See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
How would you feel if a group of people (who aren’t associated with the IRS) just offhandedly decided that it was all right for them to steal one-tenth of your yearly income because they felt that what you did for a living wasn’t really work, and you made all kinds of money from the advance…
Ending months of speculation, search engine company Google plans to float by selling $2.7 billion worth of shares in an online share auction. —Google files for IPO (Internet Magazine) The online community has been waiting for this for a long time. How long will Google’s geek-friendly “don’t be evil” philosophy last under the pressure to make…
Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador…
though Limbaugh is wrong to decide that video games are entirely like other games, his comparison opens up interesting possibilities for anyone wanting to develop a theory of video games as a medium because it suggests that any such theory ought to deal with both sides of video gaming’s cultural history. Though many readers in…
In Dragon’s Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It’s personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything…
—Primetime Cheating (Pedablogue) My colleague Mike Arnzen has already created the blog entry I was about to create, so I’ll just link to him.
The Project’s national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number…
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. Matt arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly Matt checked the rankings for…
Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site…
There is no day on the calendar six months or a year away, when you can say, ?OK, I‘m done promoting now, and I can stop.? Promotion needs to be a significant part of the ongoing work of maintaining your blog. If I?ve learned one thing in my years working with creative people of all…
Conseco, which sells life, health and annuity policies to middle-income clients, expected to save millions by moving the work to the world’s second-most-populous nation. Instead, the switch was hurt by 9/11, cultural differences and intense pressure to quickly cut costs.–Bill W. Hornaday —Outsourcing didn’t pay off for Conseco (IndyStar)
Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads. “This is what happens when the game’s off, basically,” said Mike `Burnie’ Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue‘s creators. “They’re chatting away,…
Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology…
Miners know they have a significant problem when the canary they keep with them stops singing. Hobbyist/part-time programmers are our industry’s version of the canary, and they have stopped singing. People who program four to eight hours a week are being cut out of the picture because they can’t increase their skills as fast as…
Circle Games and CyberpunkJerz’s Literacy Weblog) While I figured cyberpunk wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I hoped that the likeable protagonist Nell and the fantasy sequences she encounters in her Primer would get students who don’t much care for science fiction to enjoy Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. In order to discuss some of the…
To viewers, the hourly show appears as one continuous, somewhat overwhelming four-block-long image — and it’s programmed that way by teams of animators who spend as much as four months to create the shows. But what viewers won’t be able to see is that the image — and the “screen” — is broken down into…
Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey: 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job. 39% of…
There is still the childhood picture just where it‘salways been, right above “I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974.” And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: “When I was eight, my father,…
Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. —Chris Ulbrich —Porno Hen Hawks for Burger…