The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work. Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for…
I’m sitting in the back of a meeting where the speaker has spent 40 minutes tracking down a technical glitch interrupting his presentation. Happily, the room has wireless access… Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (aka Rogue), created in the early 1980s[1] by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, is an intriguing game for many reasons.…
The U.S. government could provide tax breaks for newspapers or allow them to operate as nonprofits to help the struggling business survive, Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday. — Reuters Similar:CNN's Chris Cillizza on Trump's definition of "Fake News"Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’…CultureThis is what the techbros are excited about? Really?Some 2300 years ago in…
A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem. Today I Die Similar:Pac-Man”The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man a…DesignLife in Code and Software (Open Humanities Press)This book explores the relationship betw…AcademiaShowing vs. Telling (Example: "I like to win.")I just wrote these examples on a student…AestheticsGoogling Is for Old People.…
His ear was severed by a sword wielded by his friend, the painter, Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art. Gauguin lied about the incident and fled, two German art historians now believe. Van Gogh covered up to protect his friend and was placed in…
Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7. Coding is art, art is code. As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming…
“We’re going to become a 24-hour, local news-gathering media company so we can more effectively gather content and distribute it among our different platforms: print, online and mobile,” [Baltimore Sun] spokeswoman Renee Mutchnik said. — Washington Times Reporters are reporting on how other news organizations are reacting to changes in the field of journalism. It’s…
Unicorns are much more fun when they move. It took about two minutes for my daughter to do the drawing, about an hour and a half to make the model (while my daughter played at my feet), and another two hours to make the animation (long after she was in bed). Similar:How journalists should handle racist words, images…
Yes, that’s right, I’ve quit Facebook. After being a member for over three years–since its expansion to all colleges and universities in September 2005–I decided to deactivate my account. Why would I do such a thing? Hmph, funny you should ask. —Karissa Kilgore When I finally got around to joining Facebook about a year ago,…
Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB) When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007, for several weeks I could do little more than lie on the futon and worry about the work I was missing. During the first week or so, when I still imagined it was just the…
This article from NCTE comes at a good time for me, since I’m scheduled to teach a “Writing about Literature” class in the fall. It’s a PDF (booo!). Of all types of writing, writing about literature may seem the least practical. Who apart from scholars and English majors analyzes poetry after the age of 18? Even book…
The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton. The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be…
Best. Comment. Ever. while([fh offsetInFile]+12<=imageoffs) { uint32 sign=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 marker=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 chunklen=[fh readUInt32BE]; off_t nextchunk=[fh offsetInFile]+((chunklen+3)&~3); // At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such…
Via this Time Magazine article, “How Not to be Hated on Facebook.” Similar:Crazy-looking keyboards that never caught on As the typewriter become popular, it w…AestheticsNew NASA Astronaut Wrote a Limerick to Get Hired “There was a lot of writing involved…AmusingThis is about half of the #steampunk control panel details I've created in the past m…AestheticsMinneapolis…
I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year,…
Fascinating story of a forger who tricked both the Nazis and the Allies. Sounds like a great subject for a non-fiction novel. Brought in for questioning, van Meegeren refused to give up the name of the painting’s rightful owners and was sent to prison on charges of treason, a crime punishable by death. Six weeks…
I never actually had to teach my son to read. He went smoothly from being read to, to reading along, to reading on his own. The transition for my daughter has been a little rougher, so in the last year or so, whenever Carolyn showed an interest in reading, I’ve praised her for her accomplishment.…
My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this. As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no…
In the past few hours, I’ve gotten Friend requests from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway, as well as a a shady “Narrator Man” who calls himself invisible, and is a member of The Brotherhood. My students in an American Lit class have been working on a creative interpretation of a work of literature, and several…
Most small publishers only received letters from Google last week asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them know that soon their rights will revert to Google unless they “opt out” immediately. This gives small publishers two weeks to track down their writers, many of whom spend at least half the year in…