Author: admin

I confidently asserted to my friends who make virtual reality games that:

With VR, you can’t see the other person having fun. You can’t see the person-having-fun and the fun-squirting-experience at the same time.

It will take a lot longer for people to believe the fun is there.

It will take a lot longer for people to see The Thing and say, “I gotta get me summa that!”

Will I ever be able to watch a Youtube and understand VR fun? See a video clip on the news? Watch over a guy’s shoulder at work?

So. Here’s how my friends confidently and effectively refuted my assertion.

https://youtu.be/qYfNzhLXYGc
Virtual Reality – SteamVR featuring the HTC Vive

 

And, in the course of the VR discussion [learned disputation on a BBS], the assertion ‘This will revolutionalize education’ was made, and confidently refuted. By youtube.

This Will Revolutionize Education

It is so convenient to have friends to set you straight.

More on the theme “Games in the NY Times”. Two interesting articles in the last two days.

When Dungeons & Dragons Set Off a ‘Moral Panic’

http://goo.gl/tb5IX1

The print article is of interest in itself, but of more interest is the 13 minute video piece at the top of the article. Called a ‘Retro Report’, “a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their reverberations.”

Interesting as a form of new video media embedded in old print media, and as an attempt to take retrospective looks at things that were ‘hot’ news in our ‘not-so-distant-pasts’.

For example… remember this?
http://www.retroreport.org/video/nuclear-winter/

 

… also, in the NY Times magazine, a feature on Minecraft.

THE MINECRAFT GENERATION: How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching millions of children to master the digital world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html

Nice article. Wastes a lot of time trying to make the subject respectable by reference to the developmental virtues of playing with wooden blocks. But otherwise, ‘gets it’, and succeeds in presenting the essential delight of Minecraft in the lead.

I also give them props for making their own NY Times Minecraft world, and sharing it. And telling the reader…

To play, you’ll need a computer with Minecraft and a child who’s familiar with the game. Once you have those things, just log on to the nytmag.hypixel.net server (your child will know what this means).

FEATURED WORLD: New York Times Magazine & Christoph Niemann
https://goo.gl/U0zzGk

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-new-york-city.html?emc=edit_th_20151018&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=36673453

The Lonely Death of George Bell
Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, some alone and
unseen. Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising
amount of activity. Sometimes, along the way, a life’s secrets are revealed.

Long. Detailed. A pilgrimage through the people, processes, and systems that follow a solitary, unmarked death in NYC. Told with a storyteller’s ear for drama and suspense. And, if you are patient, a measured, graceful resolution.

• Read the article, then, at the bottom, notice an interactive icon in the margin indicating a link to display reader comments on the article, and the current number of comments.
• Click on this icon, and discover that NY Times curates the comments into three classes: 1. NYT Picks, 2. Readers’ Picks, and 3. All.
• When I initially finished the article, I was reluctant to go to the comments, having come to anticipate with horror the experience of diminishing returns. I WANT to see how people have reacted… want to passively share their responses… but the character and presentation of social responses to internet discourse varies like telephone call-ins, and I don’t want to diminish my pleasure in the piece.
• I am so grateful that NY Times has chosen to filter and present comments first that will contribute particularly well to the conversation. How much I wish that all social media had such careful, graceful curation.

I typically am overwhelmed by the bounty of absorbing articles in the New Yorker. I accept my fate. I can’t keep up.

So imagine my surprise when the NY Times recently has doubled… nay, trebled… my heavy burden of delicious reading. And to make it worse, the web presentation of their articles is simply flabbergasting.

So. This is the future. An inexhaustible burden of delicious journalism calculated to keep me from the light of day. And a new standard of online journalism to measure by.

I offer a selection of links of the recent amazing articles, and their delectable treatments.

Gary Shteyngart, an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR, spends a week at Four Seasons hotel in New York, eating fancy food and guzzling expensive wine, and watching Russian TV, trying to answer the question…

“What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/out-of-my-mouth-comes-unimpeachable-manly-truth.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0

 

A far-too-intimate look at the young Alex Honnold, a ‘free climber’, without ropes, planning for a first-ever free-solo of El Capitan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/magazine/the-heart-stopping-climbs-of-alex-honnold.html

 

A writer who cheerfully admits that he never plans anything, that he loses stuff all the time, like his passport, and doesn’t bother to sort out his driver’s license before flying to Newfoundland for his NY Times writing assignment. This is a very different sort of travel writing through the eyes and mind of a very different kind of travel writer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html

 

A portrait of New York City through the eyes of all sorts of New Yorkers, who use the currency of memorable walks to tell their personal tales in a way that brings the sense of place of New York to life in its people’s footsteps and voices. This article is a particularly excellent example of how an intuitive and comfortable sequence of images and texts tells a story in a style perfect for the web reader.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/22/magazine/new-york-city-walks.html?smid=tw-nytmag

 

52 places, each illustrated with a large-format photograph or video, and with a few paragraphs to excite the imagination. And the 52 featured places are now followed by a new ‘Place of the Month’ selected from reader suggestions, to keep this journalistic travel destination alive. [This abandoned boat just happens to sit right next to the Dancing Coyote Cottages on Tomales Bay, in Inverness, California, where Pat and I frequently spend time in the spring savoring the delights of Point Reyes National Seashore and the beaches, hiking trails, and restaurants of Marin County.]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/11/travel/52-places-to-go-in-2015.html?placeId=readerschoice&smid=tw-nytimestravel