But wait, you might ask, don’t people accidentally repeat each other’s sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens. It: Rejected–too many hits to count It seems: 11,160,000 matches It seems to:…
After learning a bit about IF and playing a few games, you might think to yourself: hey, I could do this! And the best part is: you’re right. The modern IF scene is so vibrant largely because it’s quite possible for a single author to build a game from start to finish. It’s easy for…
—Choose Your Own Adventure with bees, lasers, zombies, robots, hot scientists… No time to check this one out… blogging it for later. Similar:Beautiful News Writing: "Rampaging rooster attacks girl."I don’t want to make light of a little g…AestheticsHow Literature Became Word Perfect There can be no true distinction drawn …CybercultureHow Poetry Helps You Improve Your…
Consider their treatment of Mr. Spock. Almost every episode, Dr. McCoy heckles him over his logic and even uses “green-blooded” as part of his threats. Captain Kirk, ostensibly Spock’s greatest friend, takes any opportunity he can to point out problems logic causes, and on more than one occasion makes Spock the butt of race-based jokes…
Electronic text in general is a volatile medium, where conventions often emerge and change before they can be translated successfully into print. Further, IF in particular has attracted only sporadic academic attention. Therefore, this bibliography includes useful information that can be gleaned from non-academic sources, including popular periodicals, fan tributes, and authors’ manifestos. Excellent theory,…
Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there’s more of it, because anybody can chip in. There’s more “choice”–and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the “MSM,” for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism. The blogs are not as significant as…
And “Charlotte’s Web” is a sneakily sophisticated fable. White certainly appreciated the joys of life on the farm (while evading some of its bloodier aspects), but the book is really about the benevolent, even miraculous power of celebrity. It is, most simply, the story of a spider, Charlotte A. Cavitica, who saves the life of…
“Is There A Santa Claus?” was published 21 September 1897, more than three months before the Christmas holiday. It was placed in the third of three columns of editorials that day, subordinate to seven other commentaries on such matters as “British Ships in American Waters,” ambiguity in Connecticut’s election law, and features of the chainless…
“Here are my keys, Dr. Jerz. I think I will miss these most of all. Thank you for everything that doesn’t fit in an envelope. Thank you for being my teacher, and friend.” —Amanda CochranHere are my keys, Dr. Jerz (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) This was a difficult good-bye. I’ve gotten to know many fantastic students here…
We need a return to the core values of social responsibility. We must unite our voices and demand that society’s wrongs be righted, before our priorities as a people are forgotten forever. I speak of nothing less than the need for justice, and I demand justice-themed TV action-adventure dramas–not two seasons from now, not three…
There are remarkable parallels between “The Canterbury Tales” and modern rap, Brinkman said at Wellesley College during a recent stop on his tour of high schools and colleges across the eastern United States and Puerto Rico. “Chaucer and rap are both performance-based and they’re both battles of words where your proficiency gets you by,” said…
The recent conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran should be viewed by the world as exactly what it was: nothing more than a propaganda effort by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to bolster his own political agenda and image as someone willing — even if ignorantly — to confront the United States and Israel. While…
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for instance, Disney was inundated with letters from outraged parents who felt that Snow White’s flight through the woods or Pinocchio’s excursion on Pleasure Island or the devil in “Fantasia” or Bambi’s mother’s death were all too real and terrifying and hardly a gloss. Disney would typically respond…
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the…
“I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid.” —Cover Letters from Hell (Killian Advertising) That is… laid off. Blogging this to save it for a professional development unit in “Intro to Literary Study” next term. Similar:A Box With A Hidden Video Camera Documents Journey Through The MailAs a big fan of Richard…
In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination…
Underneath the veneer of “natural language,” Inform 7 actually has a pretty rigorous syntax, and it can be very picky about how you word certain kinds of phrases. But then there are other areas where the syntax is very loose, and it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that you can write your game in…
Our story about the the most popular Halloween costumes of the season, first published Oct. 14, misidentified the super-speedy The Flash and Boy Wonder superhero Robin as Marvel comics characters. In fact, they are DC Comics superheroes. We regret this error; it is against Bankrate’s policy, and just plain unwise, to cause offense to superhumans…
“Vote with Your Feet” Discusison I was reading a forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a poster asked for tips on teaching long night classes. I came across a reference to a “‘vote with your feet’ discussion.” I’d never heard the term before, but I gather it means you say “Everyone who…
The Office had nothing around it but the two gas stations and a very busy road. It wasn’t leaning against anything, wasn’t under an overpass or covered with stickers from a nearby venue. It was its own thing, a classy, self-contained room that a young fellow spent his youth wiling away the hours in, trying…