Doris Lessing doesn’t like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica: Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn’t believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. “And…
Adam Parrish: The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player’s path through the game. A Frotzophone “performance” looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you’re also playing music. Here’s a…
ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon’s new e-book reader. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit…
Times Online: The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial. No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to…
Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father’s funeral this morning. I am the twinkle in your eyes, Eternal laughter sparkling, Strong and silent, My father. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at the mall.Quick visit to see…
I really like the interface I stumbled across on the Evening Standard website. The version here on my page is just a static screen grab, but on the real site when you mouse over a title, the item drops open to reveal the photo and the caption… it feels far less distracting than a popup,…
Someone bought a collection of old slides from a second-hand shop, scanned them and posted them online, then got in touch with the photographer — who had tossed them into a trash bin 30 years ago. I was an artist in Vietnam and served with the Department of Information, Mac Headquarters. During my time there…
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Stanford last June: Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure–humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who…
Spit & Polish: When this game was first released in 1880 it was so hugely popular in taverns and inns that the bank of England was forced to mint more threepenny bits to keep up with demand. Gotta love the mustaches and bowler hats. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a…
Ear Studio: Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to…
This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention. There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game ‘Adventure!’ to include Booth as the lead antagonist. Similar:Today I didn't save…
Invisible Games: The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime…
Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking…
Bill “Calvin and Hobbes” Watterson reviews the new Charles “Peanuts” Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal. Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder’s commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but…
The New Yorker has an article about a bookstore that supplies custom-made libraries for purchase or, for comercial displays and movie sets, rental. Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scène, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover…
Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at the mall.The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way…
Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years. If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. The…
A scene from Ridley Scott’s youth, via Wired: The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it’s steel, and it’s probably particles, it’s not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you’d be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire.…
Great Zork map. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterQuick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial…
Kaj Sand-Jensen: Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently…