Wired gives Star Wars a good drubbing, focusing on the ending: There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren’t part of the original…
Via Jay is Games We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we’re calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme “escape”. It’s text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full…
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.” “It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking…
Sadly, I haven’t had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners. Vote Summary Place Game Avg. Std. Dev. No. Votes 1 Rover’s Day Out 7.96 1.65 92 2 Broken Legs 7.39 1.72 92 3 Snowquest 7.37 1.41 101 Similar:Yahoo, You Nagged Me Too Many Times;…
The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying…
Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece…
During a scheduled internet outage at work, I took a stack of papers from my “I’ll probably never need this stuff but I need to go through it one more time before I chuck it” stack, and headed to the copy room, where there’s a big recycling bin. A colleague did a double-take as he…
Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books. Not just in the abstract — these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles. At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page.…
A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and…
To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself…
Many have defined the problem — people are abandoning old media for new in droves — but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium…
Remember, remember, the ninth of November. “Anyone standing shortly before eight at the Brandenburg Gate would have thought it an absurd dream that there would be a crowd of people on top of the Wall four hours later.” Reuters / Washington Post Similar:The crisis in local journalism has become a crisis of democracyThe paucity of…
Welcome to the “fakeosphere.” Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs – or flogs – fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it’s a $500 million-a-year industry – and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago. “I don’t think…
At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud. Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction. “I’m not sure why…
Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What’s most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that’s a…
A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby’s mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what’s in the report. But “husband and…
The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn’t replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines. In a few days, I expect to be the owner of…
http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/ Dictionary of Terms Allegory Metaphor Motifs Satire Subtext Symbols The Protagonist Themes How to Write a Paper 1: Get Psyched 2: The Thesis Statement 3: Organization 4: Proving you know what you’re talking about 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader 6: In Conclusion 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc. Similar:MisSpelled: Premiering Oct 1In this podcast series,…
Avi sez, “‘Mickey Mouse in Gurs’ is a tragic ‘comic’ book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.”…
A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region. “Of Faith and Kristallnacht,” a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among…