See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“In spite of denials from congressional leaders, the rash of job cuts has some legislators worried that Congress will be fully mechanized within 10 years.|’The House and Senate will always need people,’ Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said. ‘These machines are a valuable tool, but there’s still no substitute for the wisdom and experience…
“For years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. in their detail. When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood’s more measured pace – incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Innovators will focus on…
At End Of Road You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. >how did I get here? That doesn’t matter. You’re here now. >but this isn’t where I want to be I’m…
“Are you out there Dennis Jerz? Are you reading this? Are you keeping track of me? I kind of hope not…it’s weird to know that my anonymous readers aren’t so anonymous. But if you are, that’s OK too.” [Anonymous Blogger] anonymous readers aren’t so anonymous A UWEC student who keeps a weblog is blown away…
“If you like Interactive Fiction at all, I would like to draw your attention to Ad Verbum, a marvellous game written in 2000 by Nick Montfort. When I first downloaded this, I really didn’t expect it to be any fun at all — I prefer IF that is more a story than a game, and…
Last week, Elwyn Jenkins provided a good rebuttal to Orloswki’s “second superpower” complaint. When I recently noticed that the good microdoc resorted to an ad hominem argument against Orloswki, I was a bit put off. Can’t we all get along without name-calling? But then I read Orlowski’s rant against the PageRank of his “googlewashing” article.…
“Only a few years ago professors rarely encountered marketing in the Ivory Tower. When we did, the marketing had substance — book dealers with free review copies of books, office-supply vendors with reorder requests, discounts on scientific or literary publications, and the like.|Now we’re deluged with ploys that have little to do with our academic…
“I’ve collected hundreds of rejection slips from agents, producers, and studios. Recently, all this changed. I wrote an article last year called “Hacking Las Vegas” (Wired 10.09), and the next thing I know I’m being approached to turn it into a movie starring Spacey…. But I’ve heard rumors that have made me question my confidence…
Why is such a high-tech nation eschewing texting? | The short answer is that, in America, talk is cheap. Because local calls on land lines are usually free, wireless operators have to offer big ‘bundles’ of minutes?up to 5,000 minutes per month?as part of their monthly pricing plans to persuade subscribers to use mobile phones…
“The Matrin County School Board has a new way of post a student’s grades online for a parent to check. Pinnacle is the name of the program, a simple java applet. Not only does Pinnacle log student’s grades, but also attendance and conduct. The way grades are accessed are by inputting the first 6 digits…
“Fleishman posted the book online in PDF format last month. He expected a few hundred downloads. Instead, it was grabbed about 10,000 times in just 36 hours.|It took Fleishman a couple of days to realize how much traffic the book was attracting. But by the time he pulled the file offline, he was on the…
“Although it had no sound, no color (black-and-white), and no animations, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history — graphics. Mystery House was the first computer game to ever contain graphics (70 simple 2D pictures drawn by Roberta Williams). Before then, all computer games were text-based. Due to…
After I dubbed Yahoo’s new search engine “Yahoogle”, Clancy Ratliff wrote (in a KairosNews discussion thread): You know, I love the name “Yahoogle.” I wish it were called that and not “Yahoo Search.” We could also have “Lycoogle,” “AltaVoogle,” “NoogleLight,” “Dooglepile,” “AskJoogle,” etc. Instead of “Dooglepile,” I suggest “DogPoogle.” Actually, somebody has already registered “Yahoogle.com,”…
“Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two…
“Detective Smith — who calls himself a ‘Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy’ — has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her…
“University officials say once file traders are notified they’re breaking the law, they don’t tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it’s trying to send a message to administrators and students.” —RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)…
“Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a ‘Second Superpower’, it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.|Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the…
“Because McLuhan saw the media as extensions of the human body — printed books as extensions of eyes, radios as extensions of ears — he believed that each new technological advance would reshape humanity and traumatize it, too. ‘We shape our tools and our tools shape us.’…. The tanks rolling into Iraq from the south…
“Children don’t go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the ‘traditional’ past-times of children and replaced…
A student writes: “I’m not quite sure how I could make the topic of ‘digital divide’ into something controversial that allows the reader to form their own opinion.” Digital Divide: Looking for ControversyLiteracy Weblog) I did a Google search: “digital divide” controversy and came up with a few good leads. While links from the first…