See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I’ve made some good progress. Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I’d been going crazy…
By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts…
The freeform world of both the Jazz Age and the DotCom explosion create surreal intoxicated hilarity, and both The Great Gatsby and The Sims allow the participants to immerse themselves in the experience. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, affords us some distance from this world and critical insight into the excesses of this…
Student Reaction to Google Placement (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) While preparing for my Intro to Literary Study class, I thought that, since I introduced the “Claim, Data, Warrant” concept last week when I was very sick, I’d better revisit the topic to make sure the presentation was effective. I Googled claim data warrant (without quotation marks) and…
My Half-Life 2 Mod Begins (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve finally knuckled down and started making a serious effort to teach myself how to create a Half-Life 2 mod. A “mod” is a user-created expansion to a commercial game. Perhaps the most famous of these is Day of Defeat, a total-conversion mod that turned Half-Life (a sci-fi…
With a few clicks of a mouse, Pleasants can navigate the Web site for Goochland County’s Byrd Elementary School and access the Web log kept by her daughter’s third-grade teacher, Ellen Robinson. As all Goochland teachers have been required to do this year, Robinson keeps a school district-sponsored Web log, or blog — a kind…
Were I duplicitous and talented enough I could convince you I’m anything: a ninth grader with body image issues . . . a divorcee with nothing left to live for . . . or a graduate student about to hit the job market. This entire blog could be an elaborate scam designed to evoke undeserved…
“I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this kind of behavior is naturally rewarded,” cautions Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “But it does lead to success in some realms.” And those realms can include the legal profession, sales teams, trading floors, entrepreneurial endeavors — in other words, the…
But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going…
One might imagine what would have happened to the future of the essay if Rousseau had contemplated and feared negative public response to his love of self-pleasure and resisted exploring his emotions in such a way (i.e., if he doubted whether self love would be a ?serious? topic). Or what if Cervantes took the ?novel?…
—Pick Up That Can (Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman) A comic strip using visuals created with the Half-Life 2 engine.
—So *this* is what we’re doing for Valentine’s Day? (CTRL+ALT_DEL) Okay, it’s a few days late, but it’s very sweet, in a geeky, retro way.
The very nature of e-mail (which, along with first cousins IM and text messaging, is an undeniably handy means of chatting) encourages sloppy “penmanship,” as it were. Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf. But it’s not…
In the past year, newsrooms have begun to treat convergence differently, to see it as a solar system of loosely connected functions, rather than a hard-wired fusion of media. As bloggers and independent niche online publishers attract fast-growing audiences, media executives feel pressed to invest in experimentation. They seem more aware that prizes go to…
—Dick Cheney Quail Hunt Game File this under “What took you so long?”
The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective. —Stephen Leahy —The Secret Cause of Flame Wars (Wired)
The York team recently compared 94 bilinguals and monolinguals between the ages of 30 and 80. It found that while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower. Now young people who play video games are showing this similar pattern of high performance in resisting…
The International Society of Cubists officially launched its Web site today, a brilliant rejection of natural form and perspective that metaphysically establishes the implication of movement, analytically redefines spatial relationships, and is an absolute bitch to navigate. “What the hell is this? I can’t tell how to get anywhere,” one of the site’s first visitors…
I regularly use computers in my classroom, and have long been a fan of the educational potential of online discussion groups. So I was completely taken aback a few months ago when a colleague informed me of something she had recently learned from her students: Teenagers no longer check their e-mail. I confirmed that in…
As recently as a few years ago, Aftab said the profile of an online victim was a young woman who felt alone, didn’t have many friends and craved attention. Then, in 2002, 13-year-old Christina Long of Danbury was strangled in a Danbury mall parking lot by a 26-year-old man she met on the internet. Long…