Clive Thompson, from Wired: I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor. Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone…
Scott McLemee writes about an intellectual brownout that came to him during a party, when he was asked to comment on a book he knew well. People who consume two or three books a month, for example, might be less susceptible to moments of total overload than those who read two or three a week.…
Patti Dobranski, Tribune-Review “The secret state police were at the door. They came to arrest my father. On Nov. 9, at 8:30 p.m., I lost my German citizenship. I said ‘Let’s get out of this hellish country.’ I just wanted to go somewhere else.” But Nov. 9, 1938, was more than Blaustein’s personal hell. It…
In The Escapist, Tom Rhodes takes a stab at W.B. Yeats/Gordon Freeman slash crit. It’s more of a nice try than a slam dunk; yes, it’s possible to make these connections, and the insights are, well, insightful… but what the article lacks is an argument for why this interpretation is necessary, why it offers a…
On Grand Text Auto, Andrew Stern writes a good post about the distinction between character-driven games and purely linear narrative (which makes for a poor gaming experience). No one can disagree that games should be “player-driven”, another way of saying games with high agency. I take a purist’s view on this; I quickly lose interest…
There’s not a whole lot more to this short article from the Press Gazette, but it’s another sign of Google’s power: Google is “hugely dangerous” and is one of the major preoccupations of News Corp, according to the editor-in-chief of Times Online. Anne Spackman, speaking as part of a panel about the future of newspapers…
Cringely Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on “childcare” then later on “insurance” they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all. There are other issues…
From Inside Higher Ed: An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogs A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs Similar:College bookstores adapting to changing times with additional servicesIn the corner of the Seton Hill Universi…AcademiaHeart of Stone (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 14) Odo tries to keep Kira's spi…Rewatching ST:DS9 In a runabout, Kira…CultureDesiderata (Nerdy Inspiration)This is…
Spit & Polish: When this game was first released in 1880 it was so hugely popular in taverns and inns that the bank of England was forced to mint more threepenny bits to keep up with demand. Gotta love the mustaches and bowler hats. Similar:Today's 10 sq cm of #steampunk control panel went pretty fast.…
Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats.…
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic: Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween’s big costume show? Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder? Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren’t the crop’s cream? Wherefore do they, might they go?…
Jessica Mintz writes of University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom’s Wikipedia assignment: “I would find these things on Wikipedia,” she said, and would think, “Gosh, this is awfully thin here. I wonder if my students could fill this in?” Wikipedia has been vilified as a petri dish for misinformation, and the variable accuracy of its…
Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MA program. Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it’s often the little things that matter most. Take his short-short piece “Nightmare Job #3,” which begins…
…did they steal candy from me while I wasn’t looking, and stuff the empty wrappers into their pockets? If they did, they certainly didn’t confess on their blogs. Similar:Watching Livestreamed Prime Stage Theatre's "Miracle in Rwanda"A very moving performance. So many chara…DramaNASA Communicates with Ailing Voyager 1 SpacecraftI remember staying up well past my bedti…Current_EventsMy…
Next Generation: “The game begins with Bart wanting to play a game called Grand Theft Scratchy. Of course this is a parody of Grand Theft Auto. And Marge immediately takes it away from him. She tries to clean up the town and stop the game from being distributed in Springfield because Marge is against video…
The New York Times has published more details about Google’s plans to compete with Facebook: On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and…
In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles. The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it’s mostly made up images… I didn’t find any text that I could copy…
Ear Studio: Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to…
Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands. The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international…
Structure, Sign, and Play An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida “There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be…