See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Spoiler: not much really happened. Telling Facebook you want to hide everything it shows you only means it will try to show you those same things again later. I began my day of refusal with a perfectly pleasant photo of a friend boating. I don’t want to see this. Next was a post from someone…
I find it impossible not to be cheerful amidst all the energy on campus as new students register and move in. Our tech staff is busy distributing magical devices that can create and distribute knowledge, or destroy contemplation and attention. Are we wise enough to serve those students well? Let’s hope we are!
On Twitter, I see tear-gassed civilians, heavily armed cops, and reporters being arrested. On Facebook, I see people dumping buckets on their heads. The Washington Post offers a good overview of a complex, and important, issue. “The study found that, because Facebook friend networks are often composed of ‘weak ties’ where the threshold for friending…
The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything…
Students often say they hate group work. I don’t attach a huge amount of points to group work, but I do ask them to collaborate on various projects. Learning how to deal with a team member who isn’t pulling his or her weight, or how to work with a take-charge person who tries to shut…
A US state has passed a law that will give the family of a deceased person access to their Twitter, Facebook and email accounts just as if they were physical assets. Delaware’s “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act” grants heirs and the executor of the will the same powers over digital accounts…
[I]t turns out that Twitter is not just a place where scholars take notes publicly at conferences, it’s a medium that does a better job than most of including the voices of African Americans, and that matters. To a large extent what has been happening in Ferguson is the result of white folks’ near-total deafness…
In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad Manjoo revealed that several of BuzzFeed’s most popular listicles were lifted in large part from other websites, including Reddit. In the years since, the site has been hit with lawsuits and public accusations from people who feel it has exploited or flat-out stolen their work. Last month the…
She stopped liking, and started commenting. And maybe what she discovered is what old-timer bloggers remember the blogosphere being like before Facebook. Back in my day, we didn’t need someone else’s algorithm to show us what we were interested in. We clicked on insightful, valuable, and compelling comments to see what else the author had…
When it comes to gameplay, A Mind Forever Voyaging also seems modern and innovative. Yes, it’s a text adventure, which some may wrongly view as self-evidently antiquated. But it’s also a largely puzzle-less, combat-less story that could almost be compared to games like Gone Home or Dear Esther, but with a larger and more open…
tl;dr: Zagg.com just offered to replace an iPad Mini keyboard that was not clamping on as well as it should have been. Even though the warranty had recently expired, a Zagg tech support person wrote me a detailed email walking me carefully through the process. Now, if the website had been better designed, that email…
Real journalism takes a look at that Huffington Post blog warning you that Facebook Messenger will summon intubation associates who will extract up to a pint of six different bodily fluids. And I, for one, welcome our Facebook overlords. One blog from the Huffington Post published in December has gone viral, making the rounds on…
I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked—even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it…
The play that coined the word “robot,” Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), included violent robots, compassionate robots, and herd robots (who are content to be workers until incited by the violent robot leaders). This article explores a wide range of human responses to robots. Our expectations of robots and our response to their designs…
Game collectors have their story, too. For them, the dig provided the extraordinary opportunity to get to the bottom of the “infamous Atari landfill.” Nostalgia had its role, playing upon the remembrances of 40-somethings hoping to reclaim a restorative piece of a childhood that Atari helped define. Searching for them reversed the expectations of a…
Untrained teachers. Damage-prone machines. OS bogged down with ineffective security software. The whole town clogged the school’s WiFi. What an expensive disaster! “There is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a 12-year-old who has a computer,” said Crocamo. All this security software also bogged down the computers. Teachers complained it took 20 minutes…
Hoaxes roam the Information Superhighway, camouflaged as factoids. Consider this one: “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon.” The “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon” factoid had been cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor. It was cited in a book about Jews and Jesus. It was cited in innumerable blog posts and…
What the researchers found was that the typical diversion caused by an e-mail was nine minutes and 30 seconds in length. Now that was just the time spent on the e-mail itself. After that, it still took the participants of the study another 16 minutes to resume their primary task. That’s a lot of lost…
Turning on the anti-clickbait filter: Homeschooler builds apps. Sam has been making games from his home in the south of England for “about a year.” He started out playing around with a programming language called Small Basic, a simplified version of Visual Basic, mostly making text-based adventures that are all words and no graphics. |…
I’m just quoting the f-bomb in the link, but I do agree with the sentiment behind it. Last week, Amazon informed us that for ten dollars per month, Kindle users can have unlimited access to over six hundred thousand books in its library. But it shouldn’t cost a thing to borrow a book, Amazon, you…