I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious. Absolutely…
This came up in my feed reader today. Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming. There’s a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent…
Tonight I was reading my 10-year-old son a chapter in Beorn the Proud, a youth historical fiction that describes the relationship between a 9th-century Irish girl taken as a slave by the son of a Viking king. The heroine, Ness, spits out angry prophecies and pretty much gives the Vikings a piece of her mind…
Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral. It is like playing a giant game of telephone. Accurate (The Guardian): Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW. Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the…
Owens’s exploits might have been lost to the mists of time if not for an undergraduate student named Jane Browning, who stumbled on the story in a cafe in Gloucester County, Virginia, and tracked down the man behind the legend. You can read more about Owens in his Wikipedia entry and on Ms. Browning’s blog,…
The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by…
Sad news for Trek fans. Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and the actress who portrayed Nurse Chapel on the original science-fiction television series, died Thursday of leukemia, according to the family. —NBC For more, see her biography on Wikipedia. Similar:Allegiance (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 18) Picard plays 'Escape…
For the first time this year, I asked my school to buy me a laptop (a Dell Latitude XT, my first-ever tablet computer). I also asked for a new monitor, and it’s a beauty. I’m pretty pleased with my setup. Of course, it’s fun to set up your office when you don’t have any immediate…
An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public. RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is “A…
Sad news from the MLA, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language…
Crapwrap, for a personal touch. Bored of perfectly folded paper and exquisitely tied ribbon? Fancy adding a more ‘personal’ touch this year? Then why not have your Christmas presents CrapWrapped™ at Firebox. This exclusive, uniquely shoddy gift wrapping option involves us wrapping your pressies in a slapdash fashion. Similar:The chief engineer does not know where…
The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News (both owned by the same corporation) have announced another nail in the coffin of print journalism. Home delivery will be available on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Subscribers will have access to an electronic “e-edition” seven days a week as part of their subscription. This “e-edition” allows you…
That didn’t take long. BoingBoing assembles a collection of digital interpretations of the shoe-tossing incident. Similar:The College Fear FactorWhat happens in a literature discussion …AcademiaThe Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pagerIn the halls of power at Amazon, busy ex…BusinessThe Evolution of 'Star Trek'(Infographic) | Space.comThe first 45 years of Star Trek (in an a…DesignReading Literature on…
We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary…
Tropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. The site’s name is misleading… while there are plenty of TV tropes, you’ll also find examples from journalism, comics, video games, etc. From the “air vent escape” to “loser archetypes” to the…
For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into…
Fascinating follow-up to Wednesday’s story about the Linux advocate who posted a bitter diatrabe lamenting the ignorance of a teacher who confiscated a student’s Linux disks and wrote a heartfelt (if misguided) letter insisting that giving away software must be illegal. “Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?” I didn’t even have…
After a long anecdote about how hard it is to predict the pro playing ability of college quarterbacks, this New Yorker article focuses on details that characterize effective teachers. While I was initially bored by the sports introduction, I ended up being fascinated by the play-by-play commentary of scenes from the classroom. Another teacher walked…
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has cooperated with a game developer to produce a Second Life memorial to Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass,” a series of state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots in 1938). I haven’t visited the site yet, but it looks like there’s a deliberate attempt to distance the player from the experience, by casting the…
That may be the best headline I’ve seen on all the coverage related to the KFC teen girls sink bath MySpace photo story, but note that the <title> of the page is the more informative “KFC Bath Prank: Three Girls Fired From California KFC After Bathing In Restaurant Sinks.” The photos themselves are silly, rather…