Bruce Sterling wrote, “The Hacker Crackdown”, in 1992 and published it as an ebook; let’s remember that this was before there were browsers and the Internet was mostly an academic domain. In order to read this ebook, you would have to find it available on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and downloaded it as a […]
“Digital: a love story” is one of those pieces of media that was a long time in coming; it now has a whole personal story wrapped up in its discovery, initial experience, dormant phase, and subsequent completion. If you’ll indulge me, let me tell you a tale that spans 4 years. I’ll try to keep […]
I’ve already written a few posts about Inform 7: it’s a powerful tool for creating interactive fiction that has a very low cost to entry. But, it’s also very complex and DOES have a learning curve. Yes, you can make a playable game by compiling the single line of source text: “The Kitchen is a […]
I initially found out about Jason Scott from Jimmy Maher’s blog The Digital Antiquarian–another guy who will get his own post shortly. Maher mentioned Scott’s text adventure documentary, “Get Lamp.” I found it on Youtube, and was immediately hooked. When you have 2 hours to invest in something cool, you can find it here. Jason […]
I was watching the Philosophy Tube’s channel on youtube the other day, and saw his episode on “Rick and Morty” as an argument against Scientism: Link The media landscape that I live in is a little constrained: I don’t have a TV or access to cable, and tend to avoid mainstream programming. This is not […]
Once a month three guys throw the Mini Game Jam; it’s basically an 8 hour workshop with the purpose of creating a game from scratch. It starts with a get-to-know-you exercise: every participant is given five pieces of paper with the same number printed on each; the goal is to talk to five different people […]
I’m actually a little to young to have experienced the full wonder that was the Text Adventure era; being born in 1976, I could kind of understand what was happening in any given text adventure, but I didn’t really have the patience required to really interact with them. As Don Woods says in Jason Scott’s […]
2013 wasn’t the hardest year in my history, but it was pretty rough: trying to adapt to a new country, to a new language, getting a working visa, finding a job. It proved even more challenging than I had expected. As of last September, things started to turn around and now my position looks much […]
Last year during the month of December, I was unemployed and had a lot of time on my hands. Businesses are usually down to a skeleton crew, and everyone is on vacation; so, the job hunt was on hold. I had a bunch of seasons of TNG on my laptop, and started watching them. This […]
A few weeks ago I started thinking about what kind of media you could whip up with just a smart phone and whatever open-source editing software that might be out in the wild. I asked Dr. Google a few questions, and I found out about the kdenlive project. I was able to get it installed […]