One of my first dates with my wife was interrupted when I got a piece of beef stuck in my throat. I could breathe, but not swallow. When the paramedics arrived, I asked them to wait in the lobby while I walked out to my date, handed her my keys, and explained that I was…
Soon after, Mario entered into the Mushroom Kingdom and proceeded to steal from their banks and museums with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Thieves. Throughout the game he is chased by Bowser, chief of police at the M.K.P.D. (Mushroom Kingdom Police department) and the Goomba’s and Koopa Troppers in blue. […] Bowser’s chase of…
The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort. Each artist’s work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective. Here we make, remake, shape and reshape. Steve Ersinghaus :: Story Carianne Garside ::…
Photopia unceremoniously dumped the idea of a ‘puzzle-based’ narrative in favour of what it called a ‘story-based’ narrative, a linear progression (linear in terms of interactivity, not time) from beginning to end that throws seemingly random fragments of a story at the player, which slowly start to weave into one another and create a cohesive…
Shackle yourself to your work, and set the timer.Thanks for the link, Josh. Similar:My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year.…
A touching tribute in images and words. Phillip Toledano Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its jou…By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s…
Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month. One of the more unusual plays in this year’s Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the…
A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I’m blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill — something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn’t often fit will with…
That’s the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis, with the Hubble Space Telescope, in front of the sun. Wow! It’s difficult to imagine a more epic scene, but this photo has modest origins: amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault shot it with nothing but his own telescope, a solar prism and a Canon 5D Mk II. — Gizmodo Similar:My…
Nowadays, layout editors can just expand the size of a photo or cheat the typesize to make a story fill a gap. But in the days before such digital magic, newspaper editors needed a steady supply of filler stories — short items, just long enough to plug gaps of a few inches at the bottom…
Last night, I went to see the new Star Trek movie with a member of the computer science faculty. A math professor was hoping to come, but had a change of plans. The previews suggested it would be a bit intense for me to take the kids to see it, but now that I’ve seen…
This paper riffs on one of the most popular handouts on my website — Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers (originally written by one of my technical writing students in 2002, though I continue to tweak it), and applies it to mathematics. [B]efore anyone can understand a piece of mathematics, they must first…
I know that my bridge playset has long since gone to the big warp core in the sky, and I can’t seem to find the shoebox where I kept my original Star Trek action figures from the 70s. Even as a kid, I remember being frustrated that the playset didn’t really look all that much…
A serendipitous click on a link brought me to this striking example of storytelling economy in a news story. “Three flower cars, wow!” said a pilgrim from Wisconsin who was just about to chomp down on a chocolate cannoli from Mike’s Pastry yesterday morning. The cheesehead was momentarily spellbound by the stately procession of black…
A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem. Today I Die Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…More than a million people die on roads…
His ear was severed by a sword wielded by his friend, the painter, Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art. Gauguin lied about the incident and fled, two German art historians now believe. Van Gogh covered up to protect his friend and was placed in…
Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7. Coding is art, art is code. As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming…
Unicorns are much more fun when they move. It took about two minutes for my daughter to do the drawing, about an hour and a half to make the model (while my daughter played at my feet), and another two hours to make the animation (long after she was in bed). Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events…
Via this Time Magazine article, “How Not to be Hated on Facebook.” Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its jou…By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I…
Fascinating story of a forger who tricked both the Nazis and the Allies. Sounds like a great subject for a non-fiction novel. Brought in for questioning, van Meegeren refused to give up the name of the painting’s rightful owners and was sent to prison on charges of treason, a crime punishable by death. Six weeks…