your feet' discussion."

I'd never heard the term before, but I gather it means you say "Everyone who supports proposition X stand on this side of the room; everyone who's against it, stand on the other side. If you're not sure, position yourself somewhere in the middle."

Then I'd probably ask students who have a strong opinion to justify their position. I'd also carefully introduce new bits of evidence to see whether that changes anyone's position. And I'd ask the ones who've stayed in the middle to explain what it would take for them to take a step in one direction or the other.

During a 2 1/2 hour class, that might be good for a post-break "let's get back on track" activity.

The Office had nothing around it but the two gas stations and a very busy road. It wasn't leaning against anything, wasn't under an overpass or covered with stickers from a nearby venue. It was its own thing, a classy, self-contained room that a young fellow spent his youth wiling away the hours in, trying beyond all reason to be somebody different, somebody more powerful, a unique force at an age when you feel anything but. All hangouts are places where someone goes to be themselves; mine just happened to take up 9 square feet of space. --Jason Scott --The Phone Stories: THE OFFICE (ASCII)

A tribute to a phone booth where the author spent much of his youth.

"New Media Projects" introduces students [all English majors in this section, though it's not restricted as such] to Inform 7, The Games Factory 2, Flash, Blender 3D, and Hammer. All students completed short projects in each medium, and selected tools to use for a midterm and a final project.

Students kept a development journal on their weblogs, and often helped each other get past rough spots. Since few of my students had any programming experience, there were some rough spots and tense times, but there were also grand "aha!" events that accumulated as the semester progressed. I'm pleased with what my students accomplished.

See the list of final project postings. --Final Presentation Gallery (New Media Projects -- Seton Hill University)

Just as you can't be too rich or too thin, I'd always thought, so you can't have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife - but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in all. Unload this mother into the plastic tray as you walk through security at Heathrow and just see what happens.
--Call that a knife? (Guardian)

Shiny, pointy things.... very many shiny shiny, pointy pointy things.

--Advent Calendar 2006 (Leslie Harpold)

A cute Advent calendar.

Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children.

Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested for allegedly bringing in a loaded gun. The boy showed the gun to another student, and word soon trickled to a teacher and then a security officer, officials said. --Pa. teen fatally shoots self at school (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

The pressures of getting a breaking story published means sometimes one reads strange things that trickled through the editorial process.

The word "trickled" is unusual enough in a news story that I noticed it right away. When it appears in two consecutive paragraphs, its hard to ignore.

That craft has never been more vibrant, or vital. But the ability to make a living at it will crumble soon.

The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can't possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We?re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers --Dan Gillmor --The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist (Center for Citizen Media)

I can never resist a challenge and this one, posed by a mischievous friend, was a humdinger: could I befriend one of my own children on one of those 'social networking' websites for teenagers without being caught out? Could I make a convincing youngster and engage my son in online conversations?

While it was an intriguing idea, a little like a scenario from a Shakespeare comedy in which a character disguises himself to try to discover his lady's true character, I felt torn. After all, no challenge is worth jeopardising one's relationship with one's children. --Anne Atkins --Fooled by Cybermum!Mail on Sunday (London))

This is well written, but very creepy.. . the kid this mom is snooping after sounds like the worst thing going on in his life is, well, that his mom impersonated a teenager in order to flirt with him.

This has been copied in several places online... I can't seem to find the original source.

There is no clacking of keyboards in most classrooms at the Mary Erskine and Stewart's Melville Junior School, although there is a full range of facilities for computer lessons and technology isn't being ignored.

But the private school's principal believes the old-fashioned pens have helped boost the academic performance and self-esteem of his 1,200 pupils. --School shuns tech, teaches fountain pen (Yahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

*clunk*

The rotating tin cylinder within the phonograph vibrates slightly as a brass needle scrapes against it. The sound of a throat being cleared emerges from the machine's hornshell speaker, followed by a thin, haunting voice.

"March the 16th."

A deep, shaky breath.

"I dread to say it, but I believe I am going mad. The -- *moments* -- come more frequently now. I fear that I have found what I have sought, and I shall now pay the price for it."

The scrape of a chair across flagstone. A sigh.

"Chaos treads the halls of Bedlam; her work is evident everywhere..."

--Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto --Slouching Towards Bedlam (Interactive Fiction -- Online Gallery)

A steampunk SF mystery.

Yesterday, I heard that Star C. Foster, also known for her blog Sarcasmo's Corner, died suddenly. Since I only knew her through her work, I thought the best way I could honor her memory is to put up this online version of her excellent text-adventure game.

Someday, much sooner than you'd like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you'll swear, you'll cry -- then you'll sigh and open your wallet.--Kris Wagner --Gadgets Built to Fail (Wired)

"They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up." -- Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman

I have a Verizon unlimited data plan in the U.S. and recently crossed the border to Canada. Prior to crossing the border I called customer service to find out what rates I'd be paying for voice and data. The data rate I was quoted was ".002 cents per kilobyte."

I was surprised at the rate so I confirmed it with the representative I spoke to, and she confirmed it "point zero zero two cents per kilobyte." I asked her to note that in my account.

I received my bill and was charged $.002/KB - which is dollars - "point zero zero 2 dollars per kilobyte". As it is translated to cents would be .2 cents or 2 tenths of a cent - which is a 100 times greater rate than I was quoted. --Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents (VerizonMath)

Oh, this is beautiful. The floor manager calls it a matter of opinion that .002 cents is not the same thing as .002 dollars.

The full audio is playing in the background while I'm writing this... Don't miss the Verizon Can't Do Math Money Remix.

I no longer see cases of blatant plagiarism as personal insults. They are, instead, the pathetic bleats of students who think they know enough -- maybe all there really is to know -- about how to read and think and write.

The paradox of plagiarism is that in order to be really good at it, you need precisely the reading and writing skills that ought to render plagiarism unnecessary. --Jonathan Malesic --How Dumb Do They Think We Are? (Chronicle of Higher Education)

"For more than 100 years journalism has been sustained by this virtuous circle in which the audience paid for their news, and the advertiser paid to reach that audience, and the publisher made a profit and paid his journalists and the society benefited into the bargain," said Michael Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.

"That whole circle breaks down on the internet. This requires wildly creative thinking on the part of media companies to preserve the base of support that's created quality journalism for all these years.

"And that's a subject that the whole of society needs to be interested in and not just those whose livelihood depends on it." --Papers battle online news sites (BBC)

'Theory', we are told, has radically changed the nature of literary studies, but people who say this do not mean literary theory, the systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methods for analysing it. When people complain that there is too much theory in literary studies these days, they don't mean too much systematic reflection on the nature of literature or debate about the distinctive qualities of literary language, for example. Far from it, they have something else in view. --Jonathan Culler --What is theory?Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction)

Via Torill.

I don't know what it is, but I just can't seem to connect at all with the average audience. Seriously, folks, what is the problem here? I've been doing this a whole lot longer than any of the clowns out on the circuit these days, so I think I know a thing or two about my craft by this point. These kids coming up now, they wouldn't know funny if you spelled it out for them with a 22-page Translator's Foreword in a special edition from Oxford University Press. --Aristophanes --Today's Audiences Just Don't Get Me (The Onion (Satire))

--Maybe! (Wondermark)

Click to see the punchline.

Saving this for the next time I teach A Doll House or "The Yellow Wall-Paper."

This one with an elephant is good, too. Oh, and this one about the kidney made me laugh out loud.

I feel like I need to add a new tag called "retro".

Less intimidating and frustrating than the conference, more "human" than the margin note, audio commentary possesses the potential to become a space where real teaching and learning can emerge in the midst of feedback. --Sommers and Sipple --A Heterotopic Space

Haven't looked closely at this, but I'm blogging it for access later.

Since I find myself habitually editing and re-editing the notes that I type to my students, and since my handwriting is terrible, I have thought about working with audio.

During all of 2006, I was a paperless prof... as much as possible, I had students do their work online. We met in class as usual, of course, but all submissions were collected online, where they were date-stamped. This was very useful in cases when I asked students to refer to previous drafts (they didn't have to remember to bring hard copies with them), and there were very few ambiguous "the dog ate my homework" moments. If the system went down briefly, I knew about it, because I was probably online marking papers at the time. I usually set the deadline to be about 15 minutes before class started, so that students wouldn't hang around in the computer lab down the hall waiting for their pages to print out and then burst into class a few minutes late asking whether I had a stapler.

I liked the fact that I no longer had to juggle stacks of student papers. I liked the fact that students wouldn't flag me down in the halls in order to shove a late paper in my hands. But I also found it very tedious to give ALL my commentary by typing out words and sentences. Sometimes I longed just to circle two words, draw a line between them, and add a question mark.

Scientists say they have photographic evidence that suggests liquid water may have been on the planet as little as five years ago. --Julie Wheldon --Does water STILL flow on Mars? (Daily Mail)

The lunch took place just a couple of days after the Democrats crushed the Republicans in the midterm elections, regaining the House and the Senate. Mr. Bérubé, to his credit, kept the gloating to a minimum.

It's worth noting that, even though they've been writing about each other for years, the two men had never met.

Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Bérubé admitted to pre-lunch jitters. And while they both immediately agreed to the meeting, each expressed doubt that the other would be willing. --Breaking Bread: Horowitz vs. Bérubé (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This is in a web address marked "temp," so if you're at all interested in the culture wars in academia, you'd better download this conversation now.

I'm filing this under "drama" because I don't have a "sensationalism" category.

And why is the Horowitz graphic on the left, and the Bérubé graphic on the right? Somebody thump the layout designer upside the head.

In what seems to be a growing genre, we have a new trailer for Mary Poppins re-cut by a fan into a horror film called "Scary Mary". --Mary Poppins re-cut into Horror film (The Disney Blog)

Stay awake... don't close your eyes.

I discovered that an online newsletter, Podcasting News, had run a small piece titled "Professor: University Podcasts Are Totally Bogus." The professor was me.

The piece included a link to our student newspaper, which led the reader to a mangled version of my opinion piece, reduced to a fifth of its original length and printed as a letter to the editor. The paper had gone at my text with a hedge clipper, then printed it when I was traveling out of state. I never caught my "letter."

The shrunken, mangled piece made me sound like a Luddite, a curmudgeon railing against a technology whose self-evident usefulness lay just beyond his intellectual grasp. By the time I found the piece, various readers had added their comments. Most said I was antediluvian, and one cited a survey to prove that. Only the professor from UConn had had the courtesy to look up my e-mail address and contact me directly.

The online piece made no reference to the article that I had originally responded to, which led several of my e-readers to castigate me for neglecting to consider how valuable podcasts would be for handicapped students and students who couldn't come to class because of illness or religious holidays -- situations never mentioned in the article that first aroused my ire. --Robert Schneider --The Attack of the Pod People (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This is a good example of what happens when student journalists let their biases get in the way of doing responsible reporting. Perhaps the students didn't deliberately plan to make Schneider look bad, but because they did not contextualize his work properly, they appear to have made choices that had the end result of exaggerating and distorting his opinions. It's not enough for a journalist to "not intend" that sort of thing to happen -- you have to work actively to prevent it, and that careful work does not appear to have happened in this case.

Having said that, the professor who submits "a dissenting article" and expects the paper to print it in full as an article (rather than a letter or guest editorial) was probably operating on a misconception. (The professor's submission would likely be just as biased as the original. A good editorial page editor might line up two dissenting essays side-by-side, but that's not what happened here.)

Most papers also include a line about word length for submitted letters and guest editorials, and it sounds like Schneider was way over that limit.

Having said that, I find myself responding very positively to this quote from Schneider's defense of in-the-flesh teaching:

Students have to participate in my classes -- and I don't mean "have to" in the sense that if they don't participate, they won't pass. They have to participate because I can't teach if they don't; I have to sense if my students are following me or not. Even if their participation takes the form of a blank look or a nodding head -- as occasionally happens -- I need it.

I can certainly imagine how Schneider and others (including me) could usefully make a static recording of that portion of a lecture that is static and non-interactive, thus leaving more class time for the interactive parts.

Especially when I am trying something new, it's vital for me to be able to tell whether the students are following me, and it's far more efficient for me to be able to gauge that in real time, by their facial expressions and what they are looking at (the clock, their fingernails, the homework that is due in the class right after mine) than for me to wait until they have taken a unit test or completed an exercise for me to grade.

So I agree with Schneider concerning the importance of the live culture of the classroom. By "culture of the classroom" I mean the social and intellectual atmosphere that each group of students develops. I mean intangible things, such as whether the students spontaneously applaud when their peers finish presentations, or whether I have to prompt them each and every time. If a student's cell phone goes off, is it more likely to interrupt me in the middle of a monologue, or is it more likely to interrupt a discussion between students? (The last couple of times it has happened, it has been the student's own phone going off while the student was out of her seat giving a presentation... is that because students are setting their phones to vibrate first and then ring, so that they can catch the phone before it makes noise?)

I know of colleagues who put most of their lecturing into their Monday and Wednesday classes, and reserve Friday as an optional discussion day.

[Whoops -- I got interrupted at this point and when I got back to the blog entry, I had no idea where I was going with this... so I'll just post it anyway.]

Writing, in a radio story, has to be tighter and simpler than print: the beginning should hook listeners fast and hard, the way a song does. A succession of straightforward, declarative sentences (like those in the beginnings above) might feel a bit too clipped in a print story, but it's just right for radio. A reader can always go back and re-read part of a print story, or stop for a minute to think about a difficult section, and then resume reading. Radio has to be clear the first time around. Also, a radio story has to be a little sluttier with its charms: it can't be coy and get to the most interesting stuff a couple of minutes in. It has to frontload the drama, and not be too subtle about it. Bullcreek, in Dave's story, "hates" the nuclear waste proposition. Hate is a nice, strong word. Joe Roberts, in the Springsteen song, does not beat around the bush: his brother, Frankie, is no good. We, as listeners, know right away that this story will end in tragedy, but that doesn't spoil the ending for us, just primes us for it. In fact, giving away the ending at the start of a radio story can be a great strategy, especially if the story itself is a slow build. --Nancy Updike --Nancy Updike (on writing for the radio) (Transom.org)

I just taught the last regular class of the 1-credit "Media Lab" class that students take if they want to get credit for working on The Setonian, and I can't stop thinking about what I've got planned for next term. We're going to do some podcast journalism that we'll release for starters as part of the New Media Journalism program.

In the future, I'd love to see the Setonian have a podcasting editor, whose job would be to produce a 10-minute news magazine to go along with each issue of the paper. This would likely involve reading radio versions of stories already written for The Setonian, augmented by new audio interviews with principal sources, as well as original stories chosen for their value as a radio story. Stuff like a music therapy drumming session, the varieties of sacred music one might find at SHU (from organ music in a classroom, to guitars and folk songs at an informal Mass, to pop music with lyrics that students find spiritually meaningful), a story on avid videogamers (with bleeps and booms in the background), or a humorous neo-noir take on a mock crime scene investigation class in our forensic science major.

If you're doing a story on cafeteria food, we'd need to hear clattering plates and the crunching of celery and the painful chugging sound of the motor in the dispenser that pushes out a slow trickle of water in the cafeteria.

What I got from dumpster this month:

8 giant bags of fun-size skittles (exp. 8/07)
2 giant bags of fun-size starburst (ditto)
8 cloth Halloween gift bags
1 Halloween make-your-own candy necklace (sealed)
1 candy vampire teeth (ditto)
1 rainbow clown wig (new in bag)
1 head of cauliflower
3 8 oz. packs of mushrooms
2 packs English muffins (sell by date that day)
5 16 oz. jars of salsa
1 dozen bake-at-home dinner rolls (same day sell-by)
1 bamboo box w/ cover
2 plastic storage bins with drawers
1 bunch of fake bananas
1 giant (!) box of yarns
3 craft books (tatting, embroidery & sewing)
1 yard heart print fabric
1 4 1/2 foot fake xmas tree (compliments of Leslie!)
2 vintage granny-style lace nightgowns
2 turtlenecks
3 xmas hand towels
2 xmas stocking, one brand-new with spiderman on it
1 box of 18 gaudy purple xmas ornaments for above tree

etc.

The three rules of thumb I subscribe to are:
1) If a dumpster is locked, leave it alone
2) Leave the area cleaner than you found it
3) Share the wealth. --Moira Richardson --Dumpster Diving...Experience #1 (Roamer's Zone)

This is a comment by a former student, left on a current student's blog.

--Gingerbread Tie Fighter (Flickr)

The Icing is what gives the ginjedi his power. It's an energy field created by egg whites and sugar. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the ginjedibread together.

Via BoingBoing.

The Internet has become so pervasive that to be truly literate in 2006 demands some degree of technological fluency or at least familiarity. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 73% of American adults had used the Internet or e-mail as of March 2006. For the first time, the National Association of Adult Literacy--the most wide-ranging U.S. study of literacy--will test computer literacy in its 2008 survey that measures overall literacy. With such a large proportion of reading and writing taking place on the Internet, literacy has changed from a solitary pursuit into a collective one. --Maureen Farrell --How The Internet Saved Literacy (Forbes.com)

From an excellent special report on books in the digital age.

--Periodic Table of the Elements (Popular Science)

This is a detail from the "Oxygen" entry for this photographic periodic table of the elements.

Last night for his bedtime reading, when asked to choose from a small stack of books that also included adventure and humor, for his bedtime story my eight-year-old chose "The Mystery of the Periodic Table."

Did you know that gold is one of the few elements that is naturally found concentrated in large qualities in a pure state near the surface of the earth?

We started laughing, and I forgot that I didn't like this and that I'd rather be doing something else. We worked together and never actually hit a point where we couldn't make things work on our own. It was a nice, independent sort of feeling (which is a feeling that has been quite rare for me in this course). We actually got through two of the tutorials (out of five... even though the second one was kind of short).

Now, in relating this experience to blogging all I'm trying to say is that I went from resisting the idea to being okay with it. --Karissa Kilgore --EL405 Hammering away (Sugarpacket)

One of my students blogs about her experience using Hammer (the game modding tool that comes with Half-Life 2).

I've actually had dreams that all of my students were happily modding away, and then in the middle of the dream I've noticed that I was dreaming, so that when I woke up and realized I haven't yet passed this hurdle I would get all worried and get out of bed and revise the tutorials again.

The chance to teach a course like this was one of the main reasons I wanted to come here in the first place. So I've been preparing for this day for a long time. I do wish we could have had this moment earlier in the semester, so that students would have had the chance to play with Hammer before they had to commit to their final term projects, but at least they will have the experience.

Karissa is a top-notch English literature major who long ago mastered the undergraduate academic essay. I could see that she was a bit flustered by the "New Media Projects" course, which is the strangest English course I've ever taught, since it involves object-oriented programming, 3D design, and learning lots of different interfaces.

The method behind my madness is the idea that a "new media" expert should not simply know whatever counts as "new media" at the moment they take a new media class. I hope that the class prepares them to make sense of holographic cranial implants and whatever else counts as new media long after iPods and HD-TVs are in museums alongside Hi-Fi sets and 8-track tape players.

Yes, of course it's necessary to be able to produce something substantial in a way that begins to unlock the power of a particular tool, but I also want students to focus on what they do when they confront a new medium.

We've written interactive fiction, created Flash animations, built objects out of cubes and spheres, and -- today -- followed some tutorials that show the students, step by step, how to create a simple map for Half-Life 2 using Hammer.

The course has been an exhausting blast.

Lately the class has mostly been workshop days, where the students work on their individual projects, and all I do is circulate and help them. Since it's not a coding class, and I'm not really expecting them to master any of the software tools that the course touches on, I have no problem helping them through rough spots by coding certain features for them.

On a typical workshop day, I sweep through the room, one moment pointing out a typo on a student's page, helping a different student figure out how to get an interactive fiction game to recognize "ascend" as a command meaning "climb stairs," then helping another student make an invisible button increment a score variable the first time it is pushed (but only the first time), then suggesting that another student begin his presentation by asking the reader to answer some questions and personalizing the content based on the assumptions the reader holds, to helping a lantern-jawed time-traveling librarian punch penguins in a Flash animation.

The students have been great.

Because the course introduced some widely different tools, everyone has gravitated towards the tool that they find most interesting and/or most useful. The students took to Inform 7 and Flash more easily than I thought they would, and while they did make some good progress with The Games Factory 2, it wasn't a tool that anybody chose to use for their final project. The students liked a book that introduced Flash as a journalism tool, and I think that the next time I teach the course, I would probably drop Games Factory 2 and instead add a different book that introduces Flash as a tool for game programming.

I had the Hammer tutorials ready almost a month ago, but it took us some behind-the-scenes wrangling to figure out how to get Steam (a resource-heavy game-delivery utility that must do something important but I couldn't tell you exactly what) to work in a computer classroom where the workstations were locked down pretty tightly.

When we got past the first two or three places where I had become accustomed to seeing error messages, I warned the people around me know that I was starting to feel pretty good and that I was getting the urge to hug someone... and when it actually did make it past a certain point where I felt confident I could handle the rest of it, I actually did hug the two IT employees who had come by to help troubleshoot.

I've scheduled another Hammer workshop for next Tuesday. The Hammer tutorials are already finished and posted. (I used a free tool called Wink to capture hundreds of screen images, which I then annotated in order to form a step-by-step tutorial.)

I have of course the usual crushing load of papers to mark and the usual issues with freshmen who are panicking now that they realize that the choices they made earlier in the term really will affect the grades they can hope to muster at the end of term. Today I said "no" to several freshmen who asked -- at the last minute -- for special treatment that I thought was unreasonable.

But I'm still on a high from the Hammer class.

The 99 tips in this article make up the best in email practices. From how to ethically use the 'BCC:' to what attachments will make your mobile emailing compatible with everyone else's, this list covers everything you need to know about emailing. --Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips (IT Security)

I don't really care for the proscriptive tone of this document, but it has proved pretty popular online. I'm assuming it originated with ITSecurity, but the full text has been reproduced elsewhere.

I didn't find much new in the "Etiquette" section, but I particularly like the section on "Productivity, Folders, and Filtering."

Full disclosure: One reason I'm blogging this document is because tip 99 includes a link to Email: Ten tips for writing it effectively, which started out as a make-up project for one of my technical writing students many years ago.