See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work,” said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. “This kind of thing has been going on…
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn’t demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space…
Why do you love online publishing? Here’s why I do: As an American, I feel so fortunate to be alive at a time when, 200-some years after the ratification of the First Amendment to our nation’s Constitution, the people of this country finally have a medium at their disposal which allows any person to speak…
Blake Ranking wrote “I did it” on his blurty.com journal three days after the October 2004 crash that caused a friend’s death and left another seriously injured. He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its aftermath. —Teen Guilty Of Manslaughter After Online Confession (AP | The Pittsburgh Channel.com) If…
—Editing He-Man (Penny Arcade) Who’s been vandalizing the Wikipedia entry for He-Man? (Warning, punchline requires knowledge of 80s pop culture.) Thanks for the link, Matt.
Journalists “are not Emily Dickinson writing poetry on backs of envelopes, not caring whether anybody reads them.” Given the state of the industry, with newspaper circulations dropping and publications closing, Collinger said that part of the plan is to develop data and “customer driven communications” is integral to making sure the “cobbler’s children have shoes,”…
It’s true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001…
The problem is this: if you want to teach Victorian literature at the university level, the path to doing so, while not easy, is straightforward: you go to a Ph.D.-granting university English department, take a doctorate, and apply for suitable jobs in other university English departments. But because all of the various fields and subfields…
Google Inc., the leading online search engine company, will open a new engineering and research office in Pittsburgh next year to be headed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, the company announced Thursday. The facility will be charged with creating software search tools for Google. It is expected to create as many as 100 new…
In the new world of interchangeable, interdependent entertainment modules – athlete performs four songs on soundtrack to movie based on videogame! – a football injury can have unexpected repercussions. I’m here looking for some insight into the growing practice of adapting games into movies. There are plenty of them – Double Dragon, from Gramercy Pictures,…
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. —Internet encyclopaedias go head to head (News @ Nature.com) Wikipedia stood up fairly well against…
Many American academic libraries have sought to provide journals in both print and electronic formats for the past 5 to 10 years. The advantages of the electronic format have been clear, so these were licensed as rapidly as possible, but it has taken time for some faculty members to grow comfortable with an exclusive dependence…
Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade. —Chameleon scarf coordinates with your outfit (NewScientist.com (will expire)) O brave new world, that hath such gadgets in it! (I Googled for photos but I…
If what we today know as “Wikipedia” had started life as something called, let’s say – “Jimbo’s Big Bag O’Trivia” – we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a “Big Bag O’Trivia” is all Jimbo ever…
A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker. Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA…
Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you’re not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren’t to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. “Spindle” is the word that most…
Pac Man today has been tossed into the “Retro” bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boring and ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa’s Ran crap because it’s 20 years old, or write off all black-and-white movies because they lack “realistic” coloration, right? […] [T]oday’s teens grew up in a…
—Gillespie & Montfort’s ”The Executor” (BathHouse Magazine) An intriguing piece of very short fiction, written by two authors who alternated sentences. The presentation works with color and type size in a simple but effective way. It’s not long, and has a creepy but oddly touching payoff.
[Blogging] makes everyone a producer of news, for one thing. Not everyone does create news, some just transport them also. Every blogger does a bit of both, I guess. And that adds up to a sort of global brain, which digests ideas or discovers facts and such. The speed and variety of this conversation might…
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site,…