Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I…
Great little feature from the Chronicle Here are some of the things you learn when you participate in a Milton marathon: Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that…
It’s pretty cool to see a Chronicle of Higher Education blog covering text games: It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out…
I’m willing to give the new Star Trek a chance. I loved Babylon 5 during its initial run, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of a re-imagined Trek. Similar:Academic study concludes that teaching kids to touch-type can make them better writersImproving students’ handwriting skill di…EducationWriting a news story calls on different skills than writing a…
[G]ames are inherently about exploration, in the abstract sense of discovering strategies and options, seeing how rules interact and so on. And yes, you can summon screenshots of Warhammer halls bigger than the Taj Mahal, or mountain vistas in Lord of the Rings Onlinethe Other: societies wholly different from mine, cultures built on assumptions so…
Wired reviews Mirror’s Edge When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you’re vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you’re looking at your…
The votes have been tabulated, and we have our winners! Congratulations to the top three games, Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies, as well as to all authors for entering. And a big note of thanks to everyone who judged the games. The full results are available below. (IF Comp 08) See the results page. Similar:Busy…
Motringate? Mommygate? An ad on the Motrin home page, aimed at moms who carry their babies in slings, has upset hordes of mom-bloggers who use the social networking service Twitter. The best analysis I’ve seen so far is by Joyce Schwartz (known for coming up with the idea of putting missing kids on milk cartons),…
Two positions. Assistant Professor of Composition Institution: Seton Hill University Location: Greensburg, PA Category: Faculty – Liberal Arts – English and Literature Posted: 11/10/2008 Application Due: Open Until Filled Type: Full Time Seton Hill University invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in Composition, beginning fall, 2009. The faculty member will teach first-year composition courses,…
A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as “very happy” spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research. Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time use studies and…
Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Novels should be required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does,” said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty…
I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting. This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop. Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old…
On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938, Fritz Ottenheimer was awakened by an explosion that shook his bed. Ottenheimer was just 13 then — a boy living in Konstanz, Germany. And he was a Jew. — Jennifer Reeger, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Last night, my son and I attended Seton Hill’s Kristallnacht memorial service. It’s generally a…
Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. | Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.| Phoenix, which landed on the planet’s northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold…
A 1960s tape recorder the size of a household fridge could be the key to unlocking valuable information from NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon. An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science’s…
So what exactly are the barriers of entry for great thinkers (or groups of thinkers) to leave their mark on games? What must happen for games — or interactive entertainment, if you will, to mature as a medium? While no one knows the answer to this question, many people (and companies) have stepped up to…
Professor Philip Busse blogs about his adventures stealing political signs. Sure, I understand that stealing a sign will not change anyone’s mind, and, most likely, will only embolden McCain supporters’ disdain for liberals. Even so, yanking out the signs and running like a scared rabbit back to my idling car was one of the single-most…
Stark, unadorned writing. No melodramatic flourishes or sentiment. Just the truth. Powerful. Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I’m meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors.…
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The web today is not the same as it was during the last presidential election. Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations…