A former Infocom beta-tester re-discovers interactive fiction (and enters the interactive fiction competition) Back then in the mid-80s, the only (decent) interactive fiction was being produced by Infocom, the almost legendary, and now defunct, software company formed by a bunch of MIT grads. After cutting my teeth on the Zork series, Enchanter, Infidel, and Witness…
I enjoy steampunk, a cultural aesthetic which celebrates what both ordinary and extraordinary things might look like, had technology progressed along the lines that Jules Verne and his contemporaries imagined. As a literary subgenre, it imagines that the immeasurable power of steam has opened the skies, leading legions of top-hatted gentlemen-explorers and parasol-wielding adventuresses to…
It’s hot here in Sacramento. I got lost wandering the UC-Davis campus looking for the Computers & Writing registration table. I discovered lots of bike paths — several of them more than once. I stumbled upon a building with people whom I recognize from various conferences. There was a nice snack table. I had helped…
I’m caching up after the end-of-term grading crunch, spending a few weeks taking care of my wife (she had a minor surgery), and family trip for my nephew’s baptism. I just got back from the train station about a half hour ahead of some huge thunderstorms, and now I’m unable to sleep because I’m heading…
Charles Crowell writes a valentine to Amazon’s e-reader as a cost-saving tool for cash-strapped college students: If we extrapolate these savings from these two courses over a two-semester, ten-course academic year, we could expect an average savings of $245.05. That number, of course, would vary according to the cost of the respective textbooks, their number,…
An interesting development from the UK: In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”. The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a…
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:Leftovers from the food my colleagues brought in to bribe/reward those few students who sh… Leftovers from the…
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 University 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:Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviewsAn amazing story of hope and dignity. T…BooksThe Outsiders Closing after Friday Night's ShowCurrent_EventsText Games…
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…