The latest in Aaron A. Reed’s monumental project” 50 Years of Text Games” focuses on Graham Nelson’s programming language Inform, and in particular his game “Curses.” “You have to get a coin from the temple of zeus to buy the ekmek,” explained one responder. “To do that you need to use the rod of luck.…
Waiting for The Current War to start. I haven’t seen live professional theater in a long time. I saw lots of good video theater, but it’s just not the same. [Addendum] I really enjoyed the show. I knew a bit about Edison and Westinghouse, but I was surprised (and delighted) at how skillfully the writer,…
Parchmap is a wonderful expansion to the interactive fiction player Parchment. It adds a visual auto-mapper to Infocom-style games, including those created with Inform 7. You can jot notes on the map, too! My own 2001 IF-Comp entry, “Fine-Tuned: An Auto-mated Romance,” is one of the 217 stories available on the Parchmap site. Similar:York…
Similar:Ties of Blood and Water #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 19) Kira re-evaluates a …York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slowerThe Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)Business as Usual #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 18)…
I remember when I started seeing political cartoons that began depicting office workers using flatscreen LCDs instead of bulky CRTs. I inherited a handful of CRTs as people I know upgraded. I still haven’t bought a new LCD TV — I’ve inherited several hand-me-downs from family members. The next time I offer my course on…
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight Similar:Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slowerDid you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.I MacGyvered myself a heat sinkCockatoos…
In March 2001, I was blogging about All Your Base Are Belong To Us (early meme) “Remembrance of Things Past” (reflection on the digital legacy we are creating with our personal data) (Simson Garfinkel) A new generation of three-dimensional printers (“Fax It Up, Scotty” I Missed Class… Did Anything Important Happen? (From a FAQ page I…
The chunky laptop seems to boot and the LCD screen flickers, but never actually turns on. I should check it with an external monitor. I’m sure I’ll never fit in 32-inch waist slacks again, even if I had occasion to wear a suit. (I occasionally wear a jacket and tie.) The $10 is, I presume,…
“Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to know that a little piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the Space Age by barely one quarter of a mile, is going to soar into history again on Mars!” Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright said in a statement provided by the…
There was no way to preserve sounds before the nineteenth century. Speeches, songs, and soliloquies all vanished moments after leaving the lips. That situation changed in 1877, when Thomas Edison began working on a machine that could mechanically reproduce the human voice. Edison’s team successfully assembled a device on which Edison recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a nursery rhyme that would become the first words ever spoken by the phonograph.2 Depending on how you define the term, Edison’s inaugural recording of verse might be considered the world’s first audiobook.. –Matthew Rubery, Cabinet Magazine
“Lior Shamir, a computer scientist who’s actively participated in efforts to increase participation in STEM fields, now wonders if she’s been on the wrong side.” The theme of those academic meetings has been rather consistent: we must reach out to those lost souls who chose to study the humanities or social sciences and show them…
I can’t help thinking of the brief magical display honoring an Irish quidditch team in one of the Harry Potter movies. This is so much better because it’s real, not a movie special effect. Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who…
“Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” (“Can only have been painted by a madman!”) appears on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous painting The Scream. Infrared images at Norway’s National Museum in Oslo recently confirmed that Munch himself wrote this note. The inscription has always been visible to the naked eye, but the infrared images helped…
I’m not a huge fan of war movies, but my son is fascinated by Winston Churchill. He just showed me Darkest Hour. I loved the cinematography and the language. I really appreciated the attention to the act of composing a text orally with the assistance of a typist. That process is of course very gendered…
I get all my news online now, but I grew up with TV news and my father’s daily copy of the Washington Post, so I can appreciate how changes in the medium have changed journalism. Likewise, I was a kid in the 80s and an avid gamer through the 90s. On the rare occasions when…
In February, 2001, I was blogging about Computer nostalgia and text adventure games.“Walking into a room rendered in the Q3 engine can be lovely and impressive, but when you’ve only 16K to tell a story, you have to rely on the gamer’s imagination to provide the details. Just the words ‘you are on a beach’…
Some of Elon Musk’s stunts have caught my attention. He was involved in founding the company that became PayPal (which I use from time to time, to accept freelance payments and to pay other freelancers), and I can see a lot of people would benefit from the high-speed train systems he has advocated, but I…
It’s a bit of a stretch to call this Teddy Roosevelt quote “encoded,” but it’s still fun to notice. We’re told to be on the lookout for more surprises as the mission develops. Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the…
New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds…
If it were possible to build a digital novelist or poetry analyst, then computers would be far more powerful than they are now. They would in fact be the most powerful beings in the history of Earth. Their power would be the power of literature, which although it seems now, in today’s glittering silicon age,…