In the late-eighties and early nineties, electronic writers wrote hypertext fiction and poetry, the classic example being afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. In hypertext literature the narrative unfolds through a long series of links that produce different outcomes — but now the shrapnel of the technological explosion includes hundreds of sub-categories, each completely unique.…
Very detailed. See the full version at deviantART (I can’t link to it directly). The site also has a great chart showing how to age characters, and a cool nodally-linked display showing subtle shifts between emotional states, all starting with a neutral face. For example, the face does different things on the blank-relaxed-lazy path, as…
The CNN story about The Simpsons limping on after jumping the shark is pretty much what I expected, but I’m blogging it for the infographic. Not quite as epic or information-dense as Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia, but still breathtaking. Similar:Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player…
Some interesting synergy in my feed reader this morning. The hidden story of the 3D engine – by the people who write them Videogames are beautiful now. It’s not the figurative beauty of yore – the iconic charm of Pac-Man, the elegiac simplicity of the vector-mapped space craft in Elite. Modern games are edging toward…
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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…
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 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…
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.”…
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. Similar:This 1960s teenager knew the…
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…
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…
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…
Jaw-droppingly cool– though it probably helps if you’ve ever worked with Flash. Animator vs. Animation Similar:Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"The Big Boy GraveyardA Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme…This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsWashington Post Cartoonist…
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…
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…
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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…
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…
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