Gamers mark 30 years of Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons players gathered in game stores around the country Saturday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the grandfather of fantasy role-playing games — a pop culture phenomenon that has influenced myriad video games, books and movies. —Gamers mark 30 years of Dungeons & Dragons (CNN|AP) Dungeons & Dragons was one of the influences on…

Notions of beauty

Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko…

A Tribute to Spam, the Meat

Visitors enter the museum, which is located at 1937 Spam Blvd., through a wall o’ Spam, a display of nearly 3,500 cans of the pork luncheon meat. A sign by the wall helpfully notes that if you manage to restrict yourself to eating only one can of Spam a day, the contents of the wall…

Endangered species: US programmers

Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially hard. Another 28 percent…

Poetry and the Pleasure of the Text

Analysis, interpretation, literary research and explication all have their own pleasures, of course, but these are intellectual rewards which often come — students are quick to say — at the price of “enjoying” stories, poems, etc. The students would prefer to be blissfully entertained. In the hallway after my most recent class, a student told…

Two Hypertext Bookmarks

What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don’t have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what‘sgoing on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what‘sup with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took…

The gender profile of Wikipedia

One thing that has struck me is that many, if not most, of the people I’ve met from the community who are involved in managing Wikipedia seem to be women. I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out…

About Google Print (Beta)

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world’s information isn’t yet online, we’re helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results. To use Google Print, just…