See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
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. Similar:A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital AgeIf…
Similar:Quantum Theatre's "Far Away" is an enigmatic abstraction, grounded by psychologically deep…Quantum Theatre’s streaming production o…AestheticsConundrum (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 14) You Get Amnesia! And YOU Get Amne…Rewatching ST:TNG The Enterprise-D cr…CultureDon't Give Apple Too Much Credit for Bowing to Taylor SwiftApple is skilled at attracting praise. O…BusinessSolitaire ChessSpent a relaxing evening in playing…
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…
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
“If you want to know how the game was played in 2014, you will need documentation about how the game was played in 2014,” Lowood said. “Having the game available to you in 2064 so that you can play it yourself won’t tell you anything about that. It just tells you how you, 50 years…
“Hi. I’m Jason Scott, and I am trying to collect every AOL CD variation ever made.” Scott works for the Internet Archive, which is kind of like a museum for the Internet. And to him, these CDs are precious artifacts. “They are, in some ways, little time capsules about what online life was and why we wanted…
A Mark Twain short story, written in 1898, and set a few years into the future, posits the global ubiquity of a new device called the “telelectroscope,” which lets people around the world see and hear each other. The author, a journalist and a social reformer, explored how an innocent man might save himself from a…
At GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction game designer Emily Short (Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey) gave a microtalk on how to create a protagonist that is interesting, engaging and will stimulate your players. —Gamasutra Similar:Dennis Jerz, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Capek's "Fantastic Melodrama" – YouT…”In which the origin of the word “robot”…AestheticsWhen the Bough Breaks (TNG Rewatch:…
Verizon has experimented with journalism before, briefly running Sugarstring — where reporters were banned from covering issues like government surveilance and net neutrality (topics in which Verizon is a newsmaker). Verizon buying AOL gives the biggest US wireless carrier access to AOL’s successful digital advertising service and content including the Huffington Post news website. —CS…
One of journalism’s most treasured clichés, spouted by seasoned editors who ruthlessly slash other clichés from stories, is: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But the cliché doesn’t tell the journalist, or humanitarian professional, how to check it out. Verification is the essence of journalism, but it also illustrates the difficulty…
The company SwiftKey analyzed more than a billion pieces of emoji data, organized by language and country. According to SwiftKey’s chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, the results were fascinating. Here’s a sample of what researchers found: People are mostly likely to send happy faces: “The overall thing we noticed is that 70 percent of all…
Just as young people in journalism school five years ago learned that Twitter was important to reporting, soon enough they might be learning how to film with a 360-degree camera. The same goes for documentary filmmakers. “As these younger journalists are coming out of J-school they’re all learning how to use every single way of…
This will be my self-reward when I finish all my obligations for the term. For the uninitiated, here’s the rundown. In Broken Age, players control two characters: Vella, a young girl who’s about to be sacrificed to an ancient monster called Mog Chothra, and Shay, a teenage boy who was raised in a spaceship by…