Sometimes lawyers contact me about a case featuring URL hacking (or, as one such lawyer called it, “URL typing”). I haven’t yet been interested enough in a case to offer to do any writing or testifying for free. But I’ll summarize my position here. If a company built a private warehouse, not intended to be…
The BBC televised a 38-minute adaptation in 1938 – probably the first ever example of science fiction television. —My Science Fiction Life: The Story of Science Fiction in Britain (BBC) The excerpt is from the entry on one of my favorite plays, Rossum’s Universal Robots. Similar:Did you put enough donuts in the elevator shaft of your…
Pundits have been predicting the arrival of “interactive fiction” for decades — dating back at least to the clunky, campy Choose-Your-Own-Adventures of the 1980s. Video games ploughed some of this terrain: Some of the first, like Zork, were text-based adventures, which themselves were born out of the storytelling vibe of Dungeons and Dragons. But Hotel…
As I stared at the screen glassy-eyed, reveling in this whole new subculture I did not even know about, I stumbled across a Web site for Inform 7, http://www.inform-fiction.org, a design system for interactive fiction. Much simpler than a programming language, Inform 7 is a free, easy way for nerds like me to create their…
I forgot–on the way out Z, at w-l=Z-1, Rick Olsen, at great cost to his body, entered the tight canyon heading south with the great water sounds. It turned out to be a 1′ high 9″ wide waterfall. The canyon continues as a very bad lead ‘2’h X 1’w with a 1″ stream in the…
In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks. —Adam Martin —Elie Wiesel attacked in S.F. hotel (Examiner.com) He wasn’t hurt, but this is scary. Similar:Industriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime. The girl…
It’s just 12 hours. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) When I told a colleague that I was planning to stay at work until midnight in order to work on an abstract, her eyes bugged out. “I didn’t come into work until noon today,” I said, “so I’ll only spend 12 hours in the office.” Her look of pity…
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says. —NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet (Haaretz.com) Similar:Stephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What …AestheticsThe Sword of Kahless…
Friday the entire Field Camp crew went to the Bedquilt Entrance to remove the debris from that project. This consisted of the old gate, a steel monster that took four people to haul up the hill, the broken concrete from the former gate base and the tools used on the project. We formed a chain…
They call it ‘iPod oblivion’ — when you’re talking on a cell phone or listening to an iPod while crossing the street. “It can be a distraction you know but most times I stay alert … I’m aware of my surroundings,” iPod user John Palmer said. But Albany thinks it’s a problem, and so Senator…
The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden’s Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. —World’s Oldest Newspaper Goes Digital (Guardian) Yes, you read that right. 1645. Similar:Have 40 years of mobile phones given literature bad lines?The X Files did a good job of embracing …CybercultureSeton Hill's Griffin Holds an iPad in Front of Admin…
You currently have no blogs. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) When my students and I log into MovableType, we get the message “You currently have no blogs.” (I’ve put in a support ticket, and can’t do anything until they respond.) I’m supposed to be taking items off my to-do list… Similar:There’s Something Off About LED BulbsWhen I’m stressed,…
—Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us Fantastic content. No time to comment on it — not until my to do list is clear. But this is definitely worth a link. I will say that this is a far more optimistic depiction of The Machine than E. M. Forster had in “The Machine Stops”…
To Do List (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) No recreational blogging for me until I’m done with everything on this list. Write letter of ref for recent grad (deadline was Feb 1; turned in letter Jan 31) Finish new article on a classic work of interactive fiction (deadline was Feb 1; I’ll have it done in a few…
To gather up a few logs, it might seem like lunacy to deploy the same kind of sophisticated and pricey ROVs used to explore the Titanic or investigate 9,000-foot-deep geothermal vents along the mid-Atlantic seafloor. But do the math and Godsall’s method starts to make good financial sense. Operated by just one person, a so-called…
—Boston Ad Prank Suspects Talk About … Hair (Fox | Youtube) I sense these two fellows might be worried their 15 minutes of fame might be receding faster than my hairline. It was a nice try by the reporter who asked a question about whether the suspects felt their hair would be safe if they went…
What makes Ledonne think that a video game is the best way to try and deconstruct the tortured minds that led to Columbine? Gaming is essentially escapist entertainment and while there are plenty of violent games out there to help you get off, if that’s what gets you off, no one has ever confused a…
A front page article about the sexual assault appeared on the front page of this week‘sstudent newspaper, The Argonaut. The paper was distributed Thursday and sometime before Friday morning nearly 500 copies of the paper showed up with the article snipped out. The papers were apparently stolen, vandalized and returned to the display boxes, said…
So I admit it. I got caught up in all the hype about blogs — about their potential for communication, for creating global connections, for expressing oneself, for extending face-to-face discussions, and for building community in online environments. In most cases, my initial excitement has not borne fruit. I don’t fault my students. I am…
Quite bluntly, if your web application can’t easily be adapted as a classic text adventure, your application has serious problems on multiple levels. Applications that can’t be easily adapted likely suffer from application structure and design problems and UI dependency, to organizational politics and bad decisions. —Michael Buffington —Your Web App as a Text Adventure (ETech…