Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Pinback's Top 10 Games of All Time

2008-05-15T13:40:17Z

#6 is devoted to Infocom text adventures:

And the fact is, the classic Infocom games (I have left it to the reader to pick his or her favorite, as there were so many of such a high quality that it is folly to pick one for this list) were just tremendous entertainment, mainly for two reasons:

Reason 1 is their goofy advertising slogan, which said in one way or another with great irony that their games "had the best graphics". Ha ha ha, yeah, had the best graphics, even though they had no graphics. So clever! But goddammit, tell me you have any visual memory of any video game ever as crisp, vivid, and lifelike as standing in that field west of that white house. Because I sure as hell don't. I can recall every inch of the first level of Doom, better than I can my own house, but I still only see it in 320×200 resolution. That white house exists, thoroughly and completely. And that just makes every moment of one of these games so much more real, more compelling than any graphics could muster.

Reason 2 is that finally unlocking that door and entering the hidden room is as satisfying as any experience to be found in any video game ever. It's almost sexual. It was even better back when you knew you'd done it because the floppy disk drive would have to spool up. Just the thought of it is enough to bring on goosebumps.

The site is heavy on the nostalgia, but does a great job describing why the text games worked their way into our memories.

What can you do with texts that are in a digital format? « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

2008-05-14T16:42:42Z

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:

I've had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide access to more material. True, but converting books into a textual format makes them much more accessible, allowing users to search, manipulate, organize, and analyze them. Here's my summary of what you can do with an electronic text. Most of these advantages are pretty obvious, but worth articulating.

It's not digital text if it's an image file. It's just an image, that might contain anything at all. Vannevar Bush's Memex was an idea for a text storage-and-retrieval system that worked by storing and linking microfilm images of pages of text, but his vision was purely analog. Page images do provide a certain amount of information, and today it's not too hard to find tools that convert page images to text, but an archival project is incomplete if the digitization process stops at simply supplying images of the the material to be archived.

NASA to Announce Success of Long Galactic Hunt

2008-05-14T15:14:09Z

I saw a teaser that's got me wondering what's going on at NASA...

WASHINGTON -- NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.

Pink Eraser USB Flash Drive - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, craft

2008-05-13T04:09:20Z

Thank you, Rosemary, for sending me this interesting visual essay on the persistence of digital memory, from Instructables.com:

Want to make a flash drive that nobody in a modern office would even think about taking? Hide it in a pink eraser and it's secure in this digital age.

Measure for Measure - The Boston Globe

2008-05-12T14:18:37Z

Boston Globe:

Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

The study of literature is worth doing - and worth doing well. No one should be content to watch it fading gently into that good night.

I'm not the first to argue for a closer engagement of literary studies with science. For instance, in his famous 1959 essay on "The Two Cultures," the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented the scientific ignorance of "literary intellectuals," identifying it as a main reason for the yawning divide between the cultures of literature and science.

But I would go beyond Snow's suggestion that literary scholars should know more about science. Literary scholars should actually do science. --Jonathan Gottschall

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies

2008-05-09T05:11:24Z

A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism. Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV -- not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are pressnted to the public. (Armond White, New York Press, via)

In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers' own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood's deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.

The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications' void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with "democratization"--almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don't necessarily bother to learn or think--that's the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to--or need to--match opinions with other amateurs. That's Kael's "layman" retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is "conversation" (as when The Times saluted Ebert's return to newspaper writing as "a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation"). But today's criticism isn't real conversation; on the Internet it's too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart.

ADVENTURE Table-Read

2008-05-09T00:30:23Z

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities:

"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."

Recognize these lines? They're from the opening screen of Will Crowther's ADVENTURE (1975), the first example of the genre known as interactive fiction and arguably our first example of a virtual world (and as such the distant ancestor to places like World of Warcraft and Second Life). There is also an appropriate literary resonance: this path in the forest where the straight way is lost is reminiscent of another great underground epic.

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

We're inviting anyone with an interest in gaming, interactive fiction, or virtual worlds to join us for an hour or two on Thursday, May 15, at 12:00 noon in our conference room (MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library). Appropriately, we will provide tasty food: pizza. As with all adventures, we're unsure of where this one will end or exactly how we will get there. But there are sure to be breathtaking views along the way. Please RSVP to mgk at umd dot edu if you would like to attend.

The timing is right... I think I'm going to be able to attend this. Woo hoo!

Back From Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied.

2008-05-08T16:00:00Z

A few years old but, worth a few yuks, from McSweeney's.

In his nine years with the department, Dr. Jones has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction. In fact, he hasn't been in attendance for more than four consecutive weeks since he was hired. Departmental records indicate Dr. Jones has taken more sabbaticals, sick time, personal days, conference allotments, and temporary leaves than all the other members of the department combined.

The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.

The Democratic Primary Season in 7 Minutes - Channel '08: The 2008 Election on Video

2008-05-08T15:03:49Z

A good example of new media journalism, in which narration and animation weave short video clips into a coherent analysis. Via the Washington Post.

Our partners at Slate.com created a seven-minute satirical depiction of the Democratic primary season thus far. It covers Sen. Hillary Clinton's "cackle," Sen. Mike Gravel scowling at the camera, debates, former Sen. John Edwards staying in the race and Sen.Barack Obama in traditional Somali clothes.

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds

2008-05-08T14:29:42Z

According to Metafilter, "Nothing signals the death of a trend like an article in the NY Times Style section."

Even his clothing -- an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman's waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery -- is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early '90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, "steampunk" is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. "To me, it's essentially the intersection of technology and romance," said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

The New World of Computers (1965)

2008-05-08T12:00:00Z

Our Sons their Father's failing mainframes see, And where lies reel-to-reel goes USB.

The Storybook Forest Copyeditor

2008-05-07T21:19:01Z

If your father is an English professor, how do you respond to poorly written signs in a kiddie park?

Everywhere I go, I like taking pictures of signs with mistakes that make good classroom proofreading examples.

Shortly after I moved to Western Pennsylvania, I learned that Idlewild Park is the regional version of Disneyland. Every year we get season passes, and a regular stop for us is Storybook Forest -- which my wife remembers visiting when she was a little girl.

Who knows how many generations of children have seen this sign and wondered about the anonymous dwarven sign-maker who claims ownership over the familiar seven?

My son, a voracious reader, takes a scientific interest in words. After getting his six-year-old sister interested in comic books, he helped me teach her about onomatopoeia (notably "thwipp," which every Spider-Man fan recognizes as the sound of web-shooters.)

I was quite amused when Peter launched into a critique of the supposedly educational sign pictured below. (The audio file is about 2 minutes long.)

The Power of Suggestion

2008-05-07T15:26:00Z

Jason Lutes:

With every step "forward" in any area of human endeavor, something is gained, and with rare exception there is a concomitant loss. I feel this keenly in video game design, as the cutting edge of graphics slices into the future, opening up new and ever hotter arteries of experience for the player, but leaving imagination dead in its wake. Consider an informal visual chronology of computer game graphics:
Left to right, top to bottom: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Rogue (1980), Lords of Midnight (1984), Master of Magic (1993), Age of Wonders 2 (2002), Battle for Middle-Earth (2004).

The earliest text adventures used words alone to suggest the game world, allowing the player's imagination to fill in all of the details. Later, the ideogrammatic use of ASCII characters made possible things like the dungeon floorplans of Rogue to be clearly delineated, but that "*" that represented a pile of gold was still something to conjure with. With each step in the progression from limited-palette, low-resolution graphics to high-res 3D models and particle effects -- with each step toward a more photorealistic rendering of the game environment -- the player has to do that much less creative work, that much less imaginative interaction.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad progression. The trade-off is that we get games that are more immediately, actively immersive, as opposed to ones in which we have to work to immerse ourselves. Something is lost, but something else is certainly gained. Even as better and better graphics technology is erasing the need for an active imagination in playing video games, increasingly sophisticated game design has made possible a range of consequential (as opposed to imaginative) interactivity that is unparalleled in any other medium. Plus, I'd hazard that most people who play video games don't want to use their imaginations -- they just want a fun ride¹. The more bells and whistles the better.

Each of us probably have our own sweet spot between abstraction and representation, a point where our imagination is fired up by the power of suggestion, but would be extinguished by too much more information.

Top News - Blogging helps encourage teen writing

2008-05-07T00:38:25Z

This article from eSchoolNews does a good job emphasizing some of the relevant lessons from a recent Pew report:

For most media outlets that reported on an important new survey measuring the impact of technology on teens' writing skills, the big news from the survey was that emoticons and text-messaging abbreviations are creeping into students' formal writing assignments. :-(

Buried beneath the alarm of writing "purists," however, was a promising finding with equally important implications for schools: Blogging is helping many teens become more prolific writers.

FYI: Orson Scott Card Slams J. K. Rowling

2008-05-04T14:45:38Z

Tomorrow is the last day of classes, but it's not too late to bring up a new topic. Many of my students in "Intro to Literary Study" were fascinated by Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, so I thought they might appreciate hearing about Card's dismissal of J.K. Rowling's suit against a fan-created reference work devoted to the world of Harry Potter.

The author of the Ender series has some choice words about the author of the Harry Potter series. Note that he's not actually accusing her of stealing his ideas, he's just pointing out how ridiculous he feels her claims are.