Recently I noticed a cluster of student blogs on interactive fiction. Interactive Fiction: Literature or Not? My Experiences with Interactive Fiction IF Can Be Quite the Process Similar:Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose wheth… We’re drawn to activities that invite …AcademiaU.S. Press Freedom…
Must… mark papers… must resist downloading Blender 2.55. The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.55 Beta. This release is the third official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work. This version is called a “Beta” because it’s now…
I vividly remember the day I got bored with the juvenile section of the library. I had read all the Encyclopedia Brown books, all the Lester Del Rey books (about moon rocket pilots and such), and the entire shelf of astronomy books. Walking around the corner to the adult stacks was a powerful epiphany. (For…
Bottom line: effective group assignments do not require students to collectively author a paper or make a presentation. Writing and presenting are often individual tasks, and charging a group with these tasks, without special guidance on how to perform them, is to set up yourself (and your students) up for frustration and mediocrity. On the…
Literature, as with other creative pursuits, exists as one of the most diverse outlets for human expression available. Movements ebb and flow over time, allowing themselves to both influence and be influenced by the prevailing philosophical and cultural constructs swirling around them. Some obtain prominent – if not permanent – mainstream status and find their…
I’ve been waiting quite a while to be able to blog this campus newspaper story about Jason Scott’s visit to Seton Hill. Unlike today’s traditional videogames, which are jam-packed with high-resolution graphics, text adventure games force players to utilize their imaginations. Also known as interactive fiction, these were the precursors for some of the most…
I’ve taught E. M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” in a few classes. The message is a little heavy-handed, but the world Foster created is eerily familiar a hundred years later. “The Machine Stops” appeared in the November issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Review. At 12,000-plus words, it’s sometimes called a longish short story,…
Posted to Kickstarter at midnight. Not quite 8 hours later, Andrew Plotkin was already halfway there. His pitch has great production values, which I’m sure is part of what has inspired so much confidence. Similar:No, you’re not going crazy – package sizes are shrinking It’s the inflation you’re not suppos…BusinessLooks like somebody’s webmaster accidentally preloaded…
As a rule, I’m suspicious of any news article that has the world “could” in the headline, but this is certainly interesting stuff. Our existence could be coded in a finite bandwidth, like a live ultra-high-definition 3-D video. And the third dimension we know and love could be no more than a holographic projection of…
Urlesque Similar:Hemingway: The First Draft of Anything… Facebook.AmusingGoogle responds to streaming report with shruggie GIFThe Daily Dot proceeded to shrug the GIF…AmusingCNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta CNN has filed a lawsuit against Pres…CultureAdding details to a clip-art silhouette, for a project that will be released in a…
Researchers at Princeton University employed volunteers to learn made-up information about different types of aliens – and found that those reading harder fonts recalled more when tested 15 minutes later. They argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials. —BBC Similar:Game Criticism, Why We Need It,…
While a Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), was instrumental in getting National Public Radio (NPR) to fire Juan Williams, some Muslims are speaking out against succumbing to the censorship of political correctness. —Caroline May, The Daily Caller “But it’s just Facebook gossip,” my students sometimes say — even my journalism students —…
On November 1st, my longtime favorite RSS reader website, Bloglines.com, will be kaput. It’s being put down by its corporate master, Ask.com. You know, that other search engine that no one uses. The one that used to be Ask Jeeves, with that happy little butler…. Flash back a year ago: my good friend over at…
For most of the 20-somethings I know, which is an admittedly small group of graduates from some of the country’s best four-year colleges and universities, life’s third decade offers a disquieting mix of uncertainty and promise. Faced with friends scattering across the globe after graduation, the high stakes and complexity of modern life, a tough…
Pixel art entry from Something Awful. The site includes loads of others (most of which I don’t get). Similar:A Merry Look at Journalism in "The Year Without a Santa Claus" AmusingCaptain’s Holiday (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 19) Picard’s Archeologica…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….AmusingMicrosoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It:…
My wife baked this cake for my birthday (and my daughter’s half-birthday.) Here’s how the family dressed up for Seton Hill’s haunted house fund-raiser for Make-A-Wish. Similar:The girl is intrigued by the plot twists in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_.PersonalLimit child TV viewing to an hour each day, study urgesThe study followed about 1,000 people fr…HealthDon't…
Amazing. The educators who used school-provided laptops to spy on teenagers — snapping pictures of them while they were sleeping or not fully clothes–are still on the job, and the taxpayers get to pay the legal bills. There’s a science fiction trope where aliens do something their unearthly mindset considers virtuous, but anyone with normal…
Soon I will start tweeting the series pilot for the 1979 Gil Gerard Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. #buckrogers 7:44 PM Oct 15th Just from the promo, my son recognized a reused laser sound effect from the original Battlestar Galactica. #buckrogers 7:54 PM Oct 15th I had totally forgotten the flying-through-four-light-blobs warp effect. #buckrogers…
“I am learning about subtext,” he said. She raised an eyebrow. “You?” “Yes, me.” he said, casually stretching. “It means the words say one thing, but there’s a more important meaning hidden between the lines.” She watched him. “Subtext sounds so… interesting,” she said, uncrossing her legs. He sat next…
