Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.

I am ready for ruricomp and the digital countryside. Sick of losing my internet-senses every time I leave town. Bring me my green fields of 3G, spimey trees, arboreal AR and grass that twitters the temperature.

~ Warren Ellis (via plsj)

I am not quite ready for this. But I am ready to see more writers ask & explore what a ‘digital countryside’ means for their characters and stories, rather than continue writing the urban as if it exists in the present while trapping the rural a century back. Not necessarily — or not only — by writing about these technologies in their stories, but by creating characters whose mental and cultural spaces are contemporary and networked even when they aren’t in the city. Because, you know, folks in the country have Facebook, too, and tractors are satellite-guided.

So far, the best example of this I’ve read is Peter Angus Campbell’s Invisible Islands. But Tom McCarthy’s C, which I’m reading just now, seems so far to explore related terrain.

“Pixeljack Forest / Where Cursors Come From” by Nathan Pyle (via)

I tried to watch Patricia McInroy’s “In/organic Transmissions” at qarrtsiluni but a problem with the embedded video gave me this error message instead:

For a moment I thought this was the video, because it indeed shows “a conversation that is not taking place,” and the natural engaging the artificial. Makes me wonder if this is the best option for Vimeo’s error message — seems a bit self-defeating, doesn’t it? Because even as one conversation doesn’t take place — the networked one — another conversation does, face-to-face as our pixelated trio turn away from the inoperative screen toward each other and toward the landscape around them.

(PS The real video is working now, so check it out.)

This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.

In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are better than their movie.) Newspapers become twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.

~ Kevin Kelly

When heirs decide to bury a web creator’s body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?

If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would’ve survived long enough to fall into the public domain.

For works created on the web, however, the only thing keeping them around is an active publisher or a copyright license that permits others to reprint the material. A copyright holder who wanted a web site to disappear completely could take it offline, demand its removal from all archives and never allow republication.

~ Why Leslie Harpold’s Sites Disappeared (via kfan)

@ Can you grow cress in a keyboard? (via)

“Your grandparents Google,” @ Next Nature

When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.

~ Ted Kaczynski

…when the next generation of e-readers arrives, what’s going to happen to the Kindle or Sony E-Reader you replace?

If what’s happening in Europe is any guideline, it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors,cables and similar e-scrap.

@ E-Reads

As I’ve said many times, who and what get excluded from design visions are just as interesting and important as what and who are included. Western philosophers have long held that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest or least fortunate members (in other words, who we ignore or abandon) and contemporary notions of cultural citizenship rely precisely on how well we interact with people who are different from us.

During my doctoral defense, the examiners were quite concerned about a design imperative that, at worst, seemed to condemn rural spaces and people to irrelevance and, at best, reinforce some of the current divides that actually serve to disadvantage both “sides.” I found myself ill-equipped (and unwilling) to provide an argument in favour of predominantly urban, or even exurban, computing. And I began to think more seriously about what might constitute non-urban or rural computing.

@ the happily resurgent PLSJ