Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy

My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to…

Arcade: The Documentary

I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that’s a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I’ve been working on…

Timbuktu and SHU

Timbuktu and SHU (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Seton Hill University’s summer reading book is Timbuktu, a shaggy dog story. (Only the dog’s not so shaggy.) I stated reading while proctoring a final exam yesterday, and I finished it that evening during my son’s piano lesson. Reading the whole book (less than 200 pages) couldn’t have taken more…

Photon vs Electron

Photon vs Electron (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son at age 8 is turning out to be quite the science geek. While I was driving him home from piano lesson today, he asked me whether an electron is the smallest thing in the universe. I took at stab at it and guessed that maybe a photon is…

Doom and Demography

Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. […] Troubled as the world may be today,…

Passion for Paper

Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The…

Hello, Hobbit

In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground is a hobbit hole. “That means comfort.” —Brian Slesinsky has some fun with Inform 7…

[Graham Nelson and Emily Short discuss Inform 7]

Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well,…

A better way to prevent student cheating

Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America’s most successful people cut…

Columbine Survivor Talks About Columbine RPG

I think that ultimatley a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression. But, you do end up killing literally hundres of representations of high- schoolers. But ‘m not sure the ulitimate intention was to trivialize it. It seemed like the purpose was to expose people to what happened in a unique perspective. There are…

I’d rather have the thousand words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I’d rather have the thousand words. — Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fiction (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Only the truly geeky will appreciate just what it means to find yourself in someone else’s Usenet tagline. I happened upon a reference to my name…

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it’s curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I’ve ever created. I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.…

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 10 — Why Hammer Isn't Good for Fiddly Details or, The Mystery Room Revealed

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 10 — Why Hammer Isn’t Good for Fiddly Details or, The Mystery Room Revealed (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These last few weeks were a bit crazy, so I fell a bit behind in my Half Life 2 modding. Instead, I spent some time working on two different conference proposals that deal with interactive…

Crap Blog Junk Design Vomit: Some Thoughts on MySpace Design

It’s an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses–if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It’s a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite…

Blogging Scholarship in a Nutshell

Blogging Scholarship in a Nutshell (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Earlier today, I was working on three different proposals, all with deadlines today. Amanda and Karissa stopped by to see how the proposals were doing. I noted that I was madly paring down the word count in order to make the proposals fit the online forms. Amanda suggested…

Comic-Book Superrman Impervious To Copyediting

Executives at DCC Comics have announced the debut of comic-book character Superrman, whose invulnerability to copyediting protects him from nefarious outside forces and intellectual-property lawsuits. “Thrill to the exploits of Superrman, the only child of a doomed plant! Gasp in awe at his Superr-Strength, X-Roy Vision, and his ability to leap mall buildings in a…

More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it's the girl

After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only…

Trek 2.0, Boldly Going to Hell

Hey, do you feel your TV is too big? Do you long to combine your television viewing experience with dopey chat-room talk about sex with robots? Is your knowledge of Star Trek so encyclopedic that the term “spoiler” means nothing to you? Then G4 TV has a show for you! —Lore Sjöberg —Trek 2.0, Boldly…

Quoth: a dynamic interactive fiction system

Watch the movie first! Quoth is a dynamic interactive fiction system, in which authoring is done from a player’s perspective, from within the running work. Quoth draws upon the concepts of pervasive anthropomorphisation, executable natural language, and revisionist narrative. The major use of Quoth so far has been for musical livecoding. pervasive anthropomorphisation In traditional…

Introducing Inform 7

Inform 7, or I7, is a dramatic departure from what has come before. IF languages such as Inform 6, TADS, and Hugo are procedural, C-like languages, familiar to most any modern computer programmer. I7 doesn’t take that approach. Instead, its language is based on English. I’ll pause a moment to let that sink in. Rather…