Welcome to IFComp 2005, the competition for short text adventures. —Interactive Fiction Competition 2005 (ifcomp.org) Free text-adventure games, written specifically for this annual competition. Anyone can be a judge. Similar:Why Tetris is the 'perfect' video gameRather than wanting to make a film about…AestheticsWhy Hoboken is Throwing Away All of its Student LaptopsUntrained teachers. Damage-prone machine…CybercultureFacebook's Mike…
Adam Jacot de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for “moustache” in an Albanian dictionary – and another 27 for “eyebrows”. A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes. He began hanging out in second-hand bookshops, looking for foreign dictionaries and the tiny revelations…
Did anyone have the right to be so little changed by the voyage as Armstrong seems to have been? “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he asked a reporter seven years after coming home. —Thomas Mallon reviews James R. Hansen’s First Man. —Moon Walker: How Neil Armstrong…
PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! —Manifesto Games Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture. Similar:We are in a golden…
No individual has made billions off Star Trek—although that franchise, too, has its own mountains of merchandise, including toys, video games, and hundreds of books. More impressive than its merchandise and its profits, though, is its monumental amount of screen-time. Since the first broadcast of the first episode on September 8, 1966, there have been…
—MLA Citation Style (Long Island University) It’s got Star Trek. It’s got Flash Gordon. It’s in MLA style. What could be better? Similar:Granting a Student SuperAdminGoddessOMGWhatHaveIDone Network PrivilegesI should probably not grant a student su…AcademiaAlways Bet on TextGraydon Hoare offers a rousing hymn to t…CybercultureOne of the benefits of teaching at a small college, with small classes…In…
—‘NY Times’ Retracts John Roberts Memo Story (Editor & Publisher) So the paper publishes false information, in a story about a memo critiquing a court case involving a newspaper that published false information. The court case ruled that a newspaper could only be found libelous if the paper published the false information with actual malice.…
The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it’s finished…
WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought…
“Don’t panic over the latest techno jargon like … peer-to-peer, wi-max, 80211, bittorrent … the only thing that gives purpose to all these remarkable delivery systems is the kind of creative content we all produce,” Eisner said. —Eisner’s parting words to Hollywood: “Don’t panic” (Breitbart.com) I don’t feel much pity for the hordes of netizens who…
I wonder what they call it when you can’t think of what to write in a weblog? Writer’s Blog, weblock? —Anna-Marie —Comfortably Numb (ilex) One of Mike Vitia‘s students coins a term. Students in several of my classes are engaging in drive-by blogging, which is the flurry of entries that one posts just before the blogging…
The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant’s body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement. “It doesn’t take anything to start a…
In addition to a Sony PlayStation 2, the family has some special equipment: a S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames system that consists of a special controller, a helmet with built-in sensors for monitoring brain activity and a Smartbox that receives the brain signals. As long as the boys remain calmly focused on the game, it plays normally, says…
The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca. —Thomas Elias —Archeologists make historic discovery (Madera Tribune) Similar:Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guiltHow…
There was always a notion in the past of putting out information that people need to know. Now the entire industry is driven by providing what people want to hear and see. And that gives you more Michael Jackson than Social Security. That gives you Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, not local government. That gives…
Back then, most directors were too old to play games, and clearly didn’t bother to observe anyone who did. But to be fair to Hollywood, game culture is also hard to film because so much of a game’s appeal is internal. All the strategizing, the mental mapping, the cybernetic thrill of being in a loop…
In “Drama as Literature,” I assigned the first third or so of Oedipus the King, which always throws students for a loop. What’s with the “strophe,” which is the part of the choral performance chanted as the performers dance from right to left, and the “antistrophe,” which is chanted as the performers dance from left…
—Austrian national anthem ‘sexist’ (BBC) Should that caption read “Austrian schoolchildren are taught the national anthem during solar eclipses”? I can’t imagine why else they might be wearing those goggles. I don’t mean to make light of the subject. I’ve written a handout on gender-neutral language, and in my American Lit class, we discussed the ritualistic…
Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?. Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As…
Hi, I’m a reporter with National Public Radio and I’m doing a story on the plague that’s hit World of Warcraft. I’m really interested in talking to some people who play the game about the plague and what’s been done about it and generally how it feels to have your virtual character done in by…