From the Chronicle -- an interesting power play for control over intellectual property:

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

Just in case Matt Barton is too shy to mention it himself, his recent book Dungeons and Desktops has been slashdotted.

I think I'm going to be able to attend this interactive fiction event at the Unversity of Maryland:

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

Today's Chronicle had an article on the Open Humanities Press. One of the board members is Stephen Greenblatt, who as MLA president wrote an influential letter on the coming crisis in scholarly publishing.

Imagine that -- unfolding in real time -- you find a perfect real-world example that, with eerie clarity, embodies almost all the concepts you've devoted yourself to teaching and studying in the past ten or so years.

Excerpt from my review of the new Persuasive Games release "Fatworld" -- an ambitious piece of "procedural rhetoric" that aims to leverage the computer game genre to deliver a series of important points.

I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

...but REAL kid's computer would have the "design pet" button right next to the "hamster" button, and the "HP Trivia" button right next to buttons devoted to the smiley and frowny icons. So I learned from a story about The Laptop Club, a group of kids who crafted their own laptops from construction paper.

Name: Mandy
Age: 8
How often do you use a computer? Five times a week.

Verbs gush from the Blogger.com home page right into your brain stem.

Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs! Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact! Take a tour! Name your blog! Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

The latest issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly features an article in which I analyze Will Crowther's original source code for "Colossal Cave Adventure," and includes dozens of photos from my recent trip through the real Colossal Cave.

The whole article is available on the Digital Humanities Quarterly website (link below). Here's the full abstract: