Awesome. Robin has been saying for a while now that he’d love to have some sort of online hub for his local coffeehouse, so the hordes of laptoppers inside could communicate in digital space. Well, here you go.

It’s nice to see college a cappella get a little MeFi love.

I’ve got to strongly recommend the movie City of God, although I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it. (Ebert.) But there’s this: I kept a stiff upper lip all throughout the film. Afterwards, as I’m wont to do, I visited its IMDB trivia page. Then came the tears. That’s never happened to me before. (Watch the movie before you read the trivia.)

Are we seriously still talking about this? Pharmacists are licensed to cover a basic range of services, including providing emergency contraception. States should not license pharmacists who are unable for any reason to provide this range of services. They are welcome to develop an alternative licensing scheme for people who only sell drugs that promote the cult of life, or whatever. Just don’t call it pharmacy.

The form feels a little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-ish (in a bad way) to me. The tiny bit of agency that allows me to choose one path over a second one doesn’t, like, mind-crushingly alter my entire relationship with the text or anything. So read Same Day Test because it’s a good story, any which way you slice it.

The Google Sightseeing blog filters out the most awesome satellite images from Google Maps. Via Micro Persuasion.

Just after Robin posted this Gamespot link on storytelling and video games, I left for a vacation in Orlando and my parents’ dial-up connection, so I could not contribute a proper reply. Here it is.

My favorite text addressing the place of video games within the spectrum of art/literature is Ernest Adams’ lecture at the 2004 Game Developers Conference, “The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design.”

You have to remember that Adams is talking to computer game developers, not academics, so he’s reductive at best and flat-out wrong at worst. (You may have to struggle to trust anything he says after he begins by boiling the last 200 years of Western philosophy down to English philosophy — logical and deductive — and French philosophy — touchy-feely. Germans, apparently, need not apply. And of course, you forgot Poland.) But once you get over his sketchy broad-brushing of history, he makes some wonderful points.

Adams maps video game storytelling onto the timeline of modern literary storytelling, and essentially decides that we’re just exiting the classical era. This feels spot-on to me. As much as I love Final Fantasy IV, it appeals to me emotionally in the same blunt, soaring, epic way Beowulf does.

Video game storytellers of today, Adams says, are still coming around to the Victorian age:

Read more…

OK, this is going to be everywhere in approx. 30 seconds (in fact, too late), but it’s cool enough to be posted in here in the dim, dim chance you don’t see it in your travels through the Web.

There’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing since the start of the Age of Blogs about accuracy. How on earth do we trust anything we read on the Internet? Bloggers can say anything!

Just this year, there was a conference on blogging, journalism, and credibility.

Then there’s been some hand-wringing over the fact that you have to use phrases like “steady downward trend” to describe the recent credibility ratings of newspapers.

I’ve got a proposal.

Imagine: you come across an article on the Web purporting to be journalism or contain elements of journalism. So you cruise on over to StraightenTheRecord.org (or whatever) and you search for the name of the text’s author or publication. Up pops a screen listing all the corrections made on articles by that author or in that publication.

But you’re a tad underwhelmed. You had caught an error of fact in the document you were reading that isn’t listed on this page.

So you log in to the site and edit the record (it being some sort of a wiki), adding your correction to the stack.

Read more…

I’m not sure I understand what’s going on here, but I know it’s insane. (Via Steve Rubel by way of Dan Gillmor.)