Looks like the rumors of an Apple tablet are creating ripples… the HP tablet apparently has two hinged screens, which seems to put it into the smartbook category. On Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft‘s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer during his evening keynote at the Consumer Electronics trade show in…
Americans’ print consumption has declined since 1960, but words delivered by computer have more than made up the difference. (Image courtesy of the University of California at San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center) Conventional wisdom holds that YouTube, videogames, cable TV and iPods have turned us away from the written word. Glowing streams of visual…
I’ve just finished my final training run as a nanotech-augmented super-agent. Nasty terrorists holed up in the ruins of the State of Liberty have captured one of my fellow agents, and it’s my job to get him out. In real life, it’s 2002, and I’m just a guy in Wisconsin. My four-year-old son is asleep…
My online three-week course will start tomorrow morning. It will lean heavily on blogging, so chances are I’ll be a bit more productive than usual in that area. Video Game Culture and TheoryThis course isn’t about learning how to “win” a game, nor is it about programming or design. In fact, according to a recent…
Thanks, John, for sending me this link. Smart phones are great. But I’m not going to blog on my Blackberry. Reading texts from my mom is easy, but I’d rather not read a New Yorker story she emails to me on a 1.5”-by-1.5” screen. The ability of smart phones to do pretty much everything doesn’t…
It’s a spoof, but it’s well-researched and contains plenty of insight. Similar:Essay on meaning of a life grounded in the liberal arts @insidehigheredFor David N. DeVries, the critical think…AcademiaI felt a great disturbance in the Fandom”…as if millions of voices suddenly cr…AestheticsThe karyotype of Pimelodella cristata (Siluriformes: Heptapteridae) from Central Amazon ba…Some scholarly journals have a…
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:Faculty stacked up in launch tube beneath McKenna gym, ready for graduation 2022.AcademiaWhy Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?Not a day goes by without The Girl remin…BooksExcited for Annette Vee’s visit. My journalism students have to submit…
I just played this Every Day the Same Dream. Simple, stark, and in places charming. I smiled and thought a little. Similar:Snazzy officer uniforms from the #steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my now-adult ch…AestheticsHow Not to Hate Shakespeare The problem isn’t Shakespeare—it’s h…CultureHow reading fiction can help improve our mental healthIn general, I…
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:Dear readers: Please stop calling…
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…
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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.…