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…
From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) Billed as a “social-network monitoring service” and marketed exclusively to college athletics departments, YouDiligence was on display at a trade show here during the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual convention. The program is designed to conduct real-time searches of Facebook and MySpace for up to 500 objectionable…
Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article. Common threshold structures of the world – closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals – often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the…
One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price. Similar:Richard Halloran / Owns Home Computer.“Engineers now predict the day will come…AmusingPut up the Hoop Sooner: 10 lessons of parenting from one wise guy who's done doing the dad…Earlier today, we dropped our daughter…
Excellent three-part post from Lisa Spiro. People, this is the kind of thing Vannevar Bush imagined scholars would do when he dreamed up the Memex — saving each other time by sharing annotated lists. This blog has landed on my RSS list. Part 1 and Part 2 are up; I’ll add the link to Part…
A student in my Video Game Culture and Theory course, when writing a reaction to playing Andrew Plotkin’s Shade, referred to a casual gaming genre that was new to me, the point-and-click “escape the room” game. The Wikipeidia entry for Escape the Room mentioned a key-retrieval puzzle from Zork, but I thought that passage had…
Language Log quotes a recent paper: In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed…
It’s always hard for the kids to make the transition to “Daddy is working” when, from their perspective, it looks like I’m just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time. When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just…
I don’t remember where I was when I saw a link to Cursor*10. I thought “Cooperate by oneself” was a good example of “All your base are belong to us” English, but it actually makes sense. It’s like time travel. Very cool. Similar:Home Soil (TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 17)The concept was good, and…
Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain’s training grounds for real-world emergencies. The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost…
I’m putting the final touches on materials for my Video Game Culture and Theory course, which starts tomorrow. But earlier today I took a break so that the family could say goodbye to my Christmas break by catching a movie. We saw The Water Horse, which is a great family film (in that the kids…
John Hockenberry, a former NBC journalist who now works at MIT, reflects on what he says is the increasing irrelevance of TV journalism. Some of my most promising “New Media Journalism” students are interested in a broadcast journalism career, taking on internships and entering graduate school, and they all know why I prefer to get…
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Philip Kennicott (Washington Post) reflects on what we might learn about ourselves when we notice that the photographer who snapped the iconic image of a young girl crying in terror after a napalm attack in Viet Nam 35 years ago also snapped the iconic image of Paris HIlton weeping in the back seat of a…
In Reason, David Harsanyi reviews The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. “Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?” he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. “Can a car mechanic have…
1up: Ten years ago, Westwood released its point-and-click adventure game adaptation of Blade Runner. Blade Runner was, if nothing else, a towering achievement in terms of evoking the original film’s memorable aesthetic. The game’s mo-cap sprites moved against dim, smoky noir backdrops; every exterior shot felt exhilaratingly accurate, while interior locations were ominous and claustrophobic.…
Video games didn’t start with Pac-Man (1980), Space Invaders (1978), or Pong (1972). Similar:Stuffed planet Venus, made for me by my dear mother, around 1974.AestheticsDon't Like Hamlet? Now's Your Chance To Rewrite It”It’s not really fair to say, ‘Look at t…CultureClickbait Tactics Drive the Writing of Headlines on ABC NewsI probably should not be…
Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game. Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in…
The new clip improves on last night’s version, I’ve added blinking eyes, improved the nose glowing effect, and moved one of the legs a bit. Update: Here’s the file if you’d like to use it. Reindeer.blend Similar:Lighting makes a difference. The officers' pub from the interplanetary cruiser #steampunk … AestheticsBBC News – TS Eliot's widow…
I’ve been using Blender3D for about two years now. Here’s a little Christmas animation I whipped up. That’s supposed to be sparkly glowy things coming from his shiny nose, but it looks more like a puff of breath. I’m pleased with the head motions. I’ve got the eyes rigged up so they can blink and…