30th anniversary refit of the cruel, cruel text-adventure game. The game is still the same wonderful piece of interactive fiction that Douglas Adams wrote and Steve Meretzky programmed, but in finding it a new home, a few changes needed to be made. The old Flash game would not work on the new servers, and in…
And so, on the first day of testing, I arrived to pick my daughter up at middle school at 9:25 a.m. I went into the office and checked her out. She and I started walking to my car. It was just as I started reaching for my keys that we realized that someone was in…
Training humanists who can code like a techie and engineers who can dream like a poet. Well played, Stanford! “We’re also seeing students who want to balance their academic passions with pragmatic considerations about their career development, and this kind of program addresses that need. The intellectual landscape is changing, and the workplace landscape is…
“We think we can make the playing field more level by making the best-in-class tool and making it free. We hope that beyond individual students, these tools become adopted by after-school and college readiness programs.” With a huge influx of donations from Silicon Valley’s most notable philanthropists, Khan Academy quickly evolved from a YouTube lecture…
In essence, it is admitting defeat. By offering the ability to embed photos, Getty is saying it cannot effectively police the use of its images in every nook and cranny of the internet. Its code, which can be cut and pasted onto any website, is similar to the tool YouTube provides for sharing its videos.…
Emily Short on the limitations of parser-based IF. And I’ve finally, about fifteen years on, accepted that there is nothing I know how to do that will make a parser-based game a sufficiently inviting prospect for the majority of players. Tutorial text, external help materials, more synonyms, better error messages, attempts to highlight key nouns…
Within 3 minutes of being placed into groups, my students were out in the field, practicing news gathering. They have one hour to produce a 2.5 min segment. This is the first graded video project of term. (The other two in-class projects have been dry runs.) Similar:I can probably remove that link to LycosOn a…
Similar:Futuristic Acrylic Chair (Blender 3D Animation)Yesterday, I sketched a chair I found at…AestheticsAn open letter to Trump from the US press corpsThis is the message I’ve been waiting fo…CulturePage Weight MattersUnexpected consequences, when a develope…CybercultureHow Humans Respond to RobotsThe play that coined the word “robot,” K…AestheticsIN-ZOOM (A world-premiere 10-minute play)A very current short play…
This weekend has been magical. Friday night my daughter opened as Mary Lennox in Stage Right’s professional production of “The Secret Garden.” Two other talented girls share the role. Carolyn has learned a lot from them during rehearsals, studying what the other Marys are really good at, and displaying her own strengths. The Marys have…
In the Stage Right production, the role of Mary is triple-cast with each of the three girls, Grace Rusnica of Irwin and Julia Boyle and Carolyn Jerz of Greensburg, acting in one performance this weekend. Carolyn Jerz, a home-schooled 11-year-old student, shares stage time in “The Secret Garden” with her father, Dennis Jerz, who portrays…
Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next. —Bloomberg. Similar:Good example of ‘do NOT remove things from photos.’Hat tip to my former student Kiley Fisch…BusinessThat's my daughter in the hoop. Pippin Oct 21-23 and 27-29. AestheticsJournalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis When scholars of journalism…
In exploratory programming, there’s no specification or problem to be solved, but there are things to be discovered. Those programming in an exploratory way could be making art (in a generative mode) or trying to understand a topic or subject through data (in an analytic mode), or perhaps doing something that doesn’t easily fit into…
Mr. Merrell said the students told him they didn’t know how to dance and got their moves from MTV. He asked administrators to survey students to see if they would be interested in dance classes. Mr. Merrell said he envisioned several 45-minute classes on weekends for students who are interested. But, several other members strongly…
A good example of a computer-native, data-driven news feature, which Slate calls an “interactive.” Apparently using the adjective “interactive” as a noun is now a thing, according to Slate. While most artists draw from a common bank of rhymes and use the same rhymes frequently, there are some artists who appear to go out of…
The short answer is because we’re about to move the whole collection to the lower level of the building this summer, and it a needs to fit, and b we dont want to move and re-shelve things that shouldnt be kept. Its exactly like how you go through your stuff for a Goodwill donation before…
[W]e at the Center are acutely aware that our society is far from the days when nary a female could be found in the film director’s seat, when women journalists were relegated to the women’s pages, when a woman was hard-pressed to get an entertain- ment media project green-lighted. Today’s sure-enough strides show Shonda Rhimes…
David Newell is one of the speakers at the TEDx talk at Seton Hill all day today. He recalled when his grandfather took him to see his first play, “Harvey,” and came full circle describing how he recently took his granddaughter to see her first play, The Sound of Music. He described the process of…
Within one minute of being placed into groups, my journalism students are up and out of the classroom. They have one hour to come up with a topic, conduct interviews, and produce a video (with a written intro and outro for the anchor to read) to fill a three-minute hole. We don’t have a full…
We see narrative everywhere. It’s a primitive urge, a way to tie cause to effect, to convert the complexity of our experience to a story that makes sense. We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the…
When I find something interesting that an online friend has shared via a linkbait site, I hereby pledge that I will link to the origin of the story, rather than a third-party site that republishes it without commentary. The people who share and like and respond to Upworthy and similar linkbait websites are just responding…