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:30 years later, Sierra's Laura Bow mysteries are still a treasureWhen I was in college and grad school, a…CultureIf you like…
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:She feels pretty at the dress rehearsal (opens Thursday)On the ride home, in the middle of a spi…AmusingAdventure | T.M. CampGreat story of nerdiness and discovery a…CybercultureI Felt a Great Disturbance in the Font. And the Margins.You don’t want to use Courier New and 1….AcademiaThere, in my morning snapshot of the kids home-schooling in…
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:Second Skin (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season…
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:Prepare for the Ultimate GaslightingThoughtful essay from Julio Vincent Gamb…BusinessThe Hidden Benefits Of DaydreamingWhen your mind wanders, its like P. T. B…CultureVandal scratches Poe phrase into car at dealershipLanguage nerds will appreciate this news…AmusingFrom this station on…
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 Pope's Prayer for Countering "Fake News"Today is the feast of St. Francis de Sal…CultureProcession #classof2017PersonalI was part of a nerve-racking, thrilling attempt to break a world record I…
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…
This entry comes from a podcast sponsored by a Lutheran ministry group. At about 11 minutes in, the presenters discuss a handout that was originally submitted by a student, but that I have continued to maintain over the years. What kind of e-mailer are you? – Is your electronic correspondence short and to the point,…
I bought far more eBooks on impulse when they were all $9.99. When they break above $10, I have to think before I buy, and I buy less often. The skirmish over prices is possible because of deals that publishers negotiated with Amazon this year that allowed the publishers to set their own prices on…
Documentary filmmaker Jason Scott will present GET LAMP, a documentary on word-driven computer games, at Seton Hill University, 7-10pm Tuesday (Oct 5). Scott is a digital entrepreneur with a Twitter account devoted to his cat Sockington (with nearly 1.5 million followers). He regularly gives convention speeches on such topics as Wikipedia and digital archiving. GET…
I just wrote these examples on a student paper, in an attempt to reinforce a lesson in showing vs. telling. 1) Winning is important to me. It doesn’t matter to me what I do, so long as I win. (That’s TELLING. Its dry and boring, and not at all convincing.) 2) On the shelf in…
Like the labor-activist plays of the 1930s, where characters never face any problems that can’t be fixed by joining the Communist Party (or, at least, a union), Wired knows of no problem that can’t be solved by a geeky application of technology. Students in Seton Hill’s New Media Journalism program are doing pretty well on…
