See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Best. Comment. Ever. while([fh offsetInFile]+12<=imageoffs) { uint32 sign=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 marker=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 chunklen=[fh readUInt32BE]; off_t nextchunk=[fh offsetInFile]+((chunklen+3)&~3); // At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such…
Via this Time Magazine article, “How Not to be Hated on Facebook.”
I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year,…
My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this. As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no…
In the past few hours, I’ve gotten Friend requests from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway, as well as a a shady “Narrator Man” who calls himself invisible, and is a member of The Brotherhood. My students in an American Lit class have been working on a creative interpretation of a work of literature, and several…
Most small publishers only received letters from Google last week asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them know that soon their rights will revert to Google unless they “opt out” immediately. This gives small publishers two weeks to track down their writers, many of whom spend at least half the year in…
We Didn’t Start the Flame War. (Don’t listen to this one with urchins underfoot.) College Humor does not pull its punches when it satirizes (and celebrates) the depths to which human nature can stoop when participating in discussion threads. (My favorite bit is the Rick Astley impersonator, a reference to an internet meme of the…
There’s nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I’m happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring. SM: It’s kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge–not just of games, but…
And to think Charkes Kinbote had to make do with John Shade’s index cards… The influence of authors’ environments on their writing has always interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been heavily influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the novel Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909…
The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation’s economy…. Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.…
My son watches, as a baby becomes totally engrossed with a pair of sunglasses, puzzling over how to get them on his face. The baby keeps manipulating the glasses, turning and twisting them in attempt to get them to stay on. “Look,” says my son. “It’s like his ‘Zork‘.”
The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs. In an explanation published on the university’s Web site, information-technology officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that…
This article describes how the Columbia School of Journalism is redesigning its program in order to integrate new media and business skills into the traditional journalism program. Currently, most student work in the introductory course is in print — sometimes published by a professor on a course’s Web page. It is Grueskin’s hope that, in…
I generally discourage my students from delivering PowerPoint presentations, in part because they typically grab images from everywhere and anywhere, which is a practice I don’t want them to retain if they should start working for the student paper. I prefer instead for students to post a richly linked blog entry (with links pointing directly…
I don’t know any bloggers who don’t crave comments, but there are many more places than blogs that you can leave comments these days: on news articles, photos, videos, comment walls, and more. Comment writing is something of a new art form, and as many people who get comments will tell you, some are great…
You can’t do this on dead trees. A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal. The Letter Law View Interactive Compare letter frequency across various English language sources, from Scrabble to newspapers to fiction.
Kristen Seas, “Ripple Effect: A New Perspective on Rhetorical Agency” Lars Soderlund, “Kairos and Emergence” Marc Santos, “Social Bookmarking as Distributed Research” Jeremy Tirrell, “Decorum and Emergent Ethics” I was particularly interested in this panel, in part because I taught the session chair in a few technical writing / new media classes when she was…
[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn’t catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.]
Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California on Friday, March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) (Boston.com) I’m not so sure this image really depicts the recession. Rather, it’s a sign that the business model of print journalism has changed irrevocably, due to the internet. The younger generation has not continued the…
Applause for Eric Glicker, who got the ball rolling on an annotated bibliography of social software. Many plans, some commiseration, a few very pleasant surprises. Matthew S. S. Johnson reported that his mid-tenure review committee agreed to accept my blog entry on one of his previous CCCC presentation as a citation. I asked him if…