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…
“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to…
This eagerly awaited restored version of Fritz Lang’s silent classic uses what it said to be nearly an hour of footage long thought to be lost.This is one of the the most important film archival discoveries in history, as surprising as if the missing ending of “The Magnificent Ambersons” were found. —Roger Ebert According to…
Valentines for Journalists. Similar:We Are the Product Facebook SellsFacebook does not care what Hobbit you a…BusinessPreview of "The Fantasticks" (thanks, Tribune-Review, for covering the arts community)For Luisa, Jerz’s character, “the world …CultureIt's Friday night in July, and I'm jamming with my fall course preps.The dean sends me an email at 9:07pm. In…Academiawhen someone say ur…
[O]n this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops. Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students…
Walter Frederick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died at the age of 90. —Guardian Similar:FBI launches flurry of arrests over attacks on journalists during Capitol riotImagine that. Nearly six months after t…Current_EventsInnovative journalism: A game about the rising sea, a podcast about fire, a 20-year Colum…How do you tell a story…
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…
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…
There’s a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection. Using a police state to market technology in 1984: Using a police state to market technology in 2010: Similar:The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading Random House, which jacked up its eboo…BooksIn-person classes heighten age-related…
None of this is a surprise to me, but I’m glad to have statistics to back up my impressions. A very small handful of students whose first introduction to online social networking was the SHU blogosphere, before blogs went really mainstream around 2005, are still blogging here, after they have graduated. In 2003-2005 it was…
I didn’t watch the game, but I did catch the buzz about this ad. Yes, I did tear up. (Wired has details.) Similar:How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pinkJust watched videos of the musicals “Tho…AcademiaUniversities must stop presuming that all students are tech-savvyAlthough considerable resources have bee…AcademiaWhen T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster …
It is dangerous to use local weather events (such as a heavy or light winter) to make judgments about global climate. With that caveat, I’m blogging the following because I’ve noted a shift in the online discussion about “global warming,” or the more general “climate change”. This essay does a good job exploring the events…
Coming up… we’ll tell you whether you’ll be impaled by sharp, radioactive icicles hurled by mobs of rampaging robots in your neighborhood. But first, people panicking, filling up three shopping carts of toilet paper and canned food. Hear the techno-pop pulse of our theme music, and know that you’re being conditioned to think of us…
Here’s hoping I left gas in the snow-thrower. Similar:World Trade Center Literary and Cultural Reflections (first posted September 11, 2001) Not knowing what else to do, in the nu…AestheticsSnazzy officer uniforms from the #steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my now-adult ch…AestheticsSinéad O'Connor's open letter to Miley CyrusI was never a fan of Sinéad…
Fascinating software study of the Doom iPhone port.http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/index.php Similar:Pater Noster Passenger ElevatorsSome 50 years ago, my father took me to …AmusingUpdated my "Show, Don't (Just) Tell" HandoutTaking advantage of a summer day in the …AcademiaAdobe Shockwave interfereres with my system, blocks my attempts to remove it, and replaces…Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition…BusinessNow you can…
Our first few readings in my freshman writing course were personal essays, with a clear narrative. We read an academic paper today, and there’s another assigned for Friday. A few students are already reporting feeling a little lost in the detail. I gather this is because they are used to reading textbooks, where all the…
I wish I’d seen this a few weeks ago, before my Video Game Culture and Theory class ended, but it’s still a welcome find. Similar:Robert Morris University to offer video game scholarshipsRobert Morris University’s video game sc…AcademiaFacebook does not care about truth. Facebook wants to sell your attention to the highest b… Don’t trust your…
Pee-wee Gets An iPad! from Pee-wee Herman Similar:Fact check: You can safely ignore that "HOW TO FIGHT COVID AT HOME" meme I noticed this meme a few days ago. I…Current_EventsReport: Many U.S. Schools Can’t Afford Mannequins, Human Urine For Art Classes“It’s sad, but my students don’t even ha…AestheticsPhoenix journalist admits 'bad reporting' in claiming White…
“One of the deepest questions in this field,” Nass says, “is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring–that is, they’re really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay–or…
I know, I know: Amazon relied on those $9.99 prices to give it a head start in the digital books market. And raising prices to the $12.99 to $14.99 being talked about could certainly slow sales if consumers don’t bite. But here’s the thing: it’s not as if Macmillan is only raising prices for Kindle.…