Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character. The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data. (BBC) Thanks for the link, Robert. Similar:The Game (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season…
My six-year-old daughter is in the next room, playing with her hand-made paper dolls. A few minutes ago, I heard her tones get a little deeper, and as I listened, I heard, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.” Then I heard the rustle of another paper doll, and my daughter said, again in…
Jim Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I’ve been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I’ve been introducing my students to this term… 6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMESAnyone out there play…
Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over. Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most…
My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I’ve already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration. Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to…
I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo’s “Top Questions” is “What happened to my profile?” but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful “Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!” page, which does not actually answer the question. Another question is “What happened to my alias profile?“,…
A few weeks ago, my editors were bummed when I pointed out that an unusually large number of typos had slipped through the proofreading net and popped up in the headlines. For the most recent issue, the headlines were fine, but I found three typos in bylines. So the student paper isn’t perfect. Even Homer…
Via Karissa: Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim’s Facebook page. On that page was a picture of her at a fancy dress party. She was smiling. Here are some of the lawyer’s touching words in describing the victim: “What we have is a person who has post traumatic…
Teaching: Midterm Grades (w00t!) LA100 (14 Oct) EL200 (16 Oct) EL236 (16 Oct) EL405 (16 Oct) Administration/Advising Submit two recommendations (Oct 15) Program Review Executive Summary (Draft Oct 17; awaiting reviews) Advising Grids Internal proposal for a summer outreach project Research Submit co-authored article (been sitting on it for months) Finish article for anthology (probably…
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html I’d like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don’t think it’s possible. I’d never heard of the “Argument Slide” before. The “concept visualization” cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students. I’m taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at…
During play, the screen background was solid black with a white border, with one color line representing each player. We displayed the game score in a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen. It wasn’t the most graphically advanced program, but it was simple and fun. It looked something like this: […] “Both the…
A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn’t recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and…
Men at fortyLearn to close softlyThe doors to rooms they will not beComing back to. At rest on a stair landing,They feel it movingBeneath them now like the deck of a ship,Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrorsThey rediscoverThe face of the boy as he practises tyingHis father’s tie there in secret And…
You already know a different way of looking at the familiar. Similar:How to fix the internet:Â If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond th… A teenager in Indonesia may not see …CyberculturePittsburgh Post-Gazette reducing print edition to 2 days a week; cites plan to go all digi… The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is…
Thanks to Nick Montfort for posting this gem: Posted by Stephen Totilo on 10/8/08 at 12:00 pm. “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams may not have have felt like explaining the smoke monster to MTV News movies reporter Josh Horowitz during an interview taped a few feet from my desk last week. But he both offered to…
Seton Hill recently won a multimillion dollar instruction technology grant, part of which includes funding for a new technology specialist (which will become a permanent job when the grant ends). In helping to write the job notice, I drafted the “you-attitude” paragraphs, with the references to Bioshock and lolcats. Our grant will fund the creation…
I’m saving this for the next time I talk to my journalism students about surveys. Language Log. Do you think surveys asking for people’s opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like “43% of employees believe managers may…
In a Ph.D. thesis called “The Paradox of the Guided User,” a dutch researcher examined the productivity of users who were dependent on computers, and users who had a pen-and-paper alternative. The article doesn’t link to the full dissertation, so it’s risky to extrapolate beyond the quotes in the article, so I’ll just repeat a…
That’s the story that’s been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books.…
My provost just sent some of my colleagues a link to this article on games and literacy: But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up…