This is fairly recent news, and at the moment I only see press releases and mission statements, and bloggers. So I’m still not sure what to make of this, but it’s definitely something to watch: an elementary school with a curriculum built from the ground up on the procedural principles of gaming. Out of school…
I’ve had a recurring dream since I was a teenager, somehow riding along behind my old car — it’s always the car I’ve most recently traded in or otherwise lost — with a remote control in my hand. I’m controlling my car, which keeps rushing ahead of me, eventually disappearing around the corner where I…
What does my ten-year-old son think he has learned from playing Civilization 3? Similar:Major benefits for students who attend live theater, study findsI wonder what additional measurable bene…CultureMy Ouya arrived.My Ouya arrived — a Kickstarter-funded …CybercultureSo this is Pi DayMy wife says she bought the pies intendi…AmusingI wish I could credit the designer. This is…
Disturbing, yet cool. Biotele.com A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name)…
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Just as I spent the afternoon of 9/11/2001 making a web page, because it helped occupy my mind, I’m spending a few minutes while my daughter is otherwise occupied, observing the phrasing of the WTAE-TV news article: A Seton Hill University student is dead following a police investigation off campus in Greensburg early Sunday morning. …
Interactive Fiction Writing Month (Feb 15 – March 15) This is the blag for Interactive Fiction Month 2009, an attempt to lure beginners into learning Inform through a series of easy tasks with concrete deadlines, and to promote discourse on game design in general. Similar:No interior yet. Getting there. Gotta start somewhere. Low-poly background detail…
I bugged out of work a few hours early today so I could meet up with the family for a matinee showing of Coraline. The local theater had a rather defensive home-grown sign explaining that the extra $2.50 they were charging per ticket pays for the cost of renting the 3D projection equipment from Disney.…
I didn’t buy a personal Kindle — the price was too steep. But I did ask our library to buy one, and I have been experimenting with reading PDFs on my new tablet PC. So I was interested when I first heard the hype surrounding what may be Amazon’s announcement of the next version of…
If you have a Facebook account, you’re probably familiar with the “25 Things About Me” meme. Mike McPhaden unearthed “Wm. Shakespeare’s Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me,” of which the best (IMHO) is the following: 14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I…
Keats can keep his urn with its leaf-fring’d legend. I’ve got a much better slice-of-life to share. When I called my parents tonight, my father reminded me of an exchange he had with my daughter when she was about four. My Daughter (to her grandfather): This is my teddy bear. My Father (to his granddaughter):…
News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire: This fall, the English department, the publication’s then “administrative home,” voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in “fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community…
My brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, is a Steelers fan. He asked for a keepsake issue of the local paper, so I sent out an e-mail to my colleagues to beg for their used copies. The truth is, I wouldn’t even take a free subscription to the print edition, since it would mean more junk piling…
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A nifty little primer, compiled by Nate Piekos. CROSSBAR I This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just…
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
Cantina The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night. A host of unsavory-looking…
Part of a list of jokes the president told at the Alfalfa Club Dinner. This set made me laugh. “In just the first few weeks, I’ve had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry. “I finally agreed to limit the number of people…
As I was putting my 10-year-old son to bed tonight, as usual we had a long, free-ranging, unrushed conversation. Somehow I mentioned the missing Doctor Who tapes. Peter got very thoughtful. “If I had a time machine, I could go back to the moment those tapes disappeared. And I could bring them forward in time,…
In my Literary Criticism class, next week we’ll be looking at The Yellow Wallpaper — most of us probably for the umpteenth time. Here’s a comment that just appeared on the course website, that reminds me why I spend six hours straight re-configuring a server from scratch because it got infected with a virus 12…