The Internet Bible: The Fall of Eve

Via Similar:Go Forth and Conquer, but Postpone the Selfie“We have about 850 graduates, and we hav…AcademiaSpot of sunlight seems to be sliding down an escalator.   View t…AestheticsMotivation Amid Crisis (Autotrophic Bat)As part of an independent study project,…BooksThe Period, Our Simplest Punctuation Mark, Has Become a Sign of AngerYou text your girlfriend: “I know we…

Doyle Redland Says Goodbye

I’m still mourning the loss of Herman T. Zwiebel.  And now this? Similar:Feeding a Neighbor's LambsA neighbor invited us over to help feed …AmusingFirst Day in the Theatre for Twelfth Night (May 3-12) Daughter: (is sad her “first day in …CultureIntroduction to Twine (Tutorials by Vegetarian Zombie) I will always love Inform 7, but I…

The ABCs of Adventuring

Thanks for this find, Mark Sample (via Twitter). The ABCs of Adventuringby Admiral Jota, Dylan O’Donnell, G. Kevin Wilson, and Dan Shiovitz.A is for Adventure, the first of them all;B is for Brass lantern, so you don’t take a fall.C is for Compass, an unseen one you keepD is for Drinking, eating and sleep.E is…

What Makes a Great Teacher?

Gripping story of an effort to use data to predict teaching excellence. As Teach for America began to identify exceptional teachers using this data, Farr began to watch them. He observed their classes, read their lesson plans, and talked to them about their teaching methods and beliefs. He and his colleagues surveyed Teach for America…

Why Google Has Become Microsoft's Evil Twin

Google Buzz combined the openness of Twitter with the “whoo-hoo look at me!” aspects of Facebook. The result? A total face plant. —PC World Similar:Duke stops assigning numeric values to essays, test scoresThis story is about the admissions proce…AcademiaJust a #steampunk captain inspecting the æther power orbs. #Blender3D #Unity3D #design #ae…AestheticsUVA administrator awarded $3M in…

Critical Code Studies Working Group — Colossal Cave Adventure Annotation

This week, I’ll be facilitating a week-long collaborative annotation project, as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group online conference, on the source code to Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure (a classic text-only computer game from the 1970s). According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game…

Happy V-Day: Valentines for Journalists

Valentines for Journalists. Similar:Timeline of Donald J. Trump's Statements on Coronavirus OutbreakCultureVeteran’s microphone cut off when he discusses Black people’s role in establishing Memoria…Who is this nobody Memorial Day keynote …CultureDissecting a Frog: How to Write a Humor PieceAnalyzing humor, as E.B. White famously …AmusingFormer Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh sentenced to 3 years for ‘Healthy…

Frisbee inventor dies at 90

Walter Frederick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died at the age of 90. —Guardian Similar:First page of a student’s Texture project. (This made me laugh.) This clever freshman writing student…AcademiaBetween static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to …When I started my blog in 1999 (by addin…CybercultureNew Ground…

Peter West, Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839-1869

Interesting examination of role-playing, illusion, identity, and power in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, one small branch of which was the inspiration for the 1976/7 computer game Colossal Cave Adventure. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist destination for travelers from around the United States and beyond. The cave…

Typography and Textuality

Zach Whalen is turning his dissertation into a blog-web-thing, in the hopes of developing a book-thing. In whatever form it takes, it’s an interesting approach to a textual study of video games. This study asks how the design and configuration of text in videogames contributes to their textuality. I argue that videogames are texts in…