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…
This animated map of the expansion of American territory since the original 13 colonies is a bit cheesy in terms of production values, and not nearly as high-quality as the wonderful animated map of The Civil War in Four Minutes, but still a good resource. Similar:Looking in on the officers' wardroom (conference and dining) one…
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…
Excellent feature about Roger Ebert’s bout with cancer. (Ebert’s own words on his cancer are also worth a read.) When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be. He is a wonderful writer, and today he is producing…
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:More Fake News from the Biased Fake Crappy Bad MediaClearly the pesky reporters whom the pow…BusinessYour verbs have been lost and will be invisible until sentence author revision.The marketers and programmers…
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:Trump communications director Murtaugh rallies supporters by tweeting fake Washington Time…Here’s more evidence of just how crucial…CultureThe Declaration of Independence (Dramatic Reading)I rather enjoyed recording this oral int…Current_EventsIt started with a ride down an escalator and ended with a press conference at Four Seasons…Earlier today Trump tweeted that his cam…BooksApple Hill Playhouse…
[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:Those shoggoths hacked from lungs unspeakable1) Last night, I’m fairly certain some …AmusingA Christmas Carol — new audio adaptationBooksPhysician: "My career of treating patients has ended"Very painful Reddit thread. CultureTeaching myself the #Unity3D game engine. Each step…
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:College Instructors Don't Require Enough WritingI was surprised a few years ago to learn…AcademiaFact Check: No, an NPR story on…
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:Incoming Seton Hill Students Pick Up Their MacBooks and iPads TodayI find it impossible not to be cheerful …AcademiaThis is what happened when a KDKA-TV journalist showed biasSocial media platforms are full of…
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:Siblings gotta sib.PersonalMore #blender3d #cgi practice. Added workstations underneath the chief engineer's sta…PersonalMy daughter found where all the missing pens and pencils end upAmusingLocal News in a Digital AgeLocal TV news is the “most visible prese…AestheticsAnd you thought your last teleconference was rough!PersonalTom Jones, librettist for "The…
Fascinating software study of the Doom iPhone port.http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/index.php Similar:After decades lost, Star Trek’s original Enterprise model may have been foundLong before sci-fi shows created their v…DesignGreebles make me happy.Before CGI, filming a science-fiction st…Aesthetics"Why are you throwing out all the books?!"The short answer is because we’re about …AestheticsThe Media Pyramid: “Any content where ideology leads…