I plan to return to telling the story of The Myth of Merula very soon. In addition to writing Alice Mountolive’s fictional blog, I will be getting to Blackbird’s story. Blackbird’s story will be released chapter by chapter, in Flash. Each chapter will have a game at the end of it. The first chapter will [...]

The Myth of Merula Philosophy Wiki has gone through many incarnations since I impulsively created it, but each time, it has never really gelled for me. Now I finally know what I will do with it. Its purpose in life is to be a work of community science fiction. It will be an encyclopedia of [...]

I was pleased to note that two digital storytelling sites have won SXSW web awards. We Tell Stories, from Penguin, features six stories by six authors experimenting with six different ways of telling stories online. The second, Lost Zombies, is a community generated zombie documentary. Personally, I’m especially fascinated by the community logistics of Lost [...]

Poet and e-literature teacher Stephanie Strickland, in her article Born Digital, lists eleven things that electronic literature is and is not. Sprinkled throughout her article are links to examples of online works that have the traits she is discussing. They are some good demos of what is possible. The article reminds me how much there [...]

I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night going through hours of CSS [...]

I’m now halfway through month eight of new mommydom, and I’m getting my head above water and coming up for air. Wyatt is now happily creeping backwards around the kitchen and living room floors. The baby who always wanted to be held is now the baby who bucks in my arms when he wants to [...]

All those who have emailed me with questions about designing a MediaWiki skin, take note. Now there is a book for you. Packt Publishing has released a book called MediaWiki Skins Design. With the consent of the publisher, I’m releasing a sample chapter (Chapter 8, Social Networking and MediaWiki) of the book here on Squirrel [...]

It’s not even one month since I wrote the last post on attachment parenting, and already my thoughts are different. They’re not totally different, but I’ve further refined and qualified the insight from The Continuum Concept about not being child centered. Previously I had decided to let Wyatt whine more often. Now I’m working harder [...]

Now that my son is five months old, I have had more opportunities to learn and reflect, and I’ve decided that I’m not as attached to attachment parenting as I used to be. If I erred, though, at least I erred on the side of babying my baby too much rather than too little. He’s [...]

Somebody has already made some code samples available to the Director user community, using the new Aegia Physics plug-in for 3D work in Director. I was glad to find these, since it was a disappointment to me that Aegia did not make any samples or tutorials available upon Adobe’s release of Director 11. I remember [...]

Maybe I’m dense, but it took me two months to realize I have a high need baby. He’s the only baby I’ve ever had. Since having Wyatt, I have been in awe of my mother and grandmother for having four and nine children respectively. They had natural labors and stayed home with all their kids. [...]

Adobe finally did it, resurrecting Director from the dead. The English version of Director 11 is to become available in March. My questions about a physics engine have also been answered. I had been wondering all this time what would become of physics for Shockwave 3D, since Havok and Macromedia stopped partnering, way back in [...]

My four week old son, Wyatt, sleeps in his peanut shell sling, nestled against my body, as I type. Today is a milestone, the first time I have gotten him to accept being worn in the sling. I sit at my desk in the living room, watching the snow fall gently off the trees in [...]

There is finally a 3D physics engine for Flash. Called WOW-Engine, it is still under development. It extends Alec Cove’s APE 2D engine, uses the Sandy library for all 3D math and incorporates data structures classes written by polygonal labs. It’s a very promising beginning. The future of Flash 3D programming and game development looks [...]

Today I took the plunge and made the philosophy wiki a fictional extension of The Myth of Merula. I will be writing in it as Alice Mountolive. This blog will be the only non-fictional part of the Dreamfishery.com Web Site. It’s very liberating. It’s not the first time I’ve considered doing this, but for some [...]

It’s been a long wait for the next release of Director. Adobe has thrown us Director users very few bones. Finally, last week I  checked Adobe’s web site and found another bone. For so long, there has been no change to the little paragraph of the FAQ that answers the question as to when the [...]

This August, my husband and I finally made a trip out to Glacier National Park, as we’ve wanted to do for several years. Since I’m now 20 weeks pregnant, I’m glad we had our babymoon while we could! We had four bear sightings, three mountain goat sightings and a bighorn sheep sighting. Pictures are [...]

Citizen journalism has proved it is viable and deserves to be taken seriously. Not that issues of trust and accountability have disappeared, but there is every reason to keep experimenting. Writes Rory O’Connor in OhourNews:
In the wake of such recent citizen-mediated news events as the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the London train bombings, Senator George [...]

It’s hard to believe this is the first blog post I’ve written since April. I’ve been knee-deep in living several dreams at the same time, besides being bitten hard by spring fever. Throughout half of April and most of May, I spent most of my free time outside. Every week-end I worked outside made my [...]

Today I finally figured out how to create a simple hinge in Shockwave 3D using the Havok Xtra’s linear dashpot. In the past, I was frustrated by Havok’s linear dashpot, because by default it connects two movable rigid bodies’ centers of mass. I wanted to be able to connect them more precisely, such as by [...]

Meaning and action are complementary principles in the gaming activity and literary form called the “quest”. So argues Jeff Howard in his recent Digital Humanities Quarterly article, “Interpretive Quests in Theory and Pedagogy“. By quest, he means a journey in search of meaning, a journey that can include goal oriented activities if it takes place [...]

I’ve decided to make all of DreamFishery.com a fictional Website, including even the philosophy wiki. Everything on DreamFishery.com, except this blog, will be a part of the digital storytelling that Alice Mountolive is doing as the narrator of The Myth of Merula. Making this decision just feels right to me. As soon as I imagined [...]

Two days ago, I accidentally wiped out all of my philosophy wiki content and users. As I was trying to troubleshoot some issuues people brought to my attention about the roundedblue skin, I realized I could not change the skin in my wiki. When I would try to change the skin in my preferences, I [...]

In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong writes that writers and artists, not religious leaders, are filling the age-old human psychological need for myth in the contemporary world. Writers and artists are filling the vacuum that was left by the suppression of mythos in the wake of the Enlightenment. Logos is all well and [...]

I never knew that there was such a variety of romance heroes and heroines. Writing about archetypal heroes/heroines my characters remind me of: that’s my exercise this week in my Forward Motion Writers’ Community online writing class. To prepare for the assignment, one source of research was a Web site listing eight romance hero archetypes [...]

Gene Endrody uses Director to make MMORPGs like Sherwood Dungeon at maidmarian.com. Using only three game servers that run the Shockwave Multiuser Server, he’s had close to 2000 simultaneous players per server. Starting out with a lot of 3D experience but no programming experience, he’s done all the development himself. He started living his dream [...]

I’ve just learned of a fantastic new interview vlog called amadelio. Based in Germany, it has both English and German versions of all interviews. The mission of amadelio is not so much to entertain you as to get you to think. Interviewees are individuals who are culturally influential yet not necessarily featured in mass media. [...]

The March issue of Sequential Tart is now online at http://www.sequentialtart.com/. It is an issue that started to blow me away as soon as I saw the new content while helping to proof some articles a couple of days ago. I absolutely love the new series about metanarratives in comics, Messing with Metanarratives, by Suzette [...]

This article originally appeared in the January 2007 issue of the Sequential Tart Webzine.
Like Isaac Mendez, the comic artist of NBC’s Heroes who can paint the future, some comics creators find that their work at least partially anticipates some aspects of the future. In his introduction to the original DC Comics run of V for [...]

This January, I joined a free online class in novel writing at the Forward Motion for Writers community, and I’m glad I did. Its timing is perfect to help me write The Myth of Merula. It’s a two year novel writing class with weekly assignments that cover every aspect of novel writing, from idea to [...]

I changed the beginning of The Myth of Merula. I realized that it was not a strong beginning at all. In fact, it was nothing but writing that circled around the beginning, sneaking up on it and then backing away. I did not like it at all anymore, even though it’s not the final version, [...]

Playing with Director again is like coming home. Director was the first system I learned to program in. Lingo was my first scripting language. I love Lingo! In spite of being verbose, it’s also concise. Sounds contradictory, but it’s true! I won’t use JavaScript in Director, even though I know JavaScript, and Director supports it. [...]

Why Shockwave 3D?
In my long and winding quest to do real-time 3D programming on the Web, I’m back where I started — with Shockwave 3D. Much as I love Sandy, I need at least joints and collision detection, and the only existing Flash physics engines are made for 2D. I’ve put considerable thought and effort [...]

Wikis Go Web 2.0 with OpenServing
I just learned a couple days ago that Wikia is launching Openserving, which will freely host wikis and will allow each wiki owner to keep 100% of advertising revenue. These freely hosted wikis will not be plain vanilla MediaWiki wikis. They will be wikis that have been souped up to [...]

Ibogaine Treatment Clinics
My research into the Dogon continues with a look at ibogaine use among the Dogon. Ibogaine, or iboga,  is a psychedelic from Africa that has received some attention due to its reputation as a treatment for addiction and alcoholism. It is legal in Canada and Mexico, where several detoxification clinics have sprung up. [...]

I’ve become overly obsessive about making MediaWiki skins or something, because this morning on impulse, I started making a new color scheme for the Rounded Blue MediaWiki skin I made yesterday. Once I had started, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I was finished, or else it would bug me. I had [...]

Today, using my own MediaWiki skin as the basis, I altered it to make it look like the Rounded Blue Edition WordPress theme. It is available for download. Click here to go to the download page and view a small thumbnail screenshot of the Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki skin.
To use it, just unzip it and [...]

I like the Dogon. Not only do they have a weird and suggestive history and mythology, with densely packed symbolic meanings that map well to science, mirrored in all of their routine behaviors and hand-made things. They also seem like they are really, really nice people. After reading all about their belief that amphibious aliens [...]

Linden’s Second Life developers have just announced a decision to release Second Life client source code under the GNU GPL version 2. The impetus for the decision is a need to make Second Life more scalable and reliable. A Second Life resident who blogs at Gwyn’s Home wrote in great detail about why Linden should [...]

Who Are the Dogon?
The Dogon people of Africa will play a role in the unfolding story of The Myth of Merula. The Dogon are a people numbering at least 450,000 who live in Mali, farming onions and millet in the Niger river delta. They have not been converted to Islam to the extent of most [...]

This year, I’ve begun to have a welcome yet unfamiliar feeling. It’s the feeling of doing what I want. It will take some getting used to it. In addition to gaining something from it – relief, satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment – I have also lost something. I’ve lost the entirely dreamlike status of my [...]

This review originally appeared in the Sequential Tart Webzine on December 1, 2006.
Publisher
Brooke Spangler
http://agirlandherfed.com
Credits
Creators: Brooke Spangler
Grade: 7
A Girl and Her Fed follows the daily life of a young, single, female, liberal journalism intern who is under the surveillance of the fed. Her fed knows that she is not a terrorist, but ever since she has [...]

This review of Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #1 originally appeared in the Sequential Tart Webzine on December 1, 2006. If you’ve not yet read the comic, be aware that this review contains spoilers.
Publisher
BuyMeToys.com
http://www.buymetoys.com/
Credits
Writer: Ben Avery, Casey Heying
Penciler: Casey Heying
Colorist: Snocone Studios, Casey Heying
Letterer: Comicraft
Cover Artist: Joe Jusko, Boris Vallejo
Grade: 8
This second issue of The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles [...]

This morning, I have been reading the January issue of the Sequential Tart Webzine to help put me in the mood for 2007. In this issue, there are interviews with Mike and Louise Carey, Barb Lien-Cooper and Adrien van Viersen. In the featured articles, Shaenon Garrity lets us in on her secret origin of a [...]

It was the Beattles song. I have the dubious distinction of being inspired by the same song that inspired Charles Manson. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know the story about the Blackbird-Charles Manson connection, at the time. I was sitting at my computer, thinking about The Myth of Merula, listening to the Beattles [...]

This Christmas, I’m going to make my first home-made smoked turkey. I can’t wait to taste it. It will require getting up very early in the morning to put the turkey in the smoker, but that’s allright. I figure getting up early will allow me time to get the turkey out of the way, start [...]

In the past, I have written about book-to-blog experiments. I have decided to create my own book-to-blog experiment. It will be a work of fiction called The Myth of Merula. The narrative blog will only be a part of it. The rest of the story, including art and multimedia, will emerge on the merula.dreamfishery.com site. [...]

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a custom skin for the Living Philosophy Wiki. Now it has the same look and feel as the Squirrel Tao blog. Like the Squirrel Tao theme, it is based upon a customization of the Rounded V2 WordPress theme by Ghyslain Armand. In the process of customizing my wiki skin, [...]

If you’ve never tasted potato candy before, you don’t know what you’re missing. No, it doesn’t taste like potatoes. It tastes like peanut butter candy, actually. It’s so fun to make it, too! You get to play with mashed potatoes and powdered sugar and watch the magic of the powdered sugar turning the potatoes into [...]

This review of V for Vendetta originally appeared in Sequential Tart on November 1, 2006. If you’ve not yet seen the movie, you may not want to read it, because it contains spoilers.
Studio
Warner Bros. Pictures
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

Credits
Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman
Rating: R
Grade: 9
The movie V for Vendetta is based upon the eighties comic book [...]

It has been over four months since I started the Living Philosophy Wiki. I don’t regret starting it and leaving it wide open. That didn’t hurt anything. I have come to the realization, though, that nobody much will be attracted to the wiki until it has more content. It will not have more content until [...]

What cool open source stuff I have learned about since joining the luf-team Yahoo group! Reading The Millennial Project for science fiction research, as I recently blogged about, led me to the luf-team Yahoo group. It’s always nice when something cool falls into my lap without effort. So often in life, I have put a [...]

Slamdance, best known for the Slamdance Film Festival, has established a Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. The goal of this competition is to encourage and showcase independent games. Art rather than business will be the primary focus. There are a lot of concepts among the finalists that I find very fresh and interesting. For example, there is [...]

“Webcomics suck,” is a lament often read, even issuing forth from former webcomic fans and champions. I hope to convince the reader with this list that lots of good webcomics exist. It’s far from exhaustive – just a sampling. Enjoy.
Alternative History

Roswell, Texas

Drama

The Architect
Jazz Age
Maroon

Educational

Electric Spirit

Experimental

After Days of Passion

Historical

10,000 Drawings
Paper Moon

Horror/Gothic/Surreal

Briar Rose
Don’t Play, the Game’s Not [...]

I have not been writing much here lately. The reason I’ve been MIA is that I’ve been Martened, Tarted and Torqued. About six weeks ago, I brought home a tiny, new orange-striped kitten named Marten. This occurred at about the same time that I began to occasionally contribute to the ezine Sequential Tart. At the [...]

After reading what Anais Nin has to say about writing, I’m convinced that she’s right about the indispensability of the subconscious and its language of poetry, metaphor, metanym, symbol and image. At first, I thought that this insight would only have a personal value to me, but it would not be something I would use [...]

Dreaming Methods features a new work of hypermedia storytelling. Called “The Flat“, it is described as “an atmospheric journey into an abandoned council flat where traces of a narrative formed by its previous inhabitants still lingers”. Done entirely in Flash, it requires a Flash 8 or higher Flash Player. It begins with a dark screen [...]

I often read unusual books for the purpose of mining them for information I could potentially incorporate into science fiction. One book that I had picked up at a library sale several years ago and just rediscovered on my bookshelf is called The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. The first chapter, [...]

This post is the third in a series on creativity and visual thinking. This time, voluntary attention is the issue. Most people in contemporary Western society do not pay very much attention to the here and now. Alan Watts wrote eloquently of this problem in The Book.
“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives [...]

I sometimes tire of social websites that perpetuate the popular and blogs that regurgitate the issues du jour, so my interest was piqued when I recently chanced upon LeliaThomas.com on the 9Rules network. I was drawn into the blog of Lelia Katherine Thomas by the exceptional thoughtfulness and creativity she brings to it. Lelia [...]

Before seeing the rounded-v2 theme by Ghyslain Armand, I would never have considered the color brown as a main color to use in a website. Now I love it. It allows darkness in a color scheme without reverting to the old neon-on-black look of early websites. It has a sophistication about it that black sites [...]

This is the next post in my series on creativity and visual thinking. It relies upon the premise that creativity involves mental ambidexterity, or a sort of internal transfer from right to left brain. The ability to do this kind of internal transfer can be practiced. One way to begin practicing it is to find [...]

Mark Marino has just launched a hypermedia humor e-zine called Bunk Magazine. It looks like it has potential and is worth exploring. I haven’t yet thoroughly checked out the first issue, but I’ve found a few things that made me giggle and smirk, as well as a few things that didn’t. (You’ll have that.) One [...]

Bob the Angry Flower is a funny and original web comic strip about a not-very-nice flower named Bob. Bob is into a little bit of everything. He tries to push Xaxor pills to an old man. Xaxor supposedly gives back missing zest and zing, as well as curing incontinence. The side effect of of excruciating [...]

I’ve been a busy squirrel over this three day Labor Day week-end, redesigning my Squirrel Tao theme, as well as testing and integrating numerous WordPress plugins and retagging and recategorizing all of my posts. Last night, I went live with the Squirrel Tao makeover. My reasons for the redesign, so soon after launching Squirrel Tao, [...]

Summer has always been a very busy time for me, at least in my (so-called) adult incarnation. It’s not my favorite season, really. I prefer spring and fall. I even like winter these days, now that I have a fireplace to enjoy. There’s no work to do outside, and I often read, write and sketch [...]

Gwen Rachel Stanley has a new web comic out. It’s a very short piece called “A Month of Sundays“. It does sort of evoke a Sunday kind of mood. I like Stanley’s style a lot.

The Los Angeles Public Library is exhibiting a collection of vintage travel posters from the golden age of travel posters, the 1920s and 1930s.
Description: “The 1920’s and 1930’s ushered in an unprecedented era of travel to exotic and romantic destinations. And nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in the travel posters of that time.”
These [...]

This post is going to be a departure from my previous blog entries so far. I’ve decided to start writing about the creative process once in a while. Technology will not make us creative. It is not deterministic. It can constrain and enable us within a set of parameters. But it’s up to us – [...]

Check out Scarygirl, a web comic in Flash, with no words, just images. Follow her story with her companion, Toycat, who is also scary but cute. The Scarygirl strip is drawn by Nathan Jurevicius of Melbourne, Australia.

In June, SuicideGirls ran an interesting interview with Melinda Gebbie, the artist who collaborated with Alan Moore on Lost Girls.

Henry Jenkins, who will soon have a book out called, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, posted an excerpt from his forthcoming book in his blog.
Grant McCracken, the cultural anthropologist and industry consultant, suggests that in the future, media producers must accommodate consumer demands to participate or they will run the risk of [...]

Vin Crosbie on Rebuilding Media defines the term new media for us.

Jay Rosen posts on PressThink a statement that the people formerly known as the audience (also sometimes called “eyeballs”) want to make to media people. It’s a fun read, and there are lots of good comments afterwards.

It’s a good thing that philosophy has been a lifelong interest of mine and that I intend to be an administrator of, as well as a contributor to, the Living Philosophy Wiki for the rest of my life. I could easily write just a little bit of philosophy in the wiki almost every day, until [...]

Yesterday, while googling wikis, I found what looks like a fun and interesting wiki about feminist science fiction. It looks like it could use more contributors, but it has some interesting entries and links, like this one to an article about online female fanfiction written in Tolkien fanfiction communities on Yahoo. I learned that most [...]

Books (etc) We Like has a blog widget for books. This one differs from the LibraryThing blog widget in being a list of recommended books, not a list of every book in your library. Every book purchased through Books (etc) We Like contributes donations to support a list of independent/alternative media organizations. You can still [...]

Today I started a wiki about philosophy. I’ve decided to call it the Living Philosophy Wiki. This is what I wrote about it today, on its About page.
The Living Philosophy Wiki was started on July 15th, 2006. It had been a dream in the back of my mind for at least two years before starting [...]

Emmy Huang writes that, “Yes, Virginia, there will be a Flash Player 9 for Linux.”

Check out the street installations of artist Mark Jenkins. Can you tell they’re sculptures?

Christy Dena has coined a new term for research into entertainment that crosses media – transmodiology. In Latin, it means across, beyond or through media or modes. Thus, a researcher who studied both games and storytelling could fit under this umbrella. So could a person who was a student of both web comics and [...]

Jimmy Wales, the founder of WikiPedia, founded a new political wiki, called Campaigns Wikia. I like the concept, and I hope it succeeds. In the Campaigns Wikia mission statement, Jimmy calls broadcast politics dumb, dumb, dumb. I thoroughly agree. While the stupidity of TV political discourse makes Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s jobs easier, it [...]

The Webcomics Examiner interviewed Scott McCloud last month. Scott talked about his upcoming book, Making Comics, to be published in September. He described what the focus of his new book will be:
It’s not so much a book about the step-by-step procedure of constructing a page. It’s more about how all comics, regardless of what processes [...]

I guess I’m less jaded and sophisticated than most of the folks on Digg.com, because most of them seemed distinctly unimpressed by Widgetoko.com, which is a blog all about – blog widgets! Not me! I feel as excited about it as I used to feel about copying and pasting all the free javascripts available on [...]

This was part of my harvest from my foray into Digg.com yesterday. I hadn’t been on Digg in several weeks, and I was glad I took a look. I found a cool CSS resource. CSS-galleries.com has a single RSS feed of all the major CSS showcase gallery sites. The ProfitPapers website has a collection of [...]

In “Worrying About Flash 9 for Linux“, a Linux user worries that Adobe will break another promise to the Linux community about releasing an updated version of Flash for Linux. He notes that Linux users have not been able to download an updated Flash player since Flash 7. He suspects that, just as Adobe’s promises [...]

I just came across an online paper that looks fascinating and covers a subject I’d not yet considered at any great length. It’s about concrete poetry, as you might guess from its title, “Concrete Poetry – A World View“. It was written by somebody named Mary Ellen Solt and was published in 1968 by Indiana [...]

Who would have guessed that the history of Tetris was so full of intrigue and drama? In fact, Tetris has been the downfall of more than one company, ever since Alexey Pazhitnov created it in the Soviet Union in 1985, after being inspired by a pentominoes game. Torill Mortensen of Thinking with My Fingers clued [...]

The Sandy 1.0 beta has been released. Sandy is a Flash 3D API, and there’s nothing else like it, if you want to be able to do real-time 3D rendering in Flash. I’ve tried almost everything else that is available on the internet for Flash 3D, and nothing else goes so far beyond being a [...]

Dr. Elizabeth Rambo, a professor of English at Campbell University, teaches English by examining themes in pop culture hits like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Angel”, “Harry Potter” and “The Matrix”. She recently wrote a paper titled, “’Queen C’ Goes to Boys’ Town, or, Killing the Angel in Angel’s House”. In this paper, she uses Virginia [...]

Drawn! has a picture of a King Kong and Godzilla poster that is sooo cute! Actually, it’s from the collection of socially conscious posters of the Graphic Imperative. Ranging from the years 1965 to 2005, the posters in this collection have featured graphics promoting themes of peace, social justice and the environment. This particular poster [...]

I think I’ve almost got the hang of 3D math now, as well as simple physics engines, like verlet integration. One online tutorial, Vector Math for 3D Computer Graphics, has been particularly helpful. A webpage on game physics in 3D has also been somewhat helpful. One area of confusion still remains in my mind, and [...]

Today I found a good online tutorial on basic 3D math. It’s on an old geocities site that housed the Win 95 Game Programmer’s Encyclopedia. It has what is, for me, the easiest-to-follow explanation of matrix math that I’ve yet found. It’s amazingly concise, and the examples are all very easy to understand – no [...]

Lately, I have been researching methods of animation, IK, physics simulations, etc. in Flash. After reading this tutorial on using verlet integration for advanced character physics, I was happy to find the Flade open source Flash dynamics engine for simulating 2D physics using verlet integration. Now I need to get it working in three [...]

I’ve reached the conclusion that I really need to know everything. I actually tried to talk my mother into allowing me to drop out of school at age sixteen, giving her examples of actresses, writers and musicians who had been high-school drop-outs. I finished high school and then college, but I never took more math [...]

GAM3R 7H30RY, a draft by McKenzie Wark, is another book that is being shared online before finishing and publishing it. Wark hopes to use the GAM3R 7H30RY website to foster discussion around two questions:

can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
can there be a critical theory of games?

buy 10 mg [...]

Without Gods is an interesting experiment in going from blog to book. Without Gods is currently a blog by Mitchell Stephens, who is writing a book on the history of atheism. He is making his writing process transparent and interactive online on his blog. The end result will be a book that will be published [...]

A new system, called Literatronic, has been created for hypertext authoring. Rather than using links to connect the passages of their stories, authors can assign numbers to tell Literatronic how much affinity one passage has with another. A reader will be presented with choices of what to read next, based upon these affinities. Once a [...]

This morning, I downloaded the beta version of Filter Forge, which is a Photoshop plugin that allows you to build your own filters. I’m getting excited about it! (It doesn’t take much, sometimes.) It’s free, and anyone can submit filters that they create to the Filter Forge online library. I could spend weeks of my [...]

After reading a scientific article on Gizmodo about researchers who came up with a method of altering pictures to make them resemble what they think babies would see, Mario on the Quisomondo blog made a Flash baby vision simulator.

A man known in Second Life as Marc Woebegone is suing Linden Lab for shutting down his account and costing him money after a land deal “went sour”. Marc, whose offline name is Marc Bragg and who is a lawyer in real life, used what Wired News calls a hacker-like method to buy Second Life [...]

I like most web surfers am trained to ignore online ads, but one blogad today caught my eye, because it purported to be about a literary beggar named Jack who was liable to blow his brains soon out if he didn’t receive enough donations to support his writing.
This is Jack.
If he doesn’t catch a break [...]

By way of if:book:
This Spartan Life, our favorite talk show in Halo space, just posted a hilarious video blog entry making the case for network neutrality. In some ways, this is the perfect medium for illustrating a threat to virtual spaces, conveying more in a couple of minutes than several weeks worth of op-eds. Enjoy [...]

Cinescape’s Comiscsape has an interesting interview with Alan Moore, one of the artists involved in making Lost Girls. (The other artist is Melinda Gebbie.) Lost Girls is an adult comic. It will be selling for $75.00 starting in August this year. In Lost Girls, Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Wendy of Peter Pan, and Dorothy [...]

I knew that a mobius strip such as that shown in Mobius Strip II (Red Ants) could be rendered as a real, 3D model. But I wouldn’t have expected that Escher’s Waterfall could actually be modeled and created for real. The Escher for Real website displays 3D models of several M.C. Escher drawings. It’s [...]

On Friday, April 28th, Neil Young’s new protest album, “Living with War”, will be made available for free internet streaming on his website, www.neilyoung.com. One song on the album calls for impeaching President Bush. Another song is called “Lookin’ for a Leader”. Some of the lyrics in this song go, “Someone walks among us … [...]

The Orientalist is out in paperback now. It looks intriguing, a literary and historical detective story. A Time review says that it “reads like a secret history of the 20th century”. It’s the true story of a Jew, Lev Nussimbaum, who assumed the persona of a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. I think I’m going [...]

After struggling to master the recently released, open-source Sandy 3D API for Flash, I’ve decided to take another look at 3D programming in Director. Sandy appealed to me because it allowed real-time 3D in Flash. It was also appealing to have access to the source code and thus complete and precise programmatic control. The Sandy [...]

In just a few minutes of trying out Pandora this morning, I’ve discovered three artists I like. I had never heard of any of them before. I’ve been able to do the same on Last.FM, but only within a more popular circle of artists. Last.FM, being a social recommender, is bound to be biased toward [...]

Christy Dena writes in Cross-Media Entertainment that internet scavenger hunts are becoming a popular means of movie promotion on the internet, as well as a potential art form in themselves. One recent example is the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google.

Anya, author of the i-Anya blog and Australian academic, has been spending some time in the Second Life online world lately. There, she met a virtual model named Starr, who earns a real income from her Second Life career. (And just think, she doesn’t even have to worry about dieting – or aging!)
Yesterday I spent [...]

I read the whole Minus web comic this morning. It’s about a little girl with magic powers who goes through all the kinds of things that children normally do in everyday life, only she wins through magic. Except when she doesn’t, as in the strip where the other girls don’t want to play ball with [...]

37 Signals is selling an ebook, Getting Real, from their Signals vs. Noise blog. 37 Signals used the very same process that they wrote about in Getting Real, to launch Ruby on Rails and other web applications. Mark Bernstein sees the success of the publication of Getting Real as a watershed moment for self-publishing on [...]

I like the dynamic words of simply7 by Deena Larsen. It’s billed as a Flash treatise on the nature of language in electronic poetry. The words in this piece reflect words more closely to the way they behave in our minds than we are used to seeing when we read a text. Words don’t hold [...]

I’ve been following the updates to Paper Moon, a web comic by Gwen Rachel Stanley. It’s about the life of a young woman on the homefront during World War II. It’s very good, managing to convey a feel for what the details of daily life for a woman might have been like, in that time [...]

I’ve just started reading Meanwhile, by Jason Shiga. Meanwhile is a branching comic inspired by Scott McCloud. It looks like it will be a lot of fun to read. To begin with, the protagonist knocks on the door of mansion because he needs to use the bathroom. The mansion is filled with dangerous inventions, such [...]

I filled out a form, and an amazing 3D Face Generator returned a 3D image of my head.

When I stumbled across Jim’s Flash Bestiary, I felt like a kid in a toy store. Jim’s got examples of circles and kaleidescopes, natural phenomena and fractals, physical simulations, oddments, mazes and labyrinths, fun with text and classic games. His classic games includes Flash implementations of Asteroids, Frogger and Pong. His physical simulations includes a [...]

John Holbo on The Valve, in Electra Press – Will Work For Whuffie, part II, urges academics to “get over the paper fetish in the right way“. That way is to become a gift culture on the web.
The groves of academe are well suited to be exemplary Creative Commons. But there is no guarantee [...]

Now you can make your spam into a work of art. Forward a spam email to spam@spamrecycling.com. You’ll receive a link to your personal spam recycling Flash web app. You can get as artistic as you want. When you’re satisfied with the way it looks, you can have the spam recycler email a screenshot to [...]

Check out Non-Duality Cartoons, short, punchy comics with humorous takes on philosophical and mystical themes. I love these! Who can ponder cosmic subjects very long, without needing comic digestive aids? Not I. I found the link on Reality Carnival.

An artist named Zak Smith has illustrated each page of Gravity’s Rainbow. Check out his illustrations on The Modern Word Presents: Zak Smith’s Illustrations for Each Page of Gravity’s Rainbow.
So I illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow– nobody asked me to, but I did it anyway. Most of the pictures are drawings– ink on whatever paper was lying [...]

From blog maverick: Think the Internet will replace TV ? Think again. The gist of this post is that TV will continue to be delivered like TV for a long time, because it will take a long time for there to be enough bandwidth to deliver TV to computers across the nation.
I wonder if [...]

I just got done reading Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders. It was a very interesting blog article entry about the differences between the way that Pandora and Last.fm work. Steve Krause compares Pandora’s workings to nature and Last.fm’s to nurture. Pandora treats musical attributes like melody and lyrics as genes. It [...]

In the same spirit as books like The Science of the X-Files and The Physics of Star Trek, the California Science Center in Los Angeles is running a Science of Superheroes exhibitition. “Live the comics! Live the science!” exclaims the exhibition’s website. At this exhibition, you can learn how Bruce Banner’s emotions transform him into [...]

I like this pageflip Flash script. It allows you to grab page corners and drag them to simulate turning the pages of a book. At first, I thought I would stay away from things like this, because they seem to be trying to replicate the book-reading experience on the web, which requires more imaginative development [...]

I’ve decided to try the Tarquin Engine. I know ActionScript, but if the Tarquin Engine can save me some time, it’ll be worth it. I’ll have full access to all its source, which consists simply of a .fla file. I’m hoping that if it doesn’t allow me as much flexibility as I want (and it [...]

On the i-Anya blog, Angela Thomas writes that Second Life has spawned a mini Western filmed in the Second Life world, called Bells and Spurs. It’s always fun to watch movies that people make of game world events. My husband, Ken, an avid player of World of Warcraft, has shown me quite a few movies [...]

Ambiguities, puns, ambigrams, palindromes and hyperlinks are all likened by Christy Dena to quantum writing, in her post, Quantum Writing, on the WRT blog. The idea is that there are legitimate reasons for writers to deliberately choose not to pin down just one precise meaning in their use of a word or figure of speech. [...]

I like this slick technique for optimizing a Flash website for search engine placement, whilst simulataneously enabling non-Flash-enabled browsers to view it. Briefly, it goes like this. You lay out your page as if you’re not going to use Flash. Then FlashObject replaces this content if the user’s browser does’nt have the Flash plug-in and/or [...]

Derik Badman has begun to experiment with translating the concision of the haiku form into comics. His first attempt is here.

Last night, I started reading Stephen King’s new novel, Cell. I like the premise. People who use cell phones are often annoying. I read that the reason why they’re annoying is that their conversations are harder to tune out as background noise. Apparently, we can more easily tune out conversations in our environments if we [...]

Sandy’s Blog announced that version 0.3 of the Sandy Flash 3D API is coming soon. Some features from OpenGL may be added to it. It already incorporates some features from the Java 3D API.

In July, the Institute for the Future of the Book will release Sophie, which they describe as “an open-source platform for creating and reading electronic books for the networked environment”. The beta release will be available even sooner, for readers of the if:book blog. It will be interesting to see what Sophie allows a writer [...]

“Hypermedia art seems to follow a trajectory from the salon to the playground,” writes Mark Marino in his March 1st post on the WRT blog. He speculates about the reasons why, at the present time, children tend to comprise the audience that can best appreciate experimental works of hypermedia, digital fiction and poetry. Children are [...]

Kate’s speech in The Taming of the Shrew in V.ii is a complicated joke, like her speech in IV.v. It represents the culmination of the lessons she learned from the games Petruchio played with her throughout Act IV. Some of those lessons were intended to train her to direct her wit at others upon cue [...]

Shelley has often been criticized regarding his love life. Every student of Shelley is familiar with his capricious and insensitive behavior toward the loves in his life. However, what many students may not realize is that he was an inevitable victim of illusions, and that the only alternative was to give up on lust for [...]

One of the most appealing characters in the first book of The Faerie Queene is Satyrane, the bastard child of a lady who was ravished by a satyre. He grows up in the forest outside of all law and culture, learning nothing but how to cultivate and exercise his will to power. He tyrannizes over [...]

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, aestheticians debated about whether the Divine Horticulturalist created a neat and geometrical or a wild and irregular Garden of Eden. The question was of crucial importance to them, because the nature of nature was regarded as the philosophical underpinning for the nature of everything that people should [...]

“The Maids” by Jean Genet is a play not given to a conventional plot breakdown. It is designed to repeatedly dissolve audience perceptions as soon as they are formed. Mirrors are the dominant feature of the play, both physically and metaphorically. The characters, two maids and their Madame, serve as mirrors for each other. They [...]

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems very enigmatic at first. The more one dwells on it, the more it seems suffused with tragedy. The vision of the death-pale kings, princes and warriors is haunting to the imagination. The cry, “La belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall,” coming from their starv’d lips in the [...]

Goethe’s Faust is a mythic projection of a man torn between Western dualisms, arising from the mind/body split, that have both philosophical and psychological dimensions. Mephistopheles, who functions in the text as Faust’s double in many ways, represents the side of these dualisms that is more associated with the body. Just before the poodle that [...]

The Bostonians is almost like an allegory of the battle of the sexes. Olive the feminist and Basil the male supremicist engage in a battle of ideology, the battleground being Verena’s heart and mind. Despite Verena’s long indoctrination into feminism by Olive, Verena abandons her feminist commitments to surrender to Basil, a man she knows [...]

The last of Malory’s Arthur tales, “Le Morte d’Arthur,” could be regarded as the tale that deconstructs all the preceding tales. The very codes of conduct which made Arthur and his Round Table powerful are depicted backfiring at an amazing speed. As power deconstructs itself, we are shown the hidden and unacknowledged weakness which was [...]

This isn’t a new post in the Design by Fire blog, but it’s the first time I’ve read it. I loved it. It gave me an oh so emotionally satisfying laugh, in addition to educating me about web design. (I may use CSS and elastic layout these days, but I don’t give every link a [...]

After writing the post about RSS, Libraries and Good Reading Lists, I was starting to wonder what kind of technology might exist out there to allow me to have my own reading list feed on my own blog. Then last night, I just learned of a personal book collection cataloging site called LibraryThing. It allows [...]

I read something in The Webcomics Examiner this morning that resonated with me as a truth about new media on the web.
“Webcomic creators and readers are always going on about how freeing the web is”, wrote Mike Meginnis. “…But for all the benefits of this freedom, there are also very real dangers. It takes genuine [...]

A book about timing in comics is being serialized in three parts on Newsarama. Called Timing, it is being authored by Joanna Estep. I got news of it by way of Scott McCloud’s blog, The Morning Improv. It’s a very quick, entertaining read which is, appropriately enough, well illustrated. I got through the whole thing [...]

Mark Bernstein had an interesting point to make about RSS and libraries. “RSS is primarily a method for spreading the word about changes, sharing new developments among people who want to be notified,” he wrote. “This seems at cross purposes to the needs of libraries, since libraries collect and preserve. Libraries want, above all, a [...]

Corvus Elrod wrote a very thoughtful and well-argued post regarding a debate on the difference between experiencing a story and playing a game. Much of his argument hinges on his definitions of “story” and “narrative” and the distinctions between these two terms. He also makes the point that even a static story is always really [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to do sophisticated real-time 3D programming in Flash, now you can. There’s now an open-source Flash 3D API called Sandy available to the Flash coding community. Currently in its second version, it’s based to an extent on the Java 3D API. Downloads, tutorials and demos – as well [...]