Of course it’s not scientific, but it’s fun. Virgil Griffith: Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.…
Lauren Collins (The New Yorker) Teen-age identities mutate so quickly online, and can be masked so easily, that by the morning after Megan was pronounced dead Josh Evans had vanished from MySpace. It wasn’t until a month after her death that a neighbor named Michele Mulford told the Meiers that Curt and Lori Drew, who…
Via Language Log: It is a small but not insignificant recent change in written English that in Britain the newspapers have started spelling acronyms in lower case with capital initial instead of all in caps. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association and the the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are not UCEA and…
Interesting historical anecdote of an early attempt to make an artistic statement with photography, using visual elements that were acceptable in painting, but considered controversial in photography: Rejlander’s “Two Ways of Life.” (via Metafilter). Useful, perhaps, as a point of comparison for what happens when video games cross the line, and attempt to make serious,…
When steampunk was speculative fiction, not charmingly retro… Edgar Allan Poe pulbished this mock news story in the New York Sun. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty — without any great apparent danger — with thorough control of the machine — and in the inconceivably brief period…
Jeffrey R. Young (Chronicle): The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise…. “We are a peer-review press–we’re always going to want to have an honest…
On Jan 21, 3:47 pm, Conrad <conradc…@gmail.com> wrote:> I’m supposed to not know what direction I can walk in?> > This is fun? Play Adventure it to appreciate the big jump from Hunt the Wumpus and mainframe Trek. Play it, not merely seeking conformation for your own definition of “fun,” but rather to understand…
Robots gloating, and occasionally philosophizing, over their decision to destroy the humans. Love the binary solo. The guy on the left does an excellent imitation of a standard PC speech synthesizer voice. Overall, this is a great send-up of the “arrogant humans create robots who turn on them” meme (which was first widely spread by…
Michael Bracken offers practical tips to new writers. Later this week I’ll begin teaching Seton Hill’s “Intro to Literary Study” class again… it’s often the first class in which the English majors get a taste of what it means to write fiction for a college-level class. That means I emphasize basic stuff such as how…
Leigh Alexander tries to quit gaming for a week. How long does she last? What I did learn – and this was the primary aim – was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up…
Nick Tate had a rather thankless role in the cult British science-fiction show Space:1999. Note how the cheerful Disney guy, Mark Elliott, is skipping down the sidewalk at the end. Similar:Star Wars: TIE Fighter 20th Anniversary RetrospectiveIn the Star Wars films, the empire is ev…CybercultureThe Rise of Curiosity JournalismKatz and his kindred might just as…
New York Times:Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005…
On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld — a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined “winning” outcome. A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player…
New York Times: (the NYT Peramalink generator seems to be down.) “If I can walk into the office of a member of Congress and tell them we have 20,000 voters in their state who are already signed up to write letters and act based on game-related issues that concern them, that’s powerful,” he said. The…
The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word “quizzam,” which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect. That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual “Blog in Blank…
C|Net: Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new…
Times Online: On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton’s sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he…
FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies,…
From the Chronicle: On an afternoon this fall, nearly all of the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in concentration — some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others strumming along with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork. But the goal of the lab is very much college-related. It is to…
An opinion published in the Robert Morris University student newspaper: The purpose of a university newspaper is not to depict students or the school in a negative light, but to talk about positive stories, current events, campus activities etc. Now imagine a high school kid looking to come to RMU, a parent wishing to send…