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:Me waiting for students to drop by during office hours. AcademiaWhat It Takes To Change Your Brain's Patterns After Age 25Most of our brain’s patterns are solidif…HealthHow The Ballpoint Pen Killed CursiveIn Death of…
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:Stephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.Talk nerdy to me. You’re my…
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:Dragging Myself to a New Skill Level with Blender 3DWorking on some very complex stuff in Bl…AestheticsAn overnight traffic spike on an older online handout prompted me to touch it up. #techwri… Those are the stats for my entir…AcademiaNo one’s ready…
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:"We Need to Be More Vigilant With What We Trust From the Internet." –Fake PresidentFrom Buzzfeed: Sitting before the…
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…
AP: A baby Jesus statue here is getting a Global Positioning System for Christmas. The statue, part of a nativity scene, will be equipped with the device after the previous statue went missing, even though it had been bolted down. “I don’t anticipate this will ever happen again,” said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display,…