Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads. “This is what happens when the game’s off, basically,” said Mike `Burnie’ Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue‘s creators. “They’re chatting away,…
Time to get my AARP card, apparently. I’m 22, and I have officially been “ma’am’ed” for the first time. —Donna Hibbs —Ma’amed for Life (Nothing Left to Do but Rant) While pondering the language politics of the situation Donna describes, I was surprised when I realized that I would feel comfortable referring to a polite adolescent…
Stephenson’s immensely creative novel offers a story about the disequilibrium between space and time, about reconstituting subjectivity in a world where geography has conquered history, and about the importance of narrative in the creation of subject positions. In this chapter, we argue that geography’s conquest of history defines the struggles over culture, identity, subjectivity, and…
Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology…
Miners know they have a significant problem when the canary they keep with them stops singing. Hobbyist/part-time programmers are our industry’s version of the canary, and they have stopped singing. People who program four to eight hours a week are being cut out of the picture because they can’t increase their skills as fast as…
Circle Games and CyberpunkJerz’s Literacy Weblog) While I figured cyberpunk wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I hoped that the likeable protagonist Nell and the fantasy sequences she encounters in her Primer would get students who don’t much care for science fiction to enjoy Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. In order to discuss some of the…
To viewers, the hourly show appears as one continuous, somewhat overwhelming four-block-long image — and it’s programmed that way by teams of animators who spend as much as four months to create the shows. But what viewers won’t be able to see is that the image — and the “screen” — is broken down into…
A lot of designers think that a work is part of a person, that it has come from some mysterious place inside. How it will sell depends on who we are as individuals. But an interesting thing for me is that I think we ourselves change from time to time. I may be Tung Chiang,…
The administrative assistant and her two desk neighbors once sat near Alex, a colleague who chewed loudly and dripped his day-old jelly doughnuts. Their pleas to the manager to put a curtain around his desk were unsuccessful. That meant they were forced to watch the day that his mess jammed nearly every key on his…
Random Acts of Music Just now, a student crept up behind me and slipped a pair of headphones over my head. I don’t know her. She doesn’t introduce herself. Small voices, like backwards chimpmunks, say something inaudible to a hip-hop beat. “I randomly subject people to whatever I’m listenting to,” says the student. I thank…
blogs.setonhill.edu is down I’ve notified the server admin, who says he’ll won’t be able to look at it until early this evening. A shout out to Rachel Crump, who was just about to give an oral presentation on Dungeons & Dragons when the blogs went down at about 3:45 … she had prepared thoroughly enough…
1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: “Score a few points for Bud!”Dorky but bookish (therefore fun) ‘open the nearest book to page 23’ meme Found…
Questions (by whom, I don’t know) had been raised about my collegiality and some had reached the ears of the search committees where my applications were under review. I racked my brain for the comment or incident that could have sparked such rumors. Had I inadvertently said something in a seminar or a conference that…
Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey: 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job. 39% of…
There is still the childhood picture just where it‘salways been, right above “I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974.” And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: “When I was eight, my father,…
An increasing number of us seem interested in learning political news only from media that tell us what we want to hear. That’s dangerous for the press and the people. What should be done? —Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media (Dallas Morning News) Similar:Charles Schulz's Letter About Democracy, Discovered 50 Years Later | KQEDJoel Lipton,…
So much for the evolutionary advantage of love. As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the…
Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. —Chris Ulbrich —Porno Hen Hawks for Burger…
There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging — but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the…
The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this…