See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook have become part of the fabric of news stories — or the story itself — in recent years, notably during the Arab Spring. But in the hours after the Aurora shooting, the abundance of eyewitness journalism and conversation on Reddit turned the news aggregator into a surprising source…
I’ve taught an online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course about four times now. This fall I’m getting ready to teach my first online section of an American literature survey that I’ve taught multiple times before. Because Seton Hill is a very high-tech school, I have few technical worries, but it will be different teaching…
This book explores the relationship between living, code and software. Technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment. Indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the…
What is the nature of news on YouTube? What types of events “go viral” and attract the most viewers? How does this agenda differ from that of the traditional news media? Do the most popular videos on YouTube tend to be videos produced by professional news organizations, by citizens or by political interest groups or…
Computers are pretty dumb, but they’re dumb fast. Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation. […] [On SHRDLU:] Every human sentence had to be transformed into a logical syntax that represented its meaning. The…
There’s a lot of interest in infographics nowadays, but doing them correctly — and making them look simple — is not easy. From 9to5 Mac: Nielsen released smartphone purchasing data yesterday that depicted Apple grabbing more than a third of the total smartphone market in the most recently surveyed month. Android was over 50 percent. That is almost…
Even though I got it for free, a Bamboo stylus is not cheap, meaning that I worried about the cost of replacing it if I lost it, so may have used it less frequently. Deciding whether the convenience of using the stylus is worth the risk of losing it ets up even more mental effort.
So it would seem then that the solution should involve either becoming more careful, which would require more effort, or getting a supply of cheaper backups, so that losing any one stylus is less of a big deal.
This Colorful Stylus Bundle is priced at about $1 each.
[caption width="300" caption="The little stubby ones are awkward, but better than a finger. They work just as well as $20 models." align="aligncenter"]
[/caption]This sounds like a brilliant way to repurpose antiquated technology and improve pedestrian life. The city has converted 10 public pay phones in three boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – into free Wi-Fi hot spots, infusing a blast of modern technology into some of the city’s most notably outdated infrastructure. The project is considered…
If brass lanterns or slathering-fanged grues mean anything to you, you might want to look into Inklewriter. I teach a text-adventure (“interactive fiction“) unit in my “New Media Projects” course. My mainstay for that unit is Inform 7, a robust tool with loads of examples and a user community that I know well (through my…
Although I do use both Twitter and Facebook, I often regret putting time and energy into a walled garden, sparking and contributing to conversations that happen elsewhere, and not on my blog. In many ways, hosting conversations on Twitter and Facebook are superior to letting people post comments on my blog (because I get literally…
Summer vacation means if I am telling my kids steampunk bedtime stories, and the story requires an ether-powered vehicle larger than a life pod, but smaller than the ship-of-the-line where most of the plot takes place, I can visit Wikipedia to look for a class name — I like “sloop” — and then dash out…
Do we really need Justin Bieber to make this story relevant? They’re steampunks, part of an international movement that’s a mashup of do-it-yourselfers, ahistorical recreationists and science fiction aficionados who are happily reliving a past that never was. The Victorian era was “a wonderful era when people were still being surprised by the world,” says…
Will the celebrity interpretation spark or short-circuit a student’s own interpretive creativity? Were I to use this, I would want to use the video as one of several possible sources of authority, including the student’s own, original, interpretation. ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare allows you…
It’s just this feeling I have when I view the last several dozen images saved to my photostream.
Google, which declined to comment on the gender breakdown of its social network, has a long tradition of using its own products internally before releasing them to the public. Products like Gmail and Google Buzz had lengthy incubation periods inside the company before they were released to the public. But that internal testing process can…
It’s a stretch to say Atari has turned 40, since there isn’t much left but the name, but this is still an interesting read. Companies began collapsing and Atari was soon sold to a man named Jack Tramiel. Over the next decade, Atari made computers, a game console called Jaguar and a handheld game machine…
Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some…
I had already spent a couple hours today tweaking the smartphone version of my website, so this study was a welcome affirmation. Young adults – Nearly half of cell internet users ages 18-29 (45%) do most of their online browsing on their phone. Non-whites – Half (51%) of black cell internet users do most of…
How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret? The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell,…
Writing, however, was a part of the game industry in the beginning. It’s most faithful legacy is now considered niche. Great game writers like Steve Meretzky and Tim Schafer are as memorable as writers in comparable genres; Robert Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft. Today, you have to dig deep into the circles of game…