Life after the Video Game Crash

Check out the rather startling difference between the Atari 2600 title Jet Goblins Attack from 1980 and The Legend of Zelda just seven years later: The yellow block in the first screen is Batman. Now compare Goldeneye (1997) to Red Faction 2 (2004). Same seven-year span: We’re on a technological plateau. The next real leap,…

A Gamer's Manifesto

If the new consoles are built with a graphics-first mentality, how easy is it going to be to make games that stretch the boundaries of game logic and player freedom? And if so, can we at least have our damned adventure games back? But there’s another, less-obvious side of that muffin: if a machine is…

Y! MIndset

—Y! MIndset An interesting Yahoo! search engine that places “Shopping” and “Research” on opposite ends of a sliding scale, which you can adjust in order to change the weightings of of search results. Similar:NASA sends humans back to the moon for an orbital visit. I was *such* a space nerd as a ki…I remember being…

Top 100 Speeches

—Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric) Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter. Similar:Clever Modernization of Hamlet: Polonius with an iPhoneI teach Shakespeare in a literature clas…CultureKeeping things in the proper perspective at 4Cs: Praise for my delivery of a line from Sta…Already met a lot…

The Plot Flickers

There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television’s adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I’m a novelist, so I’m hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is…

Real vs. media world

Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies. A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news — as so many…

BBC staff go on strike

HUNDREDS of BBC journalists and production staff in Manchester are to go out on strike today in protest at planned job cuts. —Nicola Dowling —BBC staff go on strike (Manchester Online) Similar:Vanessa Otero's Complex vs. Clickbait, Liberal vs. Conservative Media ChartUpdate, June 2020: See Vanessa Otero Ad …CultureDear daughter, let Miley Cyrus be a lesson to…