See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Before class, Watch this 10-minute introduction to Modern Interactive Fiction. Watch this 2-minute trailer for a documentary film on interactive fiction. (Optional: a version of the film is available online: GET LAMP… I’m featured at the 12:30, 17 minutes, and around 41 minutes. You may appreciate the snark I offer at 49 minutes.) In order to understand what…
I’m about to introduce interactive fiction in my “New Media Projects” course. I’m glad to find further evidence that the genre continues to be discovered and shared. If you start playing IF and search for people with the same interests to chat with, good resources, and help of any kind, the intfiction forum is the…
There is a marked difference between how my half-generation and my brother’s engages with and approaches the Internet. I remember dial-up and still have my AOL.com e-mail address (it’s basically a giant spam folder, now). I weed through my Facebook friends weekly, de-friending those whose names I don’t remember or maybe never really knew. I…
Filing this for future reference. Very frustrating limitation on my machine. Of course, simply looping the “speaker out” jack to the “mic in” jack would probably do the trick, but what a stupid, frustrating kludge. Some PCs have the ability to record “what you hear”, but it depends on the PCs soundcard. But on my…
I’m generalising wildly, of course, but journalists – particularly student journalists – often try to learn programming from books. That may sound like common sense, but it’s not in an art or a science – and programming is both. Programmers – if I’m to generalise wildly again – typically combine books (which they don’t read…
Multimedia journalism is a pretty nebulous term. As a result, in my experience, when students try to adopt the role two main problems recur: 1) having a narrow assumption of what multimedia means (i.e. video) and 2) not being able to see the multimedia possibilities of your work. Multimedia journalism is a very different beast…
The first issue of the Seton Hill student newspaper comes out tomorrow, but the articles are already online. I’m the faculty adviser, so naturally I’m proud. Way to go, new media journos! “The human brain multitasks just fine. If you’re paying attention to me at the same time you are also regulating your heart beat…
If you have written anything you think my readers will appreciate, feel free to suggest it. Dankeschön.
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated. And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would…
Newspapers and their fans make a lot of noise about the professionalism of journalism, that journalism needs to be paid for, that the Internet is no substitute for the hard core objectivity and insightful commentary newspapers offer. and so on. Whether these arguments are true or not does not interest me. I have found…
Here’s a fantasy workspace, that I built in Blender 3D, using various Googled images of old books and this awesome steampunk keyboard. Here’s me in my real office. The books aren’t as neat and tidy. I just took some reference photos of the chair… I’ll add it to my fantasy office the next time I…
Mars Panorama — My 10yo Pretends Her Bed Is NASAs Curiosi – YouTube.
“If we really are trying to teach the world, including people from other cultures, we have to take a responsibility to educate people about plagiarism, not just vaporize people for it,” said Mr. Severance, who is also a clinical associate professor of information at Michigan, in an interview on Wednesday. —The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Word. This list was published in 2008, so it’s unthinkable that student could graduate from a journalism program today without these competencies. I’d have to add “the fundamentals of coding a multimedia project” and I want to add “the ability to mine a database for a story.” With all the new changes brought about by…
I have no problem with baby pictures, but thought this was an amusing write up (by a former student). But really, who doesn’t love a baby photo? I do. It’s the perfect way to share in the cuteness of a child, but not actually clean up after one. I’ve followed the lives of some of…
Matthew Gordon, a linguist at the University of Missouri, says that with the advent of the Internet “a new wrinkle has been added to the complaint tradition.” In the pre-digital era, he says, “most texts we read came from published works — books, newspapers, journals, et cetera. This means they represented the variety of English…
Yes, I got a chuckle over this, but if we present this as evidence of a link between grammar and class / morality / character, that requires a bit of circular thinking. First of all, the substitution of “u” for “you” has nothing to do with grammar, it’s just a shortcut often made by people…
Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a…
The other day, my wife suggested a Carnegie Science Center-related post. Only once before — in 2003 — has she volunteered a topic like that, so I took her up on the offer. I’ve noticed that, on every trip to the CSC, my wife slips away to browse the museum store while I’m watching the…
On the topic of massively open online courses, an academic says what many of us who teach online are thinking. Do you really WANT TO SAVE SOME MONEY using INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY? Ok, try this one on for size. Why weren’t you blathering on asking why the heck we all bought Blackboard or if you really…