See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
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…
I noticed an uptick in traffic to an older page, “Technical Writing: What Is It?” So I touched it up and created a new graphic. Similar:January 6th … the board game?I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.I have for some reason reached another #duolingo milestone.The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pagerFor some…
Often when I see people in my social media feed criticizing “the media,” they are unfairly blaming journalists for how the social media ecosystem misuses journalism. Here’s an example from a post by someone arguing that CNN is being unfairly biased against Bernie Sanders. The complaint is that CNN criticizes Sanders for making a claim…
I’m 50. I’m in my office casually sharpening my CGI skills, and I get a huge rush when tweets mention a Usenet thread I joined in 2001 & a video game I played in 1992, and I can see the glittering green matrix code explaining it all. Similar:January 6th … the board game?Rapture #StarTrek #DS9…
Spent much of Tuesday wrestling with code to display messages like “Press E to Open” and connecting them to animations. I’ve done this sort of thing before, but there’s a difference between hacking something to make it work once, and developing a workflow that facilitates churning things out. Plus I keep getting distracted by little…
I’m following a lot of tutorials, and continue to make progress in Unity3D. My character’s feet now react better with the environment. Here she is standing casually with each foot at different levels. With the right code attached to each foot, she will adjust her stance automatically, according to the height and angle of whatever…
Scholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces the history of video game scapegoating, noting that while the panic used to be bi-partisan, and then-senator Hilary Clinton targeted video games in 2005, now it’s mostly GOP voices who blame video games for violent actions such as mass shootings. (Incidentally, the Va Tech shooter preferred Sonic the Hedgehog,…
Before CGI, filming a science-fiction story typically involved constructing a physical model of a spaceship or planetscape. In order to trick the eye in to thinking you were looking at something huge, model-makers added tiny random bits of detail, often re-purposing off-the-shelf commercial model kits or using any kind of junk they could get their…
Similar:January 6th … the board game?Rapture #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 10) Sisko's "visions" complicate politic…Don't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can…I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.I have for some…
I’ve been using the beta for months, but the Blender 2.8 release has finally dropped. Blender is a super-powerful, completely free 3D design tool. I’ve been playing with it for years, and this summer I ramped up my skills considerably. Here’s an animation of “MoonBot,” a character from the steampunk bedtimes stories I used to…
I’m planning to begin my online Shakespeare class with commentary on how it’s a good thing that language changes, so that students will (I hope) see the effort they will need to put into understanding English from 400 years ago as part of the process of engaging with a living language, the same process that…