July 2008 Archive Page

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

In today's landscape, defining "the media" isn't nearly as clear-cut as it used to be. Big-name newspapers and networks mingle with cable channels, all-purpose Web sites and blogs in the minds of the average news consumer, and for good reason: They are, in many cases, converging, with widely read blogs run by newspapers and online Web stories originating from cable networks. Meanwhile, a number of relatively new outlets have become powerful forces in their own right, taking advantage of the speed and connectivity of the Internet to scoop the mainstream media and blur the distinction between the producer and the consumer.

Moreover, much of the new media eschews precisely the kinds of journalistic conventions still taught in school, preferring instead to apply pressure to ideological opposites, using blogs, crowdsourcing and other citizen media techniques to gather raw material for the next humorous or polemical viral video.

Maybe that's the point.  -- Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed

It was intersting to see online political discourse (with a case study on the Kerry-Edwards attempt to build a blog presence in 2004) and a history of the internet filtered through a folklorist's lens. I'm saving this in case I need ever need to update some of the insights found in the older, classic, historical studies of cyberculture (such as Buckles's dissertation on Adventure, or Levy's Hackers, or Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine).

While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. -- Robert Glenn Howard, Journal of American Folklore 121(480): 192-218 (PDF)

A good feature from the New York Times:

Young people "aren't as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn't go in a line," said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. "That's a good thing because the world doesn't go in a line, and the world isn't organized into separate compartments or chapters."

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

[..]

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted "Dieing Isn't Always Bad," about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college," she said. -- Motoko Rich

Where to begin? Where to end? Lots of food for thought.

Via Psychemethadelica! (Metafilter)

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

When you die, would you rather be remembered as a technology hack who annoyed millions and forced them to waste time by weeding through torrents of junk e-mail, or a brilliant teacher who inspired millions to treasure every moment of the time they have left?

According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.

According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.

Blogging yet another story that reminds young fans of social networking sites that their profiles may be more public than they think. WashPo

"I know for a fact that when a superintendent in Missouri was interviewing potential teachers last year, he would ask, 'Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?' " said Todd Fuller, a spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, which is warning members to clean up their pages. "If the candidate said yes, then the superintendent would say, 'I've got my computer up right now. Let's take a look.' "

How would you feel if a potential employer clicked through your social networking profile during a job interview?

Thanks, Becca, for forwarding this link about how the American newspaper has changed in the past three years.  Last semester my journalism students did a unit on community journalism, and they wrote long features that were destined for our new summer-orientation and fall welcome-back issues. So I was aware of some of the changes observed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's report on the status of today's newspaper, though I didn't know science journalism had taken a hit. Plenty other details to think about, too.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures... I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I'm rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name "Gearhart" in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, "In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it." Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin's theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: "Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

As traditional news organizations face increasing pressure to cut back on investigative reporting and depend more heavily on celebrity and puff pieces (cheap to produce, attractive to advertisers, accessible to a mass audience), Dan Gillmor suggests that advocacy groups such as the ACLU have an opportunity to fill the gap.  If only they were fairer to the opposing view...

They're falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they've been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides' arguments, however weak. (That's sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero -- and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? --Wired

Former editors protest and lament the discontinuation of a literary staple:

The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section.

To be sure, no section of any newspaper can remain hostage to past ways of covering the news of the day. We are convinced, however, that the way forward is to increase coverage of our literary culture -- a culture that every day is more vibrant and diverse in the thriving megalopolis of Los Angeles.

Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.

Thanks for the link, Neha. Inside Higher Ed has a good article on the place of composition within the field of English studies.

I have no interest in the now clichéd grumblings over English departments and their esoteric if not onanistic engagement in high-octane literary theory. I will only say that there is merit to the criticism. On the whole, however, such censure really isn't going anywhere; these exercises in cryptic marginalia are simply what we do, much in the same way that hyenas eat carrion. Both have their place, and whether one is more useful than the other is a matter for disputation.

My questions are more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classrooms?

[...]

Teaching writing -- and doing it well -- is a taxing business. It means thinking about course objectives and how to achieve them in a very practical way. It often means our learning how to impart skills that may come naturally to people whose inclinations and talents lie elsewhere. As a graduate student, my initial experiences in the composition classroom were marked by confusion and fear. I had a general inclination about what a good paper looked like -- having written a few -- but I also had almost no idea how I did it. My process had been to write and rewrite until it felt about right. How and what I was supposed to impart to others out of my intuitive sense of what worked and what didn't escaped me completely. I began to think that I was there because no one else wanted the job. --William Major

A 2001 article from the Columbia Journalism Review... blogging it because one of my journalism courses this fall will focus on election coverage.

What's sure is that TV's election night practices are in for significant reupholstery well before the 2002 races. Several networks promise they'll project winners in the future only when all polls have closed in a state, not just a majority of them. ABC intends to advise viewers that projections are "informed, statistically based estimates" of the probable outcome of elections, not definitive declarations. They'll also remove television sets from the proximity of their decision desks so that analysts feel less pressured to make hasty calls.

Beyond that, legislators -- mostly in the person of congressman Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana -- have been scrutinizing TV's election night performance. Tauzin says he won't sponsor any bill aimed at preventing exit polls or limiting vote projections -- legislation which, in any case, would clearly affront the First Amendment. He and a Democratic congressman, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, are introducing legislation to require the fifty states to close their polls at the same moment -- an often-proposed idea that would force drastic changes in the way TV news handles projections.

Despite the mistakes, gaffes, and embarrassments, or perhaps because of them, election night 2000 attracted the most households and viewers to TV screens since Nielsen began keeping such records with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cliffhanger. The late-night host Conan O'Brien joked that the networks were so thrilled with the ratings that they plan to call all elections incorrectly from now on.

The public's loss of trust in television news, however, was no laughing matter. In a CNN poll 79 percent of Americans said the networks did not act "responsibly" on election night. In future close elections, will most viewers believe what the networks tell them? How long will it take to regain their confidence? Why serve up quick-draw projections at all, since the public isn't clamoring for them? Is it really worth each network's paltry saving of $5-$10 million per election cycle to cede to a single entity so much influence and discretion? Or, contrarily, should the networks dismantle their individual decision desks and delegate a reconstituted, better funded VNS to make all projections, but in a more cautious, unhurried, less frenzied, and non-competitive mode?

I tell my free-verse-loving creative writing majors that Picasso learned to paint traditional portraits before he chose to put two eyes on one side of a figure's nose. Likewise, learning the traditional rules of grammar will make your writing more powerful, since if you choose to ignore a convention, it will be a deliberate action, rather than something that happens because you don't know any better.

When transcribing spoken words, reporters regularly cut out an "um" here and an "uh" there.  Since punctuation is often just an approximation, different reporters who hear the same passage don't always record it the same way. (See "Ladies and Gentlemen [?] we got him." for a brief overview of how reporters variously puncutated the dramatic pause in Paul Bremer's 2003 statement on the capture of Saddam Hussein.)

But what if you're quoting an e-mail from a source whose computer apparently doesn't have a shift key?  You can often work around it through indirect quotation:

Using the clipped lingo typical of online chatter, Sasha said she would be right back ("brb") because her kid sister's rabid wallabee had gotten stuck in the air vent again ("ksrwsiava").

When does standardizing a language change the sentiment too much? There's a whole side industry of bloggers who enjoy picking apart President Bush's published verbal gaffes.  Certainly anything a public figure says at an official event is fair game, but when an ordinary citizen suddenly becomes a source of news -- perhaps by being related to a crime victim -- it may appear patronizing to publish their ungrammatical statements either verbatim, or with an encrustation of parenthetical corrections. 

Online communication adds yet another layer of uncertainty. When is it appropriate to leave the cyberspeak as is, without parenthetical clarifications or silent corrections?  The NYT offers a great reflection on the relationship between cyberspeak and standard written English.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way -- shape-shifting at a rapid pace -- than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web's lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take "hey guys, i'm stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth." Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as "she admitted her mistake on a message board"?) I can't tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there. -- Virginia Hefferman

Rather than link directly to the article, which was published by the Associated Press (an organization that tries to charge bloggers for quoting excerpts of more than a few words), I'll link to the Slashdot discussion of the article.

The other day at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, I attended a brown bag talk given by my Seton Hill colleague, Maureen Vissat, The Art of the 1940s: Styles and Influences. I had seen her present as part of a series of teaching demonstrations, so I knew her talk would be excellent. She wove interesting details from the lives of notable painters and gallerists to form an informative picture of how art and artists are made, and the dual role of the gallery as archive of what is already established and promoter of the new and innovative. Her slide show included several shots of the gallery spaces, not just close-ups of the paintings or portraits of the artists themselves.

Her talk was timed to coincide with an exhibit of American painters of the 1940s. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a permalink for this gallery, but for the moment, and presumably unitl the exhibit closes in October, there's a description on the current exhibitions page.

[T]his exhibition reconstructs a sampling of the exhibitions of the same title organized by Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Museum of Art) from 1943 to 1949 and includes 48 paintings, of which 42 are the actual works that were selected for exhibitions over the seven-year period. These annual exhibitions of American painting replaced the Institute's annual Carnegie International while it was suspended due to World War II.

I've included thumbnails of some of my favorite paintings below.

Fascinating stuff... according to CNN, the story is, in order to secure the release of 15 hostages, the Colombian military set up a fake website that borrowed heavily from a real organization's identity.

The organization's logo -- a stylized red bird on a white background in the centermost of three concentric circles, with blue leaves on white in the middle circle and the organization's name on a blue background in the outermost circle -- is featured prominently throughout the site.

That same logo was pasted on the side of a helicopter used on the rescue mission that brought former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers back from the jungle, according to unpublished video shown to CNN by a military source who had been looking to sell the material.

The emblems can't be seen in the heavily edited video released by the Colombian Defense Ministry. CNN declined to purchase the unpublished material. 

But Mision Humanitaria Internacional doesn't exist. Although the site said the group was registered with the Spanish Interior Ministry and the regional Department of Justice, Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman Alvaro Pena said the organization was not registered with the ministry and was not in its records.

http://misionhi.org is turning up 404 now, but there are a few pages left in the Google cache.

From the L Magazine. Some are actually just unfortunate art, but the whole list was worth it for this one:

In addition to the usage error, I particularly like how the highlights on the drops of blood seem to be made by a light shining *up* from the lower right.

Okay, and this next one is almost certainly a quadruple play:

A great introduction to some of the reasons why I love studying the English language. From John McIntyre's You Don't Say.

The malapropism: This venerable category of errors derives from the delicious and eponymous Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals of 1775. Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal a propos) pretentiously and unknowingly substitutes the wrong word for a similar-sounding correct one in her pronouncements, such as an allegory on the banks of the Nile. Or, more comprehensively: If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs! (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).

The Spoonerism: The Rev. Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, has given his name to a tongue-twisted error in which portions of words are transposed in phrases to give new and incongruous meanings. May I sew you to a sheet? for show you to a seat and the toast To our queer old dean for dear old queen are representative examples. Though the Rev. Mr. Spooner was said to be given to this sort of thing, it appears that many Spoonerisms attributed to him are entirely apocryphal.

The mondegreen: In an 1954 essay Sylvia Wright gave this word its impetus by desribing how as a child she had understood a line in the ballad "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray," laid him on the green, as Lady Mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misunderstood rendering of the text of a songf or poem. The child's hearing the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" as "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" is a famous mondegreen. Rock music, given the roaring instrumentation and slack articulation of the singers, is fertile soil for mondegreens.

The eggcorn: The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has given us this term for an erroneous transformation of a stock expression into a new one that only appears to make sense. Free reign, hone in and baited breath* are typical examples. They appear to rise typically from misunderstandings of spoken English as it is translated into the written version.

The Cupertino: Technology has given us a new class of error identified at Language Log as the Cupertino: an error induced by careless use of electronic spell-checking -- a form of cooperation transmuted into Cupertino. The Sun once presented a notable example in an article referring to Kunta Kinte, the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, as Chunter Knit. It should be superfluous to point out that only a fool sets a spell-check program to run automatically.

ZDNet:

Researchers at software vendor CA have discovered that social networking site Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial "Beacon" tracking service.

On a listserv of which I'm a member, Jerome McDonough points out that Tennis for Two is an analog game, so not only does it not require a computer, the medium itself -- an oscilloscope -- is an analog, so the information being represented on the screen isn't digital at all.  An even earlier game, and the first game to use digital graphics, is Noughts and Crosses (1952).

This page lists the source code for the world[']s first computer game and incidentally the world[']s first computer based version of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

This is the original source code written by A.S. Douglas that was loaded from a punched paper tape and run on the EDSAC machine. It is written in an assembler. even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the EDSAC instruction set and it's assembly language some parts of the code look reasonably comprehensible. The most impressive feature is it's length - this very short piece of code manages a good game of noughts and crosses.

Keen to find out more? Then download the EDSAC simulator and the documentation from www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ You can then follow this algorithm or try your hand at programming the worlds first programmable computer.

Every year, the Army recruits, at great expense, tens of thousands of young men and women. Given the costs of recruitment (and the dearth of eligible recruits), the Army cannot afford to lose many of these new soldiers. Army training is designed to take recruits who may know nothing about military life, discipline, or maneuvers, and mold them into warriors. Likewise, my task is to mold nascent scholars out of the under-performing, ill-prepared students who frequently show up in my community college classroom. I've found three Army practices most useful: making expectations explicit, the "crawl-walk-run" methodology, and formal evaluation of training. --Martha Kinney

The military has a fairly simple evaluation scale -- "go" or "no go."  In practice, that means means "success" or "do it again."  When I teach writing for the internet, one sequence of assignments culminates in the students having to create a website (a series of interconnected web pages with appropriately credited images) according to my specifications, in the space of a single class period. I gave very general guidelines -- "A client who loves the color green and who is obsessed with cheese."  Obviously the point of that exercise is not polished prose, but rather a knowledge of the HTML-authoring tools, CSS, filepaths, and basic online courtesy (giving credit where credit is due).

A student in my basic composition class who misplaces a quotation mark can still get partial credit, since I can still read the rest of the paragraph despite the technical error. But a student who misplaces a quotation mark when creating a hyperlink might create a technical error that prevents users from getting to the rest of the site's content.  So I recognize the need to walk students through the whole process carefully, even though I typically get at least a few students who are already accomplished web authors, who might find this process tedious. (I'll have to let them start working ahead if they do well on the authoring exercise.)

I'm glad Kinney acknowledged that the army teaching model is not designed to foster creativity, but there are certain basic skills --not just HTML authorship but also peer-critiquing, close reading, and literary critical analysis -- that have a technical component with very specific requirements. Students who haven't mastered those technical requirements can be extremely frustrated when they notice their end result doesn't meet the advanced requirements (where creativity is more important).

Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign's tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what's unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is now a tool being employed by the campaign itself.

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

One of my favorite things -- a photograph of a mistake on a sign. From Language Log.

Modern recreation of the 1958 video game "Tennis for Two" (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

The Boston Globe:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love. --Carolyn Y. Johnson

If one defines boredom "feeling depressed and anxious because one has nothing interesting or worthwhile to do," then I've proably been bored for about 5 hours since I've been married. While I don't mow my lawn as often as most of my neighbors, I do find myself refreshed by the hour or so during which I can't really do anything mentally other than let my thoughts wander. I generally think about my father, who spent a lot of time keeping up the lawn (and the rest of the house), and how as teenager I found where he kept his "to do" list, and I would try to spend about 45 minutes a week doing something on that list. (It would generally put him in a great mood to find that I had done something on that list, so he'd sort of celebrate by taking me out to lunch while out on an errand... so doing that little job was a way to score some quality time with Dad.)

It still seems strange that I have household responsibilities now, and every moment I spend with my kids is a potential memory that they'll keep returning to for the rest of their lives.

You won't find this sort of thing on the TV news shows. Stanley Fish:

Milton's poetry never lets you relax. Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended. So after rehearsing the story of Mulciber's leisurely fall from heaven "like a falling star," Milton's narrator says, "thus they relate, erring," with the harsh judgment of "erring" now attached to any reader who had been entranced by the "fable" put forth by the devils. ("Paradise Lost, I", 740-747).

Employees of the New York Times are expected to follow these guidelines for ethical online activity.

B5. Web Pages and Web Logs

126. Web pages and Web logs (the online personal journals known as blogs) present imaginative opportunities for personal expression and exciting new journalism. When created by our staff or published on our Web sites, they also require cautions, magnified by the Web's unlimited reach.

127. Personal journals that appear on our official Web sites are subject to the newsroom's standards of fairness, taste and legal propriety. Nothing may be published under the name of our company or any of our units unless it has gone through an editing or moderating process.

128. If a staff member publishes a personal Web page or blog on a site outside our company's control, the staff member has a duty to make sure that the content is purely that: personal. Staff members who write blogs should generally avoid topics they cover professionally; failure to do so would invite a confusion of roles. No personal Web activity should imply the participation or endorsement of the Times Company or any of its units. No one may post text, audio or video created for a Times Company unit without obtaining appropriate permission.

129. Given the ease of Web searching, even a private journal by a staff member is likely to become associated in the audience's mind with the company's reputation. Thus blogs and Web pages created outside our facilities must nevertheless be temperate in tone, reflecting taste, decency and respect for the dignity and privacy of others. In such a forum, our staff members may chronicle their daily lives and may be irreverent, but should not defame or humiliate others. Their prose may be highly informal, even daring, but not shrill or intolerant. They may include photos or video but not offensive images. They may incorporate reflections on journalism, but they should not divulge private or confidential information obtained through their inside access to our newsroom or our Company.

130. Bloggers may write lively commentary on their preferences in food, music, sports or other avocations, but as journalists they must avoid taking stands on divisive public issues. A staff member's Web page that was outspoken on the abortion issue would violate our policy in exactly the same way as participation in a march or rally on the subject. A blog that takes a political stand is as far out of bounds as a letter to the editor supporting or opposing a candidate. The definition of a divisive public issue will vary from one community to another; in case of doubt, staff members should consult local newsroom management.

131. A staff member's private Web page or blog must be independently produced. It should be free of advertising or sponsorship support from individuals or organizations whose coverage the staff member is likely to provide, prepare or supervise during working hours. Care should be taken in linking to any subject matter that would be off limits on the Web page itself.

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

From a collection of writings by Kurt Vonnegut. Read the full text of the essay, which is summarized (by Vonnegut) as follows:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

I came across this brief article in Pocket Gamer. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't check out this version of the game.  The 1977 date for the Don Woods expansion is correct, but ("[s]ources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974... are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976." --DHQ )

Forget motion-sensing and touchscreen malarkey. What you want from a modern-day iPhone game is a proper text adventure, where you get to type GO NORTH, HIT TROLL WITH AXE, and LKHJ VSDJD.

(Okay, we're still having the odd problem with the iPhone's pop-up keyboard).

Anyway, iPhone has its first text adventure, and it's actually the first text adventure ever made.

It's listed as Advent on the App Store, but the screenshot calls it Adventure, and the product text points out that it's also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or just Colossal Cave. Hope that's clear.

Leigh Alexander makes some good points in this GameSetWatch article.

Most lifetime gamers, then, have a built-in bias engine, whether they acknowledge it or not. For some, it's much more conscious and overt - hence the "Fanboy" network of platform-specific sites, hence forum flamewars, hence almost frighteningly irrational ire over certain reviews. Most reviewers dread having to evaluate a new flagship Nintendo title of the Mario or Zelda heritage; while the PlayStation 3 struggled to gain traction in the market early on, every new release was viewed as a flashpoint as fans were desperate for a killer app, and detractors were eager to see it fail.

I'm conscious that some students who sign up for a course on video games may expect to get credit for their skill at videogames they already know and love, rather than experiencing new genres and at least sampling the classics that established conventions that echo through the years.

From the New York Times blog, The Lede:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Latest update at 3 p.m. Eastern Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as "apparently digitally altered." More developments at the bottom of the post.

As news spread across the world of Iran's provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

From Shelly Weaver (of Seton Hill's entrepreneurial center), a brief introductory article.

On the subject of social networking, what you don't know can hurt you. These networks create opportunities for businesses that would not previously have been conceivable. One avenue to approach is to follow blogs and 'doers' in your industry as well as that of other industries to keep up with the fast-paced environment --E-Magnify

I remember when I was deeply involved in working on my dissertation, I would have dreams in which I was reading an academic article, and I grew frustrated because the text on the page would keep changing -- apparently my dreaming mind didn't have a buffer big enough to store that much text all at once, but I was able to note that it kept changing.  But this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes how a teenager managed to send text messages while sleeping:

Castillo's multimedia message to her boyfriend on her Pantech C300 phone involved 11 different steps, not including the typing. First, she had to select "Menu," then "Messaging," type "New," then select "Multimedia message," then punch the "Add" button and the "add text," before entering her garbled message. Afterward, she had to press "OK" twice, scroll to "contacts," find the e-mail address on that contact, select it, and press "Send."

"Not an easy process but once you get used to it, it becomes very easy," Castillo said.

Google's version of Second Life, as explained for the benefit of an audience that isn't expected to know anything about virtual worlds (NYT).

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog -- its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional -- they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Rosemary sends me this link from PhillyBurbs.com:

About 600 students are enrolled at Pennsylvania Learners Online, a cyber charter school where online gym is a requirement, and 12 others are enrolled in a program called e-Cademy to make up a failed credit.

Rich Campsie, who teaches physical education at e-Cademy and at Pennsylvania Learners Online, said he works with students one-on-one through an online interface to teach them about concepts ranging from lifelong physical activities and exercise to team mascots and game strategies.

They report back to Campsie via worksheets and written reports. He acknowledges there is no way to know for sure if a student is completing the physical requirements of the course.

I'm not usually interested in sports, but this sounds fantastic: chess boxing.

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday.

The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.

Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.

Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.

For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.

This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there.  I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. 

The Phillips screw and screwdriver were patented this day in 1936.
Courtesy U.S Patent and Trademark Office

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)

Other, screw-related blog entries:

• Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
• What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
• The standardization of screws

I just saw Wall-E with the family. It's rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie -- my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn't knock my socks off; the "Daddy, is he really dead?" ending was predictable -- I think the death of a supporting character was probably necessary to boost the emotional energy, but I did like the supporting cast of malfunctioning robots (I wanted them to have more screen time).  But those are quibbles.

For bedtime reading, my son and I are going through How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and I just taught him about the uncanny valley last night. So it was interesting to see how human the robots seemed in this film, and how artificial the humans seemed (though that's a design choice that fits well with the story). In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes a thoughtful review of Wall-E:

This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril -- and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind -- a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs)

I'm slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts.

For years, I've been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don't have a copy of the program on my laptop, so I can only update my handouts when I'm in the office. Plus, now that MovableType is open source, I'd like to use it.

I love the idea of letting visitors post comments to my handouts, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to keep all the URLs. the same.  MT automatically removes dashes and underscores when it creates URLs, and all my index files are index.html (rather than .htm). I'm sure there's a way to use .htaccess to solve the problem with redirects, but I ran into a brick wall.

This list from Mark Potts (of "Recovering Journalist) is just the thing I needed in order to motivate me to ask my students to think of the online version of the paper as the primary product, and the print version a useful offshoot. (At present, the reverse is true.)

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product

Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

(Full story)

Wilfred M. McClay:

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities--­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide--­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in--­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

Language Log has a good post on a phrase that I've seen cropping up increasingly in journalism:

Person of interest, called a "euphemism for a suspect" by the National Association of Police Chiefs, is now routinely used in investigations of all types, from murders to brush fires. 

Donna Shaw, writing in the American Journalism Review two years ago, said:

Officially, "persons of interest" means...well, nothing. No one has ever formally defined it-not police, not prosecutors, not journalists. The terms, "accused," "allege," "arrest," and "indict" are all dealt with in the Associated Press Stylebook, but there is no listing for "person of interest." Similarly, the US Attorney's Manual-the guide to federal criminal prosecutions-uses the terms "suspect" "target" and "material witness," but "person of interest" gets no mention. So what are reporters to do?

What indeed? Journalists are stuck with using law enforcement's word, that's what.

So there you have it. Person of interest is an expression that has no legal meaning, yet it carries an undefined and highly pejorative meaning about those so designated. So far at least, it's apparently okay for law enforcement to use it, as long as they don't mind the inevitable lawsuits that will follow.

Online University Reviews has posted an entry guaranteed to generate some in-bound link traffic. There are many sites I'd never heard of before.

Academics are flocking to the Internet like never before, particularly to start a blog. Faculty members in colleges across the world are connecting with people on a whole new level. Let's face it - academia can actually be very lonely at times. Not only can a blog be cathartic for professors, it can allow for valuable feedback from students and/or colleagues.

Liberal arts subjects are wildly varied. From art to science, the major disciplines have long been considered part of the liberal arts. Below are 100 of the most interesting and popular blogs written by liberal arts professors. They have been divided into subject and alphabetized, as it would be virtually impossible to arrange them according to importance.

I'm flattered to be included on the list (along with my colleague Mike Arnzen, who writes Pedablogue). Nevertheless, I'd say it's about five years too late for the "gosh, lots of academics are starting to blog" story, but it's always interesting to look at someone else's summaries of sites that I read on a regularly basis.

Well, it's usually interesting, if the summaries reflect a particular perspective or world view.  Unfortunately, I didn't always find the summaries particularly insightful or informative.

• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - The author is an associate professor of English the University of Maryland.
• Pedablogue - This blog is described as a "personal inquiry into the scholarship of teaching."
• (In the "History" category) Scattered & Random - This is a - you guessed it - scattered and random blog written by a history professor.

As for the list itself, what were the criteria for inclusion? Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass is a great blog, but O'Connor recently left academia.  Why does the list include 30 blogs grouped under "English," with no dual-language or ESL categories? Why is Cronaca identified as the lone art blog (when its content is so eclectic)? There's a 2005 in the URL -- is this list three years old? Why did I just get an e-mail about it?

BoingBoing offers a cruel fisking of a similarly sketchy article on a different topic: "GRADED: The Worst '10 Worst Consoles' List of All Time." 

I've certainly posted blog entries that I've tossed out quickly, without much forethought or analysis, but I do think this Top 100 list would have benefited from a clear statement of selection criteria and a bit more proofreading -- there are two blogs listed under #73, so this is actually a Top 101 list.  It would serve me right if my blog were cut to make it 100, but I'm just doing what Online University Reviews says is my thing -- "Jerz's Literacy Weblog - Learn plenty of useful writing tips from this professor's blog.")

Great news for fans of robot history and cinema history:

Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered. (Zeit Online)

Metropolis is truly stunning -- the architecture of the futuristic city scenes was a big influence on Blade Runner, and on pretty much every science fiction film since. Let's hope someone with deep pockets finances a thorough restoration of the movie.

From MetaFilter, which is better known as a link filter, comes this detailed story about one small but important part of the Battle of Gettysburg.

They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold them and they are soon caught in a sack. For every Minnesotan fighting, there are 6 Alabamans trying to kill him, sometimes from the distance of a handshake. The rebels are so thick around the 1st Minnesota that many Southerners are injured by friendly fire. The Minnesotans take cover behind trees and boulders as their world is reduced to smoke and screams, the ssszzz of bullets passing and the thock of bullets hitting home. Colvill is struck in the shoulder and foot. LTC Adams is hit six times. Maj. Downie is shot through both arms. Cpts. Muller and Periam, along with Lt. Farr, are all killed. Every officer is a casualty. The flag of the 1st Minnesota falls 5 times and is picked up 5 times. They fail to capture the enemy colors. They have stopped the charge, but they cannot retreat because they know that Hancock's implicit orders were to hold the rebels until he can patch the hole in the lines above them. So they stand and die.

It's been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven't touched in years. I've been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people's computer monitors have fairly high resolution, and the growing number of widescreen monitors is opening up some space on the right-hand side of my web pages, which I hadn't previously been using.  I've already put a "recent related entries" feature on the individual blog entry pages (the system selects those automatically based on category... it's not perfect, becuase it doesn't weight more heavily an entry that shares three cateogries as more similar to an entry that just shares one category with the current entry, but it's better than nouthing). 

I was reading a Washington Times article on the press coverage of Obama's doings, when I noticed this widget.

As one would guess from the triangle over on the right, when you click on the headline, a box opens up.  But if you see an open box, and you want to visit the article on the other side of the link, if you do what comes naturally -- clicking the title -- what happens is the window closes up. You have to click it again to open it, then click on the tiny word "view >".  (I don't want to "view" it... I want to "read" it! But that's beside the point.)

To my mind, the collapsing menu thing is done better at the Evening Standard, where the panels will glide open when you hover the mouse pointer over the title. (Horrors! I just checked, and the mouse-over menu at the Evening Standard doesn't appear to be working anymore.)

Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there is always a way out. In some games, you can just level grind until your characters can overpower a boss. Interactive fiction or puzzles rarely maintain their difficulty because you can always check for hints online. The origin of such accommodations in these games was to make sure that someone who enjoyed the plot would always be able to get to the end. After all, as Pickford notes, when you're telling a story, getting to the conclusion is the reward, not overcoming a tricky boss fight. -- L.B. Jeffries (Moving Pixels)