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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books…
Alloy’s team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers’ idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting…
It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu’s regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard…
—Polka, Polka, Polka — and More (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Some family photos, mostly from my parents’ recent visit. Similar:Star Trek: Voyager Premiered 20 Years AgoI remember wanting to like Voyager a lot…CultureThe coronavirus is today just as contagious and just as serious as it was when we were all…CultureGrandpa Joe's Candy Store.Sugar rush at Grandpa Joe’s…
“Rock is so important to me,” Harris said, gesturing to a cabinet where he files articles concerning all of the live shows he attends and detailed transcriptions of interviews with artists who live only blocks away. “If I couldn’t write about music and collect music, I have no idea what I’d do instead.” The social…
In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary. Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son’s arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his…
When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don’t care, they don’t know, or they didn’t see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I’ve found that most…
I have written about how traditional chess engines are constructed and about how they go about figuring out what moves to make. I have speculated on how Rybka, a new and powerful chess engine is constructed. I have written a software specification for a new way to estimate the value of a chess position, or…
Congressman John P. Murtha will be the keynote speaker at this year’s commencement, Saturday, May 13 at 11 in the Katherine Mabis McKenna Center on Seton Hill’s Greensburg campus. —Alexandra Nseir —Murtha to speak at May commencement (Setonian) I have heard both faculty and student grumblings about Murtha, who is, depending on who’s talking, either pro-labor…
At Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing…
She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn’t close it. “He made a drastic change in the blocking,” she said. “He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later.” Baldwin said, “If, in one show out of the scores of…
The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969’s Breath, a 30-second play with no characters,…
The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion. With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that…
This world premiere will blend Rock, Tango, Jazz and Punk music with contemporary dance to re-imagine Karel Čapek’s original 1921 classic, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Čapek’s play that started it all, introducing the word ROBOT into the world’s lexicon and into our fantasies, is reexamined for the 21st Century. —R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Futurist…
Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can’t decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight…