The NY Times reports that Six Apart is selling LiveJournal. The owner of LiveJournal, a blogging and social-networking site, agreed yesterday to sell the company to SUP, a Russian online media company, in the latest example of deal-making in the social-networking sector. Similar:Lighten Up (an illustrator explores the racial politics of skin color in comics)Lighten…
Inside Higher Ed offers short stories on two student papers that are struggling to keep their administrations at bay: At Oklahoma State University, the editors of the Daily O’Collegian, the more than 80-year-old campus newspaper, have for several weeks refused to let the articles they write for the print publication appear on ocolly.com, the newspaper’s…
I must have missed this video when I was sick earlier this semester… Michael Wesch at Kansas State University: … the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will…
While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic. Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2…
NY Times: On one hand, as children we’re taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison’s famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children’s museums: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” On the other hand, good grades are…
Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father’s funeral this morning. I am the twinkle in your eyes, Eternal laughter sparkling, Strong and silent, My father. Similar:Daughter doing a thing. Interviewing the Pittsburgh Dance Council’s Randall Miller for Bur… AcademiaHasbro removes embedded typeface from My Little…
Jeremy Douglass has published a Creative Commons dissertation on interactive fiction. I recently brought a printout into my “Writing about Literature” class in order to help my undergrads (English majors, some of whom want to be professional writers or literature professors) see their homework assignments as points on a scale that includes books and beyond.…
Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own “Just Say No to Wikipedia” signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia’s…
Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon’s Kindle. Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It’s surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it…
Guardian (UK): Police forces should issue comical caricatures of the criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people’s memories. Similar:Emily Short's advice on writing great game protagonistsAt GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction g…CybercultureAuthor Says a Whole Culture—Not a Single…
The article has a great illustration — a defenestrated couch on the ground outside the psych building. Patricia Cohen, NYT. For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor’s theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching. But…
This story brings Facebook shaming to another level. It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in…
Uh, no, it doesn’t. Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida. The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people…
In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for some time. It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something…
On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn’t translate into more money for game companies. When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their…
Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal): Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content – comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports – and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content…
Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org: “I was at The Washington Post earlier today,” Brokaw said. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic…
In 2000, Salon posted an amusing spoof of Ginsberg’s Howl. I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal, dragging themselves through the Cappuccino streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option fix, HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection to that undiscovered e-commerce…
An excerpt from a story about The Laptop Club, a group of kids who crafted their own laptops from construction paper. Name: Mandy Age: 8 How often do you use a computer? Five times a week. What do you like to do when you’re using a computer? Play games and write stories and poems. What…
While the second-most-common rating that Amazon customers have given this product is five stars, some 40% have given the Kindle one star. The vast majority have not purchased the product, but are simply warning other would-be customers about bad experiences with previous e-book purchases, including e-books purchased from Amazon. I still want one… Similar:Meme alleging…