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:Beowimp (spoof I wrote for my high school lit magazine c. 1985)I got an email this morning…
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…
“New Media Projects” introduces students [all English majors in this section, though it’s not restricted as such] to Inform 7, The Games Factory 2, Flash, Blender 3D, and Hammer. All students completed short projects in each medium, and selected tools to use for a midterm and a final project. Students kept a development journal on…
Just as you can’t be too rich or too thin, I’d always thought, so you can’t have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife – but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in…
—Advent Calendar 2006 (Leslie Harpold) A cute Advent calendar. Similar:“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d… Culturexkcd: Pathogen ResistanceThis is just an excerpt. Read the whole …AmusingAnother section of #steampunk control panel. #neovictorian #design #aesthetics #blender3d …AestheticsEnjoying my "Dystopia in American Literature"…
Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children. Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested for allegedly bringing in a loaded gun. The boy showed the gun to another student, and word soon trickled to a teacher and then a security officer,…