We didn’t start the flame war. Scandalous satirical pamphlets were once cranked out by writers and sold at train stations, like so many primordial blog posts. Political cartoons have a long and vicious history. Incivility is our legacy, not our invention. It is part, but only part, of who we are. And have always been.…
So what if a WaPo story about huge flaws in FBI lab testimony shakes the foundation of the justice system, calling into question death sentences that have already been carried out? We are all too busy looking at Upworthy articles about the genius thing these blogging kittens did. Who needs the professional journalists? Similar:BREAKING: All…
Interesting news for historians of digital culture. I had no direct knowledge of this game. I want to learn more about it. Wander was probably the first computer game that is recognisable as what came to be known as a “text adventure” (or “interactive fiction“) – pre-dating even ADVENT (a.k.a. Colossal Cave) by Crowther and Woods! But Wander was more than…
In my online “American Literature” class, I recorded several video and audio lectures, which students listened to and responded to via their blogs. By the middle of the term, I started scaling back my audio lectures, in part because the students didn’t need to hear my voice anymore — they were interpreting the works on their…
Great story of nerdiness and discovery and friendship, focusing on the author’s adult memories of his love for a particular text adventure game at a crucial phase of his youth. I’ve collected several such stories in “Interactive Fiction Reflection and Nostalgia.” He knew the game, practically had it memorized. He would be the computer. I…
I was burned in 1999 when I saw The Phantom Menace. Burned bad. And then what was left of my childhood died when the booster jets popped out of Artoo’s legs. I have no distinct memory of Episode 3, other than the sensitive and complex delivery of well-written dialogue such as “I hate you!” and…
However, running parallel to the evolution of these [graphic] games was a family of explicitly, un- ashamedly narrative titles. Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1977), Zork I (1980), and Adventureland (Andventure International, 1978) have equal importance in the evolution of video games, but rarely receive the same kind of general, mainstream popular cultural appreciation…
English continues to evolve. I noticed this construction several times today. “No, totally.” “No, definitely.” “No, exactly.” “No, yes.” These curious uses turn “no” into a kind of contranym: a word that can function as its own opposite. Out of the million-odd words in the English language, perhaps a hundred have this property. You can…
Are screenshorts slowly killing blogging as we know it? For some things, I think so, because it’s an easier and more authentic way to reach your fans, friends or followers directly on social media than it is to spend time setting up a blog and then sharing out the link. Sharing text as an image…
This author did a great job articulating the unease I felt when I learned about Apple’s racially diverse emoji. I don’t like it when interfaces translate my textual emoticons ;-) into graphic symbols. Now I feel like I’ll have to think deliberately about whatever color the autocorrect chooses for those graphics. Because I’m black, should I…
I’ve had the privilege of being this amazing person’s father for 13 years. Similar:I just installed the "Old Layout for Facebook" plugin for Chrome.I just installed the “Old Layout for Fac…CybercultureAn Unexpecting MinorityTruthfully, I expected my new department…AcademiaIf you win the very first time you play a game, that means you are skilled and brilliant,…
Talked too much during a meeting today. Somehow ended up making two good suggestions. Guess who has two more items on his to-do list. Similar:Carolyn appears as homeschooled teenager "Carolyn." Free holiday show Tuesday at 7. PersonalPassage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason RohrerGrand Text Auto introduced me to the exc…AestheticsRubric for the Rubric Concerning Students’…
“The Rolling Stone article viewed by millions fueled a court of public opinion that ostracized Phi Kappa Psi members and led to vandalism of the fraternity house,” the fraternity’s statement said. “Clearly our fraternity and its members have been defamed, but more importantly we fear this entire episode may prompt some victims to remain in…
Sloppy journalism can ruin lives. Check your sources. Before publishing accusations against someone, get that person’s side of the story. My personal belief is that it’s silly to want to join clubs with greek letters, but then again in my spare time in the past few weeks I have pretended to be shot by a…
“There’s such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it’s like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that.” —Death to high school English – Salon.com. Similar:Children of Time #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season…
I have not seen the pizzeria TV interview in question, I have not been following developments in the controversy, and I won’t link to any of the coverage. Yellow journalism is bad when it supports an unjust status quo, or when it simply creates noise that distracts us from more important things. But it is…
A hypertext choose-your-own adventure narrative set at a board meeting at a game development company. You are the lead writer on a game that is going straight to hell. And guess who has to fix it? I clicked through out of curiosity and kept clicking. Very enjoyable.The Writer Will Do Something by Matthew S. Burns.…
This is nice, but what I really want to see is an Elizabethan-style revenge play featuring Clippy. December 9, 1968… in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links,…
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies. He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it…
Fliers arriving at Swedens two biggest airports, Stockholm Arlanda and Goteborg Landvetter, can now kill time while waiting for their luggage by playing video game classics “Ms. Pac-Man,” “Space Invaders” and “Galaga.”Best of all, the machines in the “Charity Arcade” are custom-made to take coins of any currency, whether its yen, euro or pounds, and…