The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much. --Jason Scott

A wonderful tribute to an enduring (and endearing) medium for capturing thoughts.

Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books.  Not just in the abstract -- these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles.

At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these 'narrative' and 'endings' groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other:

In this example book, page one is a 'branching' decision, meaning there are at least two choices offered to the reader. The second page is a 'story' page, meaning that it was either a text page that had a single forced choice (e.g., 'To continue, turn to page 30'), or an illustration page outside of the stream of the story. The brightly colored pages are endings of various degrees of direness. Great endings come in the middle and at the end of this selection of pages. The first ending in the book is an unfortunate one -- a common trope in these stories. --Samizdat

Do not miss the animations representing paths through the novel. A beautiful site! Thanks for the recommendation, Danielle!

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker's series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

"It's in the midbrain," Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, "which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli."

Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting. --Vanity Fair

Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942." --BoingBoing

Awesome Flash animation from the University of Utah, showing relative sizes from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.

I wish it could also zoom out and show astronomical sizes, too, like this FSU slide show (not as smooth as the Utah one) or the famous Powers of Ten movie.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

A fascinating twist to the complex story behind the legal battle behind the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster.

New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images." 

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."

Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken." --Los Angeles Times

Jaw-droppingly cool-- though it probably helps if you've ever worked with Flash.

Animator vs. Animation

In the figure of the coltish, resolute Sigourney Weaver, Alien may just be the film that overhauled the old, unreconstructed horror genre and dared to put a woman centre-stage. Because make no mistake: a horror movie is what Alien is. "It's basically a haunted house film," explains the critic David Thomson. "The only difference is that the old dark house just happens to be a spaceship." --Xan Brooks, Guardian

Alien came out thirty years ago.  Thirty years ago!

I would have just turned 11.  I remember reading all about the movie in Starlog (a science fiction magazine my sister and I read from about issue #6 or #7, and we later ordered back issues so we had the complete set), and I remember seeing advertisements for Alien-themed toys, but I wondered who would want them... I'm sure I saw an edited version of the movie on TV, or maybe I rented the video, but I really wasn't into horror. 

The sequel, Aliens, came out when I was a teenager, and was a big hit with my peer group. It made me re-watch the first film, and I appreciated it more. 

I did watch the third film once, but I settled for reading an online version of the script for the fourth movie.

But honestly... thirty years?

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian

In 1970, the gap between shows featuring magic and shows featuring more science-based themes is fairly wide, which may be related to the relative cost of producing the different types of shows; Captain Kirk required pricey sets and a makeup crew while Samantha Stevens just needed a film editor and the ability to wiggle her nose. But as audience expectations for shows involving magic become analogous to their expectations for science fiction shows, magic's peaks and valleys start to correspond to those of other themes, though supernatural shows may be a bit more resilient to overall drops in television spending. --i09.com

Listen to a short news broadcast, such as the NPR Hourly News Summary. These stories will typically include audio clips from newsmakers, and perhaps the noise of crowds or nature. But we're just focusing on the sound of the radio journalist's voice.

Don't try to sound like "an announcer."  Forget the barking style of voice that radio announcers always seem to have in movies when they "interrupt this program with a special bulletin."
 
Radio News Delivery.mp3
(By the way, a typical radio story is just 50 seconds long, which is about how long it took me to read the following.

A radio newscaster's voice begins each story on a high pitch, with the first sentence of the story ending with a slight drop.
 
The second sentence starts at exactly this same pitch, which is an important audio cue that we're still on the same subject.

Note this slight boost of energy in the third sentence, which is important because the tone can't keep dropping forever.

Although I wouldn't do it when delivering a hard news story, I'm about to hang my voice, indicating I've got plenty more to say.

My speech is formal but conversational, with both high and low pitches within each sentence, though the general trend has been downward.

You can always tell the final sentence in a radio journalist's story; it slows down just a bit, and its pitches are the lowest of the whole piece.
 
For the New Media Journalism program at Seton Hill University, I'm Dennis Jerz.

Dude! Your shirt looks just like the blue walkway and the brown sand! How do you do that?

From the MailOnline, via.

Any college professor knows the depressing feeling that comes when you stay up late marking a stack of papers, and a high percentage of students don't even bother to pick them up.  One instructor made an art installation out of abandoned student essays. 

As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.


--Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding

I suppose, too, that there's some self-selection involved -- perhaps the students who care least about their writing are the most likely to abandon their essays, while the best writers were proud of their work and wanted to pick it up. A lively discussion on the comments page.

The context in which the students' intellectual property is used -- as evidence of the nation's illiteracy -- is problematic, as is the fact that the students weren't given the opportunity to consent to their work being used this way.

I just noticed that Jason Scott has redesigned the home page for his film website. Good things are worth the wait. I'm content to wait.

I was on the road (and away from a computer) for the past few days, on a little family outing.  My wife brought along a copy of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure #4 that she picked up cheap at a library sale.

The cover of this book, originally published in 1979, features a big-jawed space hero in a suit that sports a familiar color scheme.

My latest Blender 3D experiment.

Political message? You decide.

Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo.

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic

The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers as in standardized testing. The Federal Government's landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, on the dismal state of public education, ushered in a new era of standardized assessment that has intensified since the passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act. "In schools today, they're teaching to the tests," says Tamara Thornton, a University of Buffalo professor and the author of a history of American handwriting. "If something isn't on a test, it's viewed as a luxury." --Clare Suddath, Time (via Annette Vee's Facebook posting)

This tutorial shows how to rig the fingers in a very clever way. I'd seen this technique described in a text tutorial somewhere, but after seeing it here, I understand it. I also appreciated seeing how to adjust b-bones so that they only rotate, without bending (which results in noodly-looking joints).

I really love Blender, since it's forcing me to develop the visual side of my brain. The summer is too short... work for the fall is already starting to pile up. I'm going to have to set aside Blender pretty soon.

The HD version actually came out better than I thought it would. More photos after the jump...

I tell my kids steampunk bedtime stories about the adventures of Captain Rod Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship. Since I also enjoy playing with Blender 3D, it seemed natural to make these clockwork heart decorations. (My wife offered detailed pointers to tweak the one on the right.)

The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, according to the Daily Express, the original high-quality recordings have been found. (It looks like NASA was planning to surprise the world a little closer to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

I can't say I understand my creation, but it sure was fun making it.

Set phasers to "meh"! 

My wife arranged a visit to The Franklin Institute a couple of weeks ago. We didn't actually know that this Star Trek exhibit was there.  I was ready to pass, in favor of the more educational exhibits, but my wife made it a Father's Day treat and shelled out enough gold-pressed latinum for the four of us.

No photography was allowed in the exhibit, which was annoying, so I wasn't going to blog it at all because, well, sometimes words are boring.  But this YouTube clip, in between the chatter and the promos, shows some of the collection.



Despite her ability to channel William Shatner, my seven-year-old quickly got restless. My son enjoys reading every single line on every single card in every single display, so we took our time working through the place.  I kept hoping maybe there would be a ball pit full of tribbles for the girl, or a dress-up area where she could try on different forehead bumps.  No such luck.  My wife had to take her out early.

A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago - a yardstick to judge and compare games.--  Keith Suart, Guardian

The first article in a series.