See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“There’s a reason they call these places ‘bedroom communities’ — you’ll sooner be snoozing before anything exciting ever happens.|But while the news might be snooze-worthy to the world at large, there are people who really do care about what goes on in their community. And as newspapers see a readership in decline, online-only news sources…
“Yahoo! are integrating their services much more than Google — not only can you move from one service to the next withough inputting the search term again, but also the new dictionary service. In the query box type define egregious and you obtain a result from the American Heritage Dictionary a definition, plus you also…
“Microsoft’s Internet Explorer might have trounced the likes of Netscape Navigator, but the folks at Mozilla.org insist the browser wars aren’t over.” Amit Asaravala —Mozilla Wants to Rumble with IE (Wired) My weblog developer Will Gayther recently showed me a 1999 Jakob Nielsen article that suggests that by now it is reasonable to expect that most…
“Some claim that games were like this only because that was what the current technology would bear, but I swear that those were still some of the best games ever made, and even today you could make a good one in this genre, which is now old enough to buy alcohol. | Thank heavens someone…
—Journalism Organizations & Related Sites (A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet) An excellent collection of journalism links, compiled by Christopher Callahan.
“Tulip is working with Ironstone Partners, which will handle all sales of Commodore 64-related products worldwide and take over the main C64 Web portal. Enthusiasts have made over 10 million game downloads, the site owners have said.|Unauthorized use of the Commodore name by other organizations will be stopped, Tulip said in the statement.” —Commodore 64…
“Of the 25 or so people in Electronics Boutique, six were women. Three of them looked bored — they were accompanying their gamer boyfriends. Two Korean-American girls were in the store on their own, but they were buying a copy of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne for a male relative. And the last woman? She…
I just got this in my in box, with instructions from my division chair that all faculty members are henceforth to paste the following block of legalese into their e-mail signatures: This document may contain confidential information and is intended solely for the use of the addressee. If you received it in error, please contact…
“Fred and Tiffany quickly came to one of their first decisions as a couple. It was about computers: Sharing was not going to work. Each one of the four children would get his or her own machine. It wasn’t a choice they made lightly….The cost, some $800 per computer, seemed like a reasonable investment for…
“The majority of companies that only make content for mobile phones will go out of business within the next four years…. many independent content providers are cranking out rich media for mobile phones, but have no marketing plans or strategy to get their products out to market.” Elisa Batista summarizes findings from a W2Form report.…
“The European Commission report on ambient intelligence describes a fanciful scenario in which Maria, a businesswoman, arrives at a foreign airport and walks through immigration unchecked, thanks to a wristwatch computer that presents her ID and visa for validation. At the kerbside, a rental car unlocks itself as she approaches and then guides her to…
“The ‘blogosphere’ may never be the same after America Online releases free blog-publishing software to its 34 million members this summer.|AOL this month began showing demos of its tools for creating Web logs, or blogs, to veteran bloggers. AOL has dubbed its service ‘AOL Journals’ because its surveys showed that members found the word ‘blogs’…
“One guiding principle of committing the perfect crime is to leave or no evidence of the misdemeanour. | Sadly, the five Texas men who took an axe to an oak tree in Austin completely ignored this criminal tenet when one of them posted a full photo spread of the outrage on his website. Three of…
“What do we know about today’s ‘new students’? Perhaps most obviously, we know that these students have been heavily influenced by information technology.” Diana Oblinger —Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Milennials (via KairosNews)Educause Review) The article referenced was pulished as a .pdf document, so I won’t bother to transcribe a longer excerpt and post it here. The…
“The 5k recognizes the roles that constraints play in creativity and discipline in craftsmanship. Please make beautiful things!” —The 5k Awards (the5k.org) 5k websites, sorted according to rating. Plenty of minimalist games. Thanks, Rosemary.
“Crooked Timber is a cabal of philosophers, politicians manque, would-be journalists, sociologues, financial gurus, dilletantes and flaneurs who have assembled to bring you the benefit of their practical and theoretical wisdom on matters historical, literary, political, philosophical, economic, sociological, cultural, sporting, artistic, cinematic, musical, operatic, comedic, tragic, poetic, televisual &c &c, all from perspectives somewhere…
—Don’t Click this Link: Extremely Annoying AdsWired) There are some extremely annoying ads on this Wired article about “machinima” — a genre of digital storytelling created by people who use the monster-and-dungeon-creation tools supplied by game designers (or hacked by fans, probably). I didn’t get very far in the article because of the hovering ads…
“Looking at this, perhaps having all that fresh new blood from AOL — all without their little weblogging heros and talk about weblogging and this conference and that and all with little or no interest in the politics of weblogging — will be a good thing. A very good thing. | Here’s hoping for complete…
“It is vitally important that we all realize this and move on. People (eg Bloggers) go on and on about how wonderful it is. About how much information is out there in cyberspace. About the way that everything is within reach in just a few clicks of their mice.” —The Internet Is Shit Eh. This…
“I do understand both of their frustration with empty trackback pages and currently do not have an answer as to why those appear higher in rankings (or at all for that matter). At the same time, I am unsure what either one of them means by ?mindless links? — that does not help bloggers (like…