Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little PassagesLiteracy Weblog) I just ordered my copy of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction — Nick Montfort’s study of riddles, Adventure, Zork, and beyond. Similar:This history of video game graphics is a walk down memory laneBlogging this so I can assign it to my “…AcademiaStudents must learn how to…
James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It’s an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which…
“In order to maintain airspeed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?” Actually, wrong. By comparing the European Swallow with bird species of similar body mass, we can estimate that the swallow beats its wings 18 times a second with an amplitude of 18 cm… Jonathan Corum —Estimating the…
Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Lincoln’s famous address. There is only one known photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg (here’s the detail view if you’re having a hard time spotting him). The Library of Congress website explains that the image sat for more than half a century in the National Archives before anyone recognized…
Their one-star bombs were nasty and relentless?landing at a rate of five a day. My characters were undeveloped, my structure sloppy, my prose trite. There were complaints of money and time wasted and of friends never again to be trusted. Some hated the book so much they were forced to put it down. One argued…
Phone Pranks and Gender on CampusLiteracy Weblog) I’m at my desk, working late. The phone rings. An unfamiliar female voice says, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” I tell her I don’t have one. “That’s a very nice blue shirt you are wearing,” the voice continues. “It goes well with your red tie.” I look out…
—News-Images.com Pretty self-explanatory — like Google News but for people who don’t want to read. Found on Slashdot. Similar:All of Your Co-Workers are Gone: Story, Substance, and the Empathic PuzzlerHowever, running parallel to the evoluti…AcademiaA news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster. Artificial intelligence has been deplo…BusinessClever Modernization of Hamlet:…
Reading the news on a computer may soon be passe. Internet-enabled mobile phones and hybrid devices are fueling the next wave of change, and journalists need to know how to deliver content to these devices. —Vivek Shankar —Reporters, readers get new ways to publish and readOnline News Association) This is some light, friendly PR-style coverage…
The world’s only double-barreled cannon is now proudly displayed on the lawn of the Athens City Hall, about a hundred miles off Route 1. It is a monument to every geek who ever had what seemed to be a really good idea at the time. —Michelle Delio —Clocked by Two Smoking Barrels (Wired) Unless you’re into…
How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the…
High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work….. The task falls to me — in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition — to patch up these leaky vessels…. I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing…
Robert Mendler, Holocaust SurviorLiteracy Weblog) I recently heard Holocaust survivor Robert Mendler, a resident of nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who spent six or seven years in 10 different concentration camps. Mr. Mendler is a regular speaker here at Seton Hill and in the region; I attended his visit to a youth group at Our Lady of…
I’m reading Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes. I recently showed a video, “People Like Us,” to my Seminar in Thinking and Writing students. In the video, a talking head says that everyone with class aspirations has a copy of Angela’s Ashes, but that nobody has read it. Kind of like the opposite of The Bridges of…
Disney started producing films for a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1927. | Mickey Mouse was conceived the next year during a cross-country train ride, according to the “official” company history. Walt Disney had just been forced to give up the Oswald rights to his ruthless New York distributor, who had exercised…
Some may not like the US President, but we should all appreciate what America has done for the world …. I don’t want the Americans to go home. In fact I am terrified of what would happen if they did. Their going home in the past has often meant suffering for others. Sure, I want…
Aviva, Diageo, Corus… the trend for rebranding companies with “nonsense” names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. —Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC) Thanks for the…
A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It…
What began as the ultimate outsider activity — a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information — is turning into the same insider’s game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them,…
The good text adventures had more than a series of puzzles to solve; they had as much atmosphere and clever writing as a good novel, and I decided in Grade 8 that I was going to merge my love of writing and computers to become a writer of interactive fiction. I set my sights on…
As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate’s device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal…