It’s a spoof, but it’s well-researched and contains plenty of insight. Similar:The Case Against High-School Sports”I’ve been in hundreds of classrooms,” s…CultureDaughter doing a thing. Interviewing the Pittsburgh Dance Council’s Randall Miller for Bur… AcademiaDo you remember Harry Monster counting with adorable little John-John? Watch this 2 min cl…https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/15…AmusingIs your child texting about recursive acronym…
The Jurupa Oak tree first sprouted into life when much of the world was still covered in glaciers. It has stood on its windswept hillside in southern California for at least 13,000 years, making it the oldest known living organism, according to a study published today. —Independent Reading this story reminded me of a story…
I canna give the furnace any more power! I hope the lithium crystals are still under warranty. Furnace.mp3 Similar:Random #steampunk workstation with a porthole, because why not. Most of the surfaces are f…AestheticsWhat a great time everyone had at the "Cabbies."CultureGreensburg Holiday ParadePersonalToday's 10sq cm of #steampunk control panel. #blender3d #blender3dartAestheticsMy basement dehumidifier was flashing…
I just played this Every Day the Same Dream. Simple, stark, and in places charming. I smiled and thought a little. Similar:The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse This was probably the wealthiest, most…BusinessTook the whole day off and spent part of it making #greebles with #Blender3D because reaso…AestheticsSurprise: Humanities Degrees Provide…
I’m gearing up to teach Video Game Culture and Theory for the third time. It’s a 200-level elective, with no prerequisites. Students will have taken a basic comp course, but some won’t have done any academic research yet. I’m conscious that some students may have difficulty switching from playing the games they want to play,…
The first part of a walkthrough of the classic (1993), a moody, contemplative point-and-click adventure that defies the stereotype of games as violent and chaotic. Popular with women and causual gamers, but also appreciated by expert gamers for its puzzles and graphics (photo-realistic CGI, with pre-rendered animations), it was the top-selling game for nearly a…
Do students who report enjoying a teaching style actually learn more from that style? This study suggests that there may be an optimal teaching method for a given task, and that whether students like it or not, that optimal method does a better job teaching them. (As usual, beware of any new article with “may”…
Is this for real? On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. —Amazon.com Hold on, though… who goes online to shop for more books on Dec 25, before the spines have been cracked on the new books that were under the tree? Amazon was heavily promoting its…
Fascinating student project from Zach Whalen’s “A Videogame Canon” course. Adventure. Rules, Representation, and Meaning in Colossal Cave Adventure Analysis of Colossal Cave Adventure Social Impact Colossal Cave Adventure as an interactive narrative and similarites [sic] to fictional novels Other projects include coverage of PONG, Half-Life, and Super Mario Kart. Similar:Short Reports: How To Write…
I’ve re-set and cleansed my psyche a bit over the last week or so, delving into a little visual and spatial creativity, rather than the reading and writing (and marking) that I’ve been doing for the previous few weeks. While his face is still cartoony, the craggy eyes, puffy cheeks, and red nose all required…
The Baltimore Sun is offering a year’s subscription to its weekend papers for one cent, in an effort to boost circulation numbers and attract more advertising revenue. Even if you only want the coupons from the advertising flyers, it sounds like a great deal. “But,” my brother-in-law, Robert Frezza, writes, “I would be killing trees.” …
For hundreds of years, Wiltz had celebrated the Christmas season with visits from St. Nicholas, who would bestow gifts, sweets and chocolates to boys and girls. But four years of German occupation had meant four years without a traditional Christmas parade, and four years without a visit from St. Nick. “So, Harry had this idea…
Long story on the epic fail that is (was) Duke Nukem Forever. The Duke Nukem Forever team was unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke…
A reading from a chapter of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Similar:Apparently Facebook Doesn't Know Me Very WellI’m actually rather happy at the thought…AmusingHexagons Are the Bestagonshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs…AmusingPart of Wright brothers' 1st airplane on NASA's Mars chopper “Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pl…AwesomeThirty Years Ago, the Challenger Crew Plunged Alive and Aware to…
In the late-eighties and early nineties, electronic writers wrote hypertext fiction and poetry, the classic example being afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. In hypertext literature the narrative unfolds through a long series of links that produce different outcomes — but now the shrapnel of the technological explosion includes hundreds of sub-categories, each completely unique.…
Very detailed. See the full version at deviantART (I can’t link to it directly). The site also has a great chart showing how to age characters, and a cool nodally-linked display showing subtle shifts between emotional states, all starting with a neutral face. For example, the face does different things on the blank-relaxed-lazy path, as…
I was showing my 7yo daughter some classic arcade games. She asked if I could teach her to make a game of her own, and proceeded to describe the premise. You are a water sprite, catching fish and avoiding sharks. Blowing bubbles at the fish makes you lure them in; blowing a bubble at a…
I’m gearing up to teach a Video Game Culture and Theory course this January. The first time I taught it, in 2006, it didn’t occur to me that students who were looking for information on, say, Space Invaders, would just play any old flash clone, without being discerning about whether it was a faithful port,…
Good overview of the concepts Johnson explores in his book Everything Bad is Good for You. Similar:It's Science! Carolyn Uses Anastasia's Lip Balm KitMy friend Anastasia gave me a home-made …AestheticsRestoring the first websiteVery important bit of history. For a st…CybercultureFences ( #AugustWilson #CenturyCycle, 6 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle > …BooksBlender 2.8 Released. Please…
I completely missed this, which I stumbled across via the Reeves Library blog. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition…