Ren'Py is an engine that supports the creation of visual novels, a form of computer-mediated Story Telling. It supports a movie script-like syntax that makes creating simple Computer Games easy, while still being customizable and extensible by advanced creators. With no additional work by the game-maker, it supports features expected of all visual novels, like loading, saving, preferences, and rollback. http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page (more)

Andrew Gelman: How to think about intellectual diversity in academia? The case of astrology and Dr. Oz. So, Columbia University has a lot of problems right now. For one thing, it seems we’re falsifying or misrepresenting some of the statistics for our college ranking. Also, our most famous professor offers tips on “What Your Astrological Sign Can Tell You About Your Health.” (more)

Collection of cards, DeckOfCards (more)

Hypertext crank http://www.lord-enki.net/ (more)

An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving.[1] The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult.[2] Colossal Cave Adventure is identified[3] as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

A visual novel (Japanese: ビジュアルノベル, Hepburn: bijuaru noberu), often abbreviated as VN, is a form of digital semi-interactive fiction. Visual novels are often associated with and used in video games, but are not always labeled as such themselves.[1][2] They combine a textual narrative with static or animated illustrations and a varying degree of interactivity. The format is more rarely referred to as novel game, a retranscription of the wasei-eigo term noberu gēmu (ノベルゲーム), which is more often used in Japanese.[3] Visual novels originated in and are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006.[4] In Japanese, a distinction is often made between visual novels (NVL, from "novel"), which consist primarily of narration and have very few interactive elements, and adventure games (AVG or ADV, from "adventure"), which incorporate problem-solving and other types of gameplay. This distinction is normally lost outside Japan, as both visual novels and adventure games are commonly referred to as "visual novels" by international fans.... Fan-created novel games are reasonably popular; there are a number of free game engines and construction kits aimed at making them easy to construct, most notably NScripter, KiriKiri and Ren'Py. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel (more)

Transparent Society, but directed toward those with more power (BigWorld). (more)

Book by David Brin about what he sees as a false conflict between Security and Privacy. (more)

Going beyond InterWiki linking across WikiSpaces. (more)

Tim Bray walks down memory lane. I look at the recent drafts coming out of the XPath and XQuery group, and for damn sure these things are going to give the programmers of the world the tools they need to pick apart XML instances and retrieve from XML databases (in fact, the programmers are getting way more than they need, but that's another debate). But I suspect the number of people who are going to be able to use XPath/XQuery directly is even smaller than the number who can do SQL, which is already a pretty small number. So we're obviously going to need some sort of user interface (GUI) for ordinary people to use. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Pat Motif had some useful ideas to contribute to that design process.

John Ohno: The end-game of the voice UI (like that of the chat UI (chatbot)) is the command line interface. So, it’s useful to take cues from currently-existing good CLI UX. (For instance, look at the differences between zsh & command.com, and the trends in the evolution of borne-compatible command shells since 1970.) (more)

I’m C. Thi Nguyen. I used to be a food writer, now I’m a philosophy professor at University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. My first book is Games: Agency as Art. It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 Book Prize. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. https://objectionable.net/

see Market Segment, Positioning Statement, Framing, Branding, Business Strategy, Focus, (more)

Gordon Brander: Wiki as a Commons. Wikis are like the Minecraft of tools for thought — very simple, very open-ended. (generative) (more)

Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American philosopher and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory,[1] a philosophy which suggests the synthesis of all human knowledge and experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber

Spiral Dynamics (SD) is a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies. It was initially developed by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan based on the emergent cyclical theory of Clare W. Graves, combined with memetics as proposed by Richard Dawkins and further developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A later collaboration between Beck and Ken Wilber produced Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi).[1] Several variations of Spiral Dynamics continue to exist, both independently and incorporated into or drawing on Wilber's Integral theory.[2] In addition to influencing both integral theory and metamodernism,[3] Spiral Dynamics is noted for its applications in management theory and business ethics,[4][5][6][7] and as an example of applied memetics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

Triggering a change in the real world (magick) by jiggling people's mindset via meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic (more)

Futurism process associated with Shell Oil and the Global Business Network. Most common structure is 2x2 considering effects of whether 2 macro trends/events come true in the future. (more)

When your computer "corrects" your writing/typing without asking you. Could be spelling error (typing), grammatical error, or something even fuzzier.... (more)

Dan Hon: s07e22: Cynical, me? ARGs are still around! (more)