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Mapping the Human Condition
by Maria Popova What the empire of love has to do with the intellect forest and the bay of agoraphobia. We love maps . There’s something about cartography that lends itself to visualizing much more than land and geography. We’ve previously looked at how the London tube map was appropriated as a visual metaphor for everything from The Milky Way to the Kabbalah, and today we turn to seven cartographic interpretations of the human condition, using the visual vocabulary of classical maps to interpret various facets of the human psyche — a genre that came of age during the late Renaissance, when it became known as “sentimental cartography.”
With every year that passes, modern games become more and more 'cinematic', while the games industry itself increasingly takes on aspects of the Hollywood model. We're talking blockbuster production values, inescapable marketing, assumed sequels, and bankable franchises. Talent from all over the film industry now has ties to the world of video games, from Mark Hamill performing as a voice actor to Clint Mansell composing music.
It's Time for Games to Move Beyond 'Cinematic' - PS3 Feature at IGN
Daniel Chandler Modality and Representation Whilst semiotics is often encountered in the form of textual analysis, it also involves philosophical theorising on the role of signs in the construction of reality.
Modality and Representation
Media Leading the Way in the Evolution of Modern Media
In the near future, Gawker Media will move " beyond the blog " by way of full site redesigns, which will provide a new framework for advertising products, including a prioritization of video and allow for a resurgence of "the scoop." Over the past several years we have seen how breaking news scoops and in-depth features drive traffic spikes , but those stories can also become lost in the traditional format that most blogs currently use. New York Times' Nick Bilton likens our transformation to the progress and evolution of the newspaper over the past century when "editors figured out that readers didn't want more news, but instead wanted a more concise culling of news." Early last week, founder Nick Denton directly addressed our readers in a manifesto about the upcoming redesign, heralding the 2011 template as "the most significant change in the Gawker model since the launch of Gizmodo and Gawker in 2002."For too long , the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content. Let's divide content into two broad groups. Content without well-defined form ( Formless Content ( Fig. 1 ) ) Content with well-defined form ( Definite Content ( Fig. 2 ) )
Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod
About The Licenses
Our public copyright licenses incorporate a unique and innovative “three-layer” design. Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. We call this the Legal Code layer of each license.
The Story Sucks
A stoic reflection on the futility of existence, Samuel Beckett's famously dull tragicomedy - in which two men wait endlessly for someone that never arrives - shares something in common with videogame stories that, as an industry, we never seem to address: The characters don't change. Sure, they change appearance, gun, location, allegiance, job, and, more often than not, from being alive to being dead. They modify everything except the one thing that counts, the one thing we might remember them for long after the credits have rolled: themselves.
by David Hinkle on Jan 10th 2012 12:30AM She's certainly not the first celebrity to do some voice work for the GPS industry, but she's by far the coolest. Joining the likes of Snoop Dogg , Homer Simpson and Yoda is GLaDOS, available in a new fan-made custom voice pack over on Reddit .
Let GLaDOS guide you to your destination, you monster
Features - Ken Levine on the Storytelling Craft of BioShock Infinite
The original BioShock stands as a sterling example of environment-as-character. The city of Rapture, with its mad scrawling on walls and atmosphere of deteriorated grandeur, told the story as much or more than the audio logs salted throughout the game, or the radio conversations with supporting characters. The strongest character in the traditional sense in BioShock , city founder Andrew Ryan, was mostly a disembodied voice. Irrational Games is trying something different in BioShock Infinite . The floating sky-city of Columbia will be a character as much as the submerged city of Rapture before it, as a unique environment is one of the defining characteristics of a BioShock game.Media, Transmedia, and a Girl Named Alice
Ever heard of Inanimate Alice? If so, do you understand what all the fuss is? Quick preface (and a sort of warning): I’m borderline obsessed with media as a rhetorical vehicle, and find its increasingly addictive nature hugely important as digital presence bleeds into physical boundaries, especially in the field of education. If you’re less curious, you may want to do some skimming. This is about as brief as I can get it.In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra -- his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on -- and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Gay Talese - Best Profile of Sinatra
New Details About The Last of Us - IGN
Minor tidbits emerge about Naughty Dog's latest. If you've been coming to IGN over the last 10 days or so, then you've already seen plenty of coverage about the upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive The Last of Us . After the game's initial reveal , we saw some screenshots , and even asked you what you thought . Then, Sony finally showed us the first trailer for The Last of Us , something we analyzed in both text and video form. Now, thanks to USA Today , a few more concrete details about the game have emerged. For starters, the article notes that The Last of Us is "expected for PS3 in late 2012 or early 2013," meaning that we won't have to wait very long for the game.I'm hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred? The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut.
Working for the Web's Big Content Machine
As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before there was Twitter , Facebook and Google+ (click to follow us), Europeans living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with their own version of information overload. Emerging postal systems, the proliferation of short letters called billets , and the birth of newspapers and pamphlets all pumped unprecedented amounts of information — valuable information, gossip, chatter and the rest — through newly-emerging social networks, which eventually played a critical role in the French Revolution, much like Twitter and Facebook proved instrumental in organizing the Arab Spring. These historical social networks are being carefully mapped out by scholars at Stanford. Above, we have Anaïs Saint-Jude painting the historical picture for us.