See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Microsoft is closing internet chat rooms because their misuse by spammers, paedophiles and others is damaging the reputation of its MSN service and the internet as a whole. —Chris Nutall —Microsoft to curb chat room abuses (Financial Times)
J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism Hildy, You’re a Newspaperman: Collecting Screen Scribes (“One film I never see on anyone’s list is “Doctor X,” an uneven 1930-something thriller in which the reporter not only climbs a drainpipe to look in a window, but crawls under a sheet to impersonate a corpse (complete with toe-tag) and…
The Keyword Variation Checker is a tool I wrote using the Google Web API. It will go through all kinds of variations of a given keyword and google the result. All that was needed is a little text-file with possible endings for a word from a free dictionary I found online. For example, the word…
It’s true — we learn far more than we are ever able to use…. This may seem harmless, but does it, in fact, hinder our ability to produce? Does all this learning and all the attention span we spend on new technologies detract from what we should be doing in the here and now? How…
I spend an awful lot of time reading textbooks and novels and student papers — and I have sacrificed reading and writing about the art and craft of teaching. I want to more self-consciously research and study pedagogy, learning from the experiences and speculations of others. Even the very definition of the “scholarship of teaching”…
The [1938 Homes & Gardens] article depicts Hitler in glowing terms, such as the “Squire of Wachenfeld,” and extols him as a talented architect, decorator and raconteur who “delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers, and musicians.” —Old Hitler Article Stirs Debate (Wired) The above article provides some context for what came across…
…I thought [blogs] were stupid and confusing, but now that I have my own, I think its very fun, and its not that hard, I do suppose I’ll get used to it and perhaps eventually I will become and expert. Its nice to know I am not the only one that thought it was confusing.…
Thoughts on Language in the Blogosphere Some thoughts I’m putting together for a paper… In the Blogosphere, one set of emotionally charged terms such as “link love” and its assorted extensions (“link slut,” “link whore”) emphasize proximity and interface. Blog A bestows “link love” on blog B by creating a hyperlink that encourages readers to…
Everyone should agree that good AI certainly creates more enjoyable games (see Barney in Half-Life). This is probably a correlative of the fact that bad AI ruins some games. But query: does smart AI create better communities? | Of course, real-life bots are the subject of a vast amount of pop literature. Asimov is a…
We write on paper, but we write to a magnetic disk (or tape). Part of what the preposition contributes here is a sense of interiority; because we cannot see anything on its surface, the disk is linguistically refigured as a volumetric receptacle, a black box with a closed lid. —Matthew G. Kirshcenbaum —Write To (MGK) Thus…
1. You think everyone cares about your opinions: They don’t. They care about mine. 8. You will stop having normal conversations with family and friends: Real life conversations will go like this. “Oh, hey, I saw So-And-So in concert and the weirdest thing happened…” Friend, “Yeah, I know, I read about it on your blog.”…
It wasn’t until the package arrived last week that the secret was revealed. The man who sold Kunath the cookie jar was a brother he has never met. —Quest for cookie jar leads to long-lost brother (Orlando Sentinel) That’s a wonderful story, but that’s one ugh-lee cookie jar.
Media conglomerate AOL Time Warner plans to drop “AOL” from its corporate name on Thursday, according to reports. — Reuters —AOL Time Warner drops ‘AOL’ from name (News.com) One more bit of Internet silliness becomes a subject for a future history lesson. It was a wild ride while it lasted (which was, unfortuantely for AOL Time…
The Buckner brothers had no criminal record or any history of trouble-making. In court last month, they pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. They were sentenced to indefinite detention. District Attorney General Al Schmutzer told the court: “They said they got the idea from a video game called Grand Theft Auto…
Protect your Email address from Spam (unsolicited Email advertisements). The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting…
Jill/txt describes Beadgee At first you see a collection of gizmos, each connected to a rhyme. Choose a gizmo and explode it into its separate pieces and a dot will start to dance along the words of the rhyme attached to it, just as a nun runs her fingers slowly along the beads on her…
Big Idea Productions, makers of the best-selling VeggieTales video series, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, as part of a deal to sell the financially troubled company. | Big Idea has agreed to sell its assets?including copyrights to Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber and other VeggieTales characters?to Classic Media LLC, which owns…
The very idea of giving up perfect control over how and whether content is re-used is treason among insiders. But as the BBC understands, it does not live in Disney World. And in the course of its internal review an obvious question has become increasingly pressing: if the BBC could make its archive available cheaply,…
Who Cares About Andy Roddick — So today I read a quick story about Andy Roddick. He just won the U.S. Open. I did a search for him on Google to learn more, and I found his official web site. Fine. No problem. Then I clicked on a link to read about his U.S. Open…
I’ve been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I’m writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one’s on cyberpunk (the genre) and I’ve never published a thing on cyberpunk. — Jill Walker —Definition: Cyberpunk (jill/txt) Jill is taking comments on the draft of her definition of cyberpunk. Neal Stephenson says that cyberpunk…