William Shatner’s low-budget sci-fi flick, “Invasion Iowa,” that was supposedly filming in Riverside, turned out to be an elaborate hoax. To borrow the phrase from MTV, the entire town was “punk’d.” Yes, William Shatner is there, and yes, there is a film crew, but the whole thing wasn’t for a movie, but for a “reality”…
When we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that’s what it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s visions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time…
—Interactive Fiction Workshop 1 (Writing for the Internet) This morning I introduced my Writing for the Internet class to Pick up the Phone booth and Die and 9:05. I always enjoy this class period. Most get to at least one of the endings in 9:05. About five minutes before class ends, I ask the students for…
Blogger, and several of the other blog-systems, have a feature that lets you blog in the future. I can set the date on the post for a date in the future, and then it will be posted when I am dead. This is a classic set-up for the: “There is a letter with my lawyer,…
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn’t take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn’t help but wonder why they shouldn’t just imitate…
Self-service has been around for decades, ever since Clarence Saunders, an American entrepreneur, opened the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders’s idea was simple, but revolutionary: shoppers would enter the store, help themselves to whatever they needed and then carry their purchases to the check-out counter to pay for them. Previously,…
But how does one measure the godliness of bacteria versus a fruit fly? (Keats opted for flies in lieu of humans, which, he said, would require “a really big bell jar.”) After briefly considering omnipotence, Keats decided to measure omnipresence. Did the number of organisms increase? How fast? In the case of the fruit flies,…
The late writer’s estate hasn’t approved publication of the 1924 piece, a gory, over-the-top parody about a bullfight in the Spanish city of Pamplona, the manuscript’s owner, Donald Stewart, told The Associated Press on Monday. —Found Hemingway Story Won’t Be Published (Yahoo!|AP (will expire)) Similar:In November 2000, I was blogging about the US Presidential election,…
The Weekly Standard posted an article on its website Saturday charging Tribe with using language that closely mirrors sections of Henry J. Abraham‘s1974 book on Supreme Court appointments, Justices and Presidents. And at one point in his 1985 book, Tribe lifts a 19-word passage verbatim from Abraham‘stext. —Prof Admits to Misusing Source (The Crimson) This is…
The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse…
Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile — a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter — in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003. Now the project has plans to expand to Ghana and Macedonia. —Rural Kids Print, Bind and Read (Wired) Similar:Battle Lines…
One complaint that hardcore IF fans have about such derivations from the old school plain text game is that developers often get so caught up in designing the graphics and recording the sound effects that the story line, the most important part of a true interactive fiction game, gets lost in the shuffle. The difference…
Another lesson is for journalists to pay attention to chatter on the Internet. Within hours of CBS making its charges — basically that Bush was a laggard in the National Guard — bloggers and other commentators on the Net expressed doubt over the veracity of documents that CBS used to back its story (and later…
…Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a golden ticket. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service…. I was about to end all candymakers on earth… and I didn’t even know it yet. —Milloway, Wood and Freese —Chocolypse Now (Freese Design) Similar:The U.S. government and Facebook are…
There is little financial incentive for recycling, and recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials. Yet there is a growing campaign for recycling, particularly promoted by local government – and more people are taking it up. The ‘black box’ outside your house is becoming…
blogs.setonhill.edu down Whoops… it looks like blogs.setonhill.edu is down. I’ve sent a note to the system administrator, but I’ve got to go offline for the evening now. Let’s keep our fingers crossed… Update: Blogs are back up. Similar:The Outsiders Closing after Friday Night's ShowCurrent_EventsHere's some good writing from The New Yorker: "Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists…
Hello, My name is [Name Here] and I am a [My Title Goes Here] facilitating programming in both [Administrative Unit One] and [Administrative Unit Two]. My position is an assistantship through the [Office of Something] program at [Nearby University]. In my [Title of a Class Here] class I have a project where I am to…
Because your Sims are much more self-sufficient than in the original — they can generally manage to eat and go to the bathroom when they need to — you’re freed up to help them out with their aspirations, which puts you more in the role of a benevolent guardian angel than an invisible day-care teacher.…
The Last Starfighter, a world premiere science fiction musical inspired by the 1984 screenplay of the motion picture of the same name, will open the 2004-05 season of Off Broadway’s Storm Theatre, Oct. 15-30.The musical marks the return of lyricist-composer Skip Kennon (Herringbone, Time and Again) and draws on the Jonathan Betuel screenplay, about a…
You’d have thought I’d thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he’d always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I’d broken his confidence–“It’s one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but…