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:The Dadliest DecadeThe eighties, at least, were drenched in…HomeWriting…
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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:NASA! Mars!! Panorama!!! Video!!!! Audio!!!!!New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Persever…AwesomeI just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999.I just dusted off a #textadventure proje…CybercultureIf you like to play with words, good newsI wish there…
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…
I ask my students to contextualize links with informative text, rather than hype. Puppies! Schadenfreude! Thinly veiled primal urges! If you aren’t weeping angry tears by the 3rd paragraph, a gargoyle has your soul! Prove your cleverness and sensitivity by sharing this link! Also so you can find this article again! Link traffic! Earlier this…
I played more of the Sierra point-and-click adventures than the LucasArts ones, but “The Dig” and “Full Throttle” were probably as important to me as half a dozen of my once-favorite TV shows or movies. (I’ve revisited these games by watching YouTube longplay videos.) There’s a fondness throughout the catalogue for the catalogue. Monkey Island…
This author is probably overthinking things, but I myself have been known to overthink musicals, so this is worth blogging. It turns out that Elsa is wrong — unleashing her powers in this particular manner brings disaster on the people she was trying to spare (though of course she also wants to flee their judgment,…
Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other’s timelines. The following graph shows the average number of timeline posts exchanged between two people who are about to become a couple. We studied the group of people who changed their status from “Single”…
Me: Yes, that sound was me choking up while running The Secret Garden lines with Carolyn. Wife: (Laughs.) Me: So, you married a sensitive man. Now shut up. Wife: You should blog that. Similar:Clever Modernization of Hamlet: Polonius with an iPhoneI teach Shakespeare in a literature clas…CultureFriday night board game therapy. #startrek #monopolyPersonalAddressing Our Biases:…