The plumber stomps the tiny mushroom headed foes who wobble towards him, trying to kill him but succeeding only if he’s completely careless. He bounces from one head to another, crushing a whole troop of them without touching the ground once. He is an efficient weapon, and these lowliest of enemies are no more than an inconvenience. Crawling through a maze of green pipes, the plumber realizes that he doesn’t believe the Devil made the turtles or their king, because that would mean the Devil also made the world and that he will not accept. He hopes he is on the side of good and decides that he must be. He is on a quest to save the Princess, and surely that is a good thing.

~ Mario’s Three Lives by Matt Bell, from Barrelhouse

The Landscape Change Program, at the University of Vermont, is a virtual collection of images that documents 200 years of Vermont’s changing face. We have thousands of views of Vermont as it was and as it is, online and free to everyone.

Placeography is a wiki where you can share the history of and stories about a house, building, farmstead, public land, neighborhood or any place to which you have a personal connection.

“There are an awful lot of people creating their own meditation spaces” in Second Life, said Hoch, sensing a patient need. “We will make some adaptations, but we also want to take advantage of the multi-use strengths of Second Life.”

Studies such as Hoch’s could draw doctors, patients, and money to Second Life, if they prove that therapies offered “in-world,” as Second Lifers refer to their realm, can be effective in the real world.

@ Boston Globe

As the boa constrictor of culture swallows the large, furry mammal that is the Web, you can see the lump traveling further down the alimentary tract, getting more fully digested day by day. How you feel about books explaining the Web depends on where inside the snake (oh, metaphor, don’t let me down!) you are.

@ Joho, presumably a flea on that large, furry mammal (making this site a single-celled fellow in the flea’s shadow?)

I don’t mind the headline hyperbole of Ultimate Blogs, but the subtitle Masterworks from the Wild Web drives me up a tree. As others have noted, the book removes all sense of linking from the blog posts collected within, and in doing so removes the “wild” from these texts altogether — there is no chance of the unexpected redirections, spontaneity, or dynamism that makes the web itself, and makes the blog an interesting (to me) medium. A book of blog posts is about as wild as a desktop Zen garden. It looks good, but all it really does is make you miss the real thing.

A metanovel is a computer program that tells stories that only a computer could tell, stories of such complexity of detail that only a computer could handle, stories with more flexibility — even reversibility — of events and characters than a human could manage. A metanovel time-sharing system tells a story to many people at once, no two of whom read the same thing, because they have each expressed different interests in the events and characters they want to hear about, and because they may each desire a different style of storytelling. And yet, among all these readers, there is but one story — the Metanovel itself — and each reader is only following those threads of the story that interest him.

@ Grand Text Auto

The Digital Livings project is finding out how writers are carving out professional careers in new media, starting with a survey of UK writers and expanding worldwide later in the year.

Which skills do new media writers possess? Where do they sell their work? What advice do they have to offer those wishing to follow in their footsteps?

(via if:book)

Alan Bigelow, creator of mynovel.org and pamelasmall.com, is remixing (and remediating) politics and culture at webyarns.com.

Trees, like almost all objects in virtual worlds, whether in video games or Internet social communities like World of Warcraft or Second Life, are enormously difficult and expensive to build.

(via PART)