Trading Up With Gilgamesh

I had begun with a flourish, emphasizing the excitement created when a young curator at the British Museum first deciphered the Gilgamesh epic, with its seeming confirmation of the biblical story of the Flood: “When George Smith discovered the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the fall of 1872, he made one of…

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

During the Stalin era, Soviet officials frequently vanished from official photographs after falling out of favor at the Kremlin. But the advent of Photoshop and its variety of tools has made it easier for photographers to tinker with images after they’re captured. By the same token, the internet has allowed skeptical bloggers around the world…

Nabokov will play you, fool

Maybe tomorrow I’ll think this is cute. In the meantime, I trust no one named Vladimir. God help me if I dream about this… —Karissa Kilgore —Nabokov will play you, fool (Sugarpacket) One of my students vents her frustration at being completely fooled during her first encounter with Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

Did You Learn Anything?

“To use the Minute Paper,” Angelo and Cross write, “an instructor stops class two or three minutes early and asks students to respond briefly to some variation on the following two questions: ‘What was the most important thing you learned during this class?’ and ‘What important question remains unanswered?’ Students then write their responses on…

Teaching Without Textbooks

Here’s the dirty secret that you’ll never see printed in a publisher’s glossy promo material: Every textbook on the market is a crashing bore to read. All the publishers will assure you that they’ve added special features designed to attract today’s young people and that the prose is lively and engaging. Yeah, right. The colorful…

XYZZY Awards 2006

—XYZZY Awards 2006 (IF Wiki) The XYZZY Awards are the Oscars of the Interactive Fiction community. I’m usually watching the kids on the weekend when the awards ceremony is held, but I always enjoy reading the transcript. The winner of Best Game is The Elysium Enigma.