See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The new logo retains the rainbow of colors but sheds the grownup curlicues: it now evokes children’s refrigerator magnets, McDonald’s French fries, Comic Sans. Google took something we trusted and filed off its dignity. Now, in its place, we have an insipid “G,” an owl-eyed “oo,” a schoolroom “g,” a ho-hum “l,” and a demented,…
I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month. It’s hard to tell. Unlike today, you didn’t push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. It was a slow process of sending “gold master” floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped to stores and the…
HI IT’S ME RYAN @ryanqnorth If I climbed into this in the rain to get this picture and now couldn’t get out, what should I do? Hypothetically 2:04 PM – 18 Aug 2015 Source: Dinosaur Comics Creator Stuck in Skate Park Hole Takes His Predicament to Twitter In Real Life Text Adventure
Okay, freshly downloaded app, If you are actually going to force me to upload a profile photo, this screenshot of your error message will be my profile photo.
The trick is that most people think they are getting a good deal out of Facebook; we think of Facebook to be “free,” and, as marketing professors explain, “consumers overreact to free.” Most people don’t feel like they are actually paying when the payment is personal data and when there is no specific sensation of…
I will always love Inform 7, but I chose to develop a journalism training game in Twine (because it will be much easier to teach Twine to my students). To prepare for my game, I spent about 6 hours (during my son’s last chess tournament) roughing out about 20 lexias. Since then, I’ve spent about 6…
Several times I assigned Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Entrepreneur, which described the rise and heartbreaking fall of her girl-centered, girl-positive gaming company, Purple Moon during the 1990s. My own daughter (who is 13) has enjoyed man more opportunities to be both girly and nerdy — something that seems to have been a lot harder 20 years…
I spent a few hours today working on a video for Stage Right. I usually use Screenflow for my videos, but today for some reason I thought I’d try iMovie. Big mistake. Of the eight video clips I wanted to use in iMovie, seven seem to have imported properly, but the eighth has this little…
“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
Of course, not all kids have tablets, and at least some of what the kids are doing on their tablets is watching videos. There’s only so much one can draw from a survey-based study, and much more that could be learned from a controlled experiment that actually gives kids the choice and reports what they…
Now, News Feed, at its most basic level, is defined by secrecy. Facebook doesn’t reveal exact details of the algorithms that determine what you see (and what you don’t) based on the company’s ever-evolving, ever-more-granular analysis of your preferences. And not just the preferences you explicitly set. Your likes, comments, clicks, even how long you…
I stayed up way too late last night playing 80 Days, a choice-based interactive fiction romp from Inkle . I had read all the glowing reviews, but kept putting off the purchase until I really had time to enjoy it. I started my first play through at about midnight, and was up past 3am. (I…
Headline Capitalization Generator! Simple concept. Type your headline in a box. Invisible typing fairies will capitalize your words for you. One of the settings is for AP Style. You should probably actually learn the rules for capitalizing first, but this is a useful tool for checking.
Fascinating video journalism from the New York Times. They didn’t shed, chew the sofa or bite the postman, but for thousands of people Sony’s Aibo robotic dog was the closest thing to a real canine companion. So when the Japanese company stopped servicing the robots last year, eight years after it ended production, owners faced…
I probably should not be surprised, but when I saw this run of several headlines on the ABC News website, I was struck by how deliberately uninformative they are. I added some useful information that could have been in the headline. A print journalist writes a headline for someone who’s already holding the newspaper, so…
People – journalists and non-journalists – who want to interact with others about the topic of journalism ethics should be transparent, courteous and civilized. One person should never harass, threaten or demean another.Also, people in the U.S. are not forced to read, view or listen to stories from news organizations. If a person believes the information…
Looks like SourceForge has backtracked on this particular issue, but I’m happy to pass along the warning that SourceForge has engaged in these tactics. GIMP is the free, open-source digital editing tool that I use (a replacement for PhotoShop). In 2013, GIMP’s developers pulled the GIMP Windows downloads from SourceForge. SourceForge was full of misleading…
Relaxing in bed on the first Sunday morning of my summer break, I web-surfed across the name of something I was interested in, on a “Top 5” list. I host some “Top #X Whatevers” pages on my website, but I put all the items (writing tips of some sort) on one page, and include a…
[N]o matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that…