Andrew Hussie remixes Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. The results hurts my head, and not in a good way. But that’s a good thing, because, well, it’s a remix of Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. Similar:The Rhetoric of Anthems and the Drama of KneelingI don’t follow sports, so I don’t feel f…CultureShe was…
With the recent release of the new Star Trek, I started to wonder how is this going to affect the kids? Thankfully, mine have heard of and have watched plenty of the original series, so I didn’t have to worry about their state of mind. But there are a lot of kids out there who…
For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honor Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to…
I’ve become a fan of audiobooks, mostly because I can listen to them while folding laundry or weeding the yard or while auto-piloting my way through the grocery store. I’ve thought about writing an article like the one that just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. One book, sampled four ways — paperback, audiobook,…
The embedded preview of Evercracked! was very, very slow when I checked it just now, so I haven’t watched it, but the UK Guardian article on videogame documentaries also includes some links to existing movies. The King of Kong: Fistful of QuartersA fascinating look at the bizarre rivalry between gamers Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell…
Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button…
An arbitrator has found that Lakehead UniÂversity did not violate a collective bargaining agreement when it replaced its campus e-mail network with Google’s e-mail service. — CAUT ACPPU Bulletin Similar:''The Balloon Hoax'' by Edgar Allan PoeWhen steampunk was speculative fiction, …AmusingDo Cultural Critics Have Any Value Left?[T]he Internet has dramatically changed …AestheticsWhat Khan Academy's Fun,…
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door. “I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by…
Your newspaper overlords believe they can sell you their content if they can just get everybody on the same page and nail the sales pitch this time. They’re looking for the magic words, not the underlying logic (the tricky part? Doing all this without breaking federal anti-trust law). This is folly, of course. Even MIT…
Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The…
From Open Access News:. 1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible. 2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by…
Text-message shorthand conventions arose from the users, because the need to type quickly on a tiny keyboard was greater than the need to spell correctly and preserve the subtleties of punctuation. But as users find more ways to hash and remix their social networking, a new set of technical needs may give rise to new…
While scanning the coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I found this interesting editorial, which questions the depiction of the student protesters as pro-democracy. The truth is that the students in the square had only the haziest understanding of western-style democracy. To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses…
The social web is the new walled garden: the photos we upload to Facebook, the 140-character messages we post to Twitter, and all of this other social activity is more or less locked away in those services. A friend cannot reply to your Twitter post without registering an account, and you are basically locked out…
The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped “blocks” fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls – making a line into a column, say – or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill…
In Montfort and Bogost’s case study platform studies also suggest a useful approach to media histories. Their work on the Atari VCS focuses on the role of creative individuals in the process of game development for the platform, and the book earmarks several important moments in videogame history. These moments are traced back to the…
To protect itself from millions of dollars worth of taxes, Proctor & Gamble UK tried to defend a lower court’s ruling that a Pringle is not a potato chip. At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one — but when?– Adam Cohen,…
A good overview of a genre I’ve been following from the beginning. I sometimes wonder why references to political cartoons aren’t more common in discussions of games about current events. At any rate, the article begins by mentioning the importance of Flash, the 9/11 attacks, and Gonzalo Frasca’s thought-provoking response, September 12th. Water Cooler Games,…
This sort of thing makes me very unhappy… without my permission, Microsoft pushes out an add-on for a competitor’s product. The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started…
Nearly a century after she was rescued from the decks of the sinking Titanic, the last remaining survivor of the disaster has died, aged 97. Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known as Millvina, died today at the nursing home near Southampton where her care had been subsidised by Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet — stars of…