A pleasantly detailed analysis of how the various editions of Tetris chose what piece was next. In 1985, Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov released Tetris to the public. This fun and highly addictive game challenged players to fit pieces together that were dealt in a random order. Since then, over 150 licensed versions of Tetris games have…
When a correspondent sent to Cuba to cover a possible war telegraphed that there would be no war and he wanted to come home, Newspaper mogul Willam Randolph Hearst is said to have replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Â It’s a story I remember learning in middle school. Â …
Me: I need to post the opening lecture for my online Shakespeare class. Also me: I should compose it in blank verse. Me (glares in iambic pentameter): Also me: O for a Canvas of fire, to surpass The farthest distance of instruction. SHU tech is cool, but can a Macbook hold A seminar discussion? Can…
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I noticed an uptick in traffic to an older page, “Technical Writing: What Is It?” So I touched it up and created a new graphic. Similar:When In Academia – WHEN A COLLEAGUE KEEPS TALKING ABOUT ‘DIGITAL HUMANITIES’:When In Academia – WHEN A COLLEAGUE KEEP…AmusingThe Game (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 6) Cadet Crusher vs…
Often when I see people in my social media feed criticizing “the media,” they are unfairly blaming journalists for how the social media ecosystem misuses journalism. Here’s an example from a post by someone arguing that CNN is being unfairly biased against Bernie Sanders. The complaint is that CNN criticizes Sanders for making a claim…
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Spent much of Tuesday wrestling with code to display messages like “Press E to Open” and connecting them to animations. I’ve done this sort of thing before, but there’s a difference between hacking something to make it work once, and developing a workflow that facilitates churning things out. Plus I keep getting distracted by little…
I’m following a lot of tutorials, and continue to make progress in Unity3D. My character’s feet now react better with the environment. Here she is standing casually with each foot at different levels. With the right code attached to each foot, she will adjust her stance automatically, according to the height and angle of whatever…
In the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my kids, the characters would embark on Earthbound adventures or welcome a visitor arriving via “the gondola.” Serving the same function as the transporter or shuttlecraft in Star Trek, it could conveniently break down when I needed the characters to be isolated, and it could miraculously…
Before CGI, filming a science-fiction story typically involved constructing a physical model of a spaceship or planetscape. In order to trick the eye in to thinking you were looking at something huge, model-makers added tiny random bits of detail, often re-purposing off-the-shelf commercial model kits or using any kind of junk they could get their…
I’ve been using the beta for months, but the Blender 2.8 release has finally dropped. Blender is a super-powerful, completely free 3D design tool. I’ve been playing with it for years, and this summer I ramped up my skills considerably. Here’s an animation of “MoonBot,” a character from the steampunk bedtimes stories I used to…
It is a game absent strategy, requiring little thought. Consequently, many parents hate Candy Land as much as their young kids enjoy it. Yet, for all its simplicity and limitations, children still love Candy Land, and adults still buy it. What makes it so appealing? The answer may have something to do with the game’s history:…
How do you tell a story that people know, or maybe just think they know? Each of the newsrooms featured here this week took on that question in different ways. In Los Angeles, the LA Times made a game to go with project on sea level rise. The Chico (California) Enterprise-Record made a podcast to…
Friendly advice… If you are practicing with your new green screen backdrop, don’t wear a plaid shirt with blue-green in it. I’m not happy with the lighting… the foreground lighting is pretty good (some spare photography lamps — much better than the fluorescent ceiling lights) but I don’t like the shadows on the backdrop. I…
50 years ago today, three humans were on their way to the moon for the first time. Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary “Apollo 11” uses lots of found footage (including longer cuts of iconic sequences I know well, and plenty I’ve never seen before) arranged on split-screen multi-angle shots, woven together with low-key graphics and the…
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I’m brushing up on my Unity3D skills, and created this simple hedge maze game. When I decided to let the player shoot books instead of bullets, I turned on the physics (so the books bounce and roll), but I forgot to tick the “use gravity” checkbox, so they float. (Music: “Dreaming of Flying” by Celestial…
As the humanities decline in the United States, the country is losing the craft of understanding, losing its capacity for citizenship. Even educated people are increasingly unable and unwilling to distinguish between fake and real information, becoming a community that cannot understand itself as anything more than a circulation of figures. Self-righteousness takes the place…
I first heard the formalized theories about “learning styles” as a junior faculty member, at a faculty workshop. I didn’t build my whole pedagogy around it, but it was one of the things I thought about, especially in the context of encouraging students to take intellectual risks with multimodal student projects (rather than just fun…