Something that I tended to think was unfortunate about certain MMO storytelling… you get these narratives where the NPCs have lots of really emotive things to say to you, and they want to throw you into this narrative. Then on the other hand, your interaction with the characters played by humans — even if theyre…
Voilà, she is Billie Holiday, in a black dress with a red tissue-paper flower tucked into her strawberry-blond hair. Behold, she is Grace Kelly in pink satin lace on her wedding day. Poof, she is Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, wearing a hat her aunt got her in Vietnam. The Dundee Elementary School…
A humanities faculty member and a math faculty member collaborate on a course about the meaning of math. “Don’t worry;” I told them. “You can’t find this more frightening than I do.” And it was true. Ever since the word problems my father forced on us at dinner, I’ve always been terrified of math. I…
Somehow I don’t expect to find this story hyped up on TV news shows… but if a similar study proposed any sort of connection that made video games look bad, that would be another story. Using complex actuarial tables and adjusting for smoking, waist circumference, dietary quality, exercise habits and other variables, the scientists were…
I teach my journalism students to write CSS and HTML by hand, to make simple games in Scratch, and to write text adventure games in Inform 7 not because I expect them to get jobs doing any of those activities, but because a fundamental coding literacy, on top of their liberal arts education, will help…
A spokesperson for the Sunday Times told the BBC: “The headline and the first sentence of the article over-simplified a complicated issue, which we regret. However, the rest of the story made clear that we were referring to cod over the age of 13 and the figures cited were accurate.” And what of that other…
YouTube has adjusted its search algorithm to emphasize videos that users watch more. Over the past few months we have made some changes to YouTube to encourage people to spend more time watching, interacting, and sharing with the community. To support this, we’ve updated what we call video discovery features, meaning how our viewers find videos…
Because you couldn’t go online, everything had to be done in person. Patzer spent most of his time busing and hiking from village to village, often just to reinstall software with a USB drive. “Imagine you have hundreds of these little villages that take two or three days to travel to. I mean, the logistical…
Students created this in 60 minutes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drU6n2nDfxo Other student projects (see links at bottom of page): http://blogs.setonhill.edu/el200/2012/09/18/videography-ex-2/ Similar:Tolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance best?Interesting set of observations explorin…CultureTake that, grass! Eat rotary analog steel.HomeVerizon Forced Me to Remove Parentheses, Quotation Marks, and Apostrophes from a Customer …When I finally found a way to contact…
This week, if you head to the Allegra LaViola Gallery in New York City to see Fiend in the Void, a solo exhibition of works on paper and sculpture by Casey Jex Smith, you’ll get a chance to see a Dungeons & Dragons clash of the titans between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The winner…
By comparing the specimens’ ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and…
Throw toast at the actors and get spaced out on sensation at the Stage Right Theatre Company’s Halloween show, The Rocky Horror Show — Live. I put this promo together from video I took at the yesterday’s first rehearsal. Clips include Science Fiction Double Feature, The Time Warp, Dammit Janet, and more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdWGMLL-asg Similar:On the…
An intelligent, thoughtful, well-written review of the best of the Star Trek movies. And kudos to the headline writer — amazingly nerdy and appropriate for this story. We know that “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982) is the best of all of the “Star Trek” movies. I am not stating anything new here.…
Shortly before leaving work Monday, local fire chief Pete Wilkes reportedly approved firefighter Joseph Ainslie’s request to take an extra three days on a particularly tough fire, advising him to “take [his] time” with the two-story blaze. “What matters most is doing the job right, not rushing through it and getting it done fast,” Wilkes…
2012 Interactive Fiction contest we’ll be featuring text-based games in this week’s Free Game Friday roundup. Not all of this week’s games come from the competition, but they all feature the written word as their main gameplay mechanic. We also didn’t have space to feature all the great games in the competition, so here’s a…
Here’s what it sounded like at our first rehearsal, after learning the parts for about 40 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV3xLg9KuiI Here’s how it looked opening night, two weeks later (I’m the surly guy in the white hat): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bXEF8B4wY Similar:As yearbooks die, colleges lose a link to the pastThis year, for the first time in decades…AcademiaIf watching this…
On my to-read list once I post midterm grades. As computer software has become increasingly central to commerce and creativity, lawmakers have retrofitted it into preexisting legal regimes to regulate its production and distribution. Currently in the United States, software is eligible for protection under patent law, copyright law, trade secret law and the First…
A student recorded this interaction on her Facebook wall: Me: I think I’m going to die after elections. Dr. Jerz: Well how soon after elections? We all die eventually, you know. Me: I’m going to wait til after Wednesday so I finish the online election issue. Dr. Jerz: As long as you finish. Wait… can…
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I love the Onion. “I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I…