See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
In January 2000, I was blogging about Dancing paperclips and telemarketers A “100 best novels” list published in 1899 Updike’s prequel to Hamlet The “bafflegab” jargon generator “Bookseller Barnes & Noble is teaming with Microsoft to build a new online e-book store.” (but the link is dead)
In 2007, Google changed the long-standing shaded background indicating the ads section of the page from blue to yellow. In 2008, it then briefly tried a green background before reverting back to yellow. Google continued to test variations of background colors including bright blue and a light violet. In 2010, violet officially replaced the…
I have certainly made more complex scenes, but this time, I modeled each board, getting the grain of the wood at least plausibly right on each face, and placing each nail realistically. Following the workflow for creating game assets, I converted the completely realistic 3D simulation with 3D boards and nails into flat images. The…
After FB crowed about this super-upbeat story, a notice appeared saying it was a paid editorial, and then the story disappeared. This looks very bad for Teen Vogue, and very bad for democracy. Read story on Boingboing.
A Facebook executive, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, recently defended Facebook’s policies about political advertising, which critics say rewards politicians who spend a lot of money pushing lies to the slogan-chanting, meme-sharing masses (including the ones in red hats and the ones with the blue hats). Bosworth seems to suggest that for Facebook to tamper with its…
“Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer.”
I can’t seem to get into superhero movies. The non-stop CGI onslaught just leaves me cold. As an English professor who teaches classes like Shakespeare in Context and World Drama, I do a lot of reading and see a lot of local theatre. But I’m hardly a media snob. For relaxation, I often put on…
What does this simple question and its results tell us? It’s not the English major that’s the problem. It’s an industry-recognized skill attached to the English major that’s the opportunity. I’ve long advocated for a rebranding of the term liberal arts. Americans generally and employers more specifically value the elements of a liberal arts degree such…
In December 1999, I was blogging about: The death of Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22, which invented the term) “On the Internet, every page is hot off the presses… or could be, if editors and publishers simply realized that ‘[i]nteractive media eliminates the holy deadline.’ What’s left over feels more like gardening.” Dot-coms hiring journalists,…
Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory. Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts. Dozens of…
Most of my students use MS-Word, but maybe a third use Google Docs (that’s a big increase lately) and a handful (but a bigger handful) use Pages. Today during a writing conference, a freshman comp student blinked in confusion when I asked her to “take me to your word processor.” I tried again. “Open up…
Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with.
In November 1999, I was blogging about John’s Book Pages (by a CS grad student who had recently read Gene Wolfe and Anthony Bourdain, among many others) What camomile tea has in common with the attack squadron over Skylon 4 (rec.humor newsgroup reference to a disastrous “tandem story” assignment) “Nimoy is, to say the least,…
These people do important, amazing work. While shiny, digitally mastered vinyl releases pop up in big box stores everywhere, the real musical wealth lies in the past—in thousands upon thousands of LPs, 45s, 78s—relics of “the only consumer playback format we have that’s fully analog and fully lossless,” says vinyl mastering engineer Adam Gonsalves. Few institutions…
Jessica found herself wishing that somebody — anybody — in her family had died: ”Because then I could write about it.” — College application essays. >As a young man I needed someone to look up to, someone to emulate. I was something of a nerd: I needed someone who’d integrated highly technical talents with the…
In September 1999, I was blogging about What makes a play worth seeing twice, according to Tom Stoppard The then-unrealistic expectations of voice-recognition software A critique of the “information wants to be free” mantra A Microsoft exec who predicted that digital publication would eclipse print publication within a decade How marketers are pushing your buttons…
For much of the day, those aboard Air Force One with the President of the United States were less informed than the average American sitting at home watching CNN.
A pleasantly detailed analysis of how the various editions of Tetris chose what piece was next. In 1985, Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov released Tetris to the public. This fun and highly addictive game challenged players to fit pieces together that were dealt in a random order. Since then, over 150 licensed versions of Tetris games have…
In August 1999, I was blogging about Conservation efforts at Poohsticks Bridge A Penmanship camp in Philadelphia Recovering the only known copy of a lost work by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (erased by a 10th-century monk who scraped off the writing to reuse the parchment) Fourth-graders using e-books at Resurrection Catholic School in Dayton, Ohio…