Steve Ersinghaus

As I write this big budget cuts are coming and will hit Connecticut Higher Ed pretty hard and, of course, everyone else. Indeed, slender funds will hurt much of my plans for the coming years on the subject of hyperdrama and hypertext literature.
It’s been bugging me that nationally the country has yet to be [...]

The relationship between today’s paper Courant and the digital version is interesting. The digital version pretends that the paper doesn’t exist and the paper is full of stories about Tribune Co cuts that will see 25% cuts in staff and a trimming of an already spare version.
The corporate news model never worked. It’s [...]

We’ve talking a lot about narrative distance this week (and last week). August Wilson has a neat example of this in his play, Fences. Here’s a chain:
1. Troy and Cory clash at the end of the play after building tension between them.
2. While not immediately linked to the above, but critical to it, [...]

Lots of interesting conversation and work at Hypertext 08. It’s going to take a few days to recover from the travel and the amount of ideas passed about.

The Tunxis Summer Mash-Up is a two-week intensive program designed for high school students interested in combining their creative talents with contemporary technology to explore the world of digital storytelling.
Students will produce three short films: a self-portrait, a documentary, and a work of fiction. Each of these projects will be mentored by faculty members who [...]

Roger Travis has an interesting set of activities up. I wonder if he wouldn’t me borrowing some of it.
Unit 1. The bardic occasion, then and now (A, B) (3 weeks)
* Activities: (reading) Iliad 2, Odyssey 8-9, Lord, Singer of Tales; (gaming) Play a level or quest three times, preferably in [...]

John Timmons sends a link to Gamasutra’s Hamlet game challenge.
This week’s challenge is: Design a game that teaches Shakespeare’s Hamlet using only original text as dialogue.
Anyone is welcome to participate, and professional developers are encouraged to provide feedback and guidance to the GameCareerGuide.com community via its forum.
To suggest your own solutions, read the complete [...]

Briefly considering the issue of those who saw the invention of the desktop and those who grew up with them as appliances.
And to keep the juices going, I think I’m going to write a poem for every Carianne piece posted here. Some catch-up to do.

Hide G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg’s Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader is now out from MIT Press. I’m sure Lonnie (in whom I see the influence of Porcellino) will be interested in this.
Heads up from GTA.

John’s put up a link the recent Frontline, Growing Up Online on Tunxis New Media.
I have yet to check it out but there’s lots to talk about.

In semantic and social web news, information control–how to get all those feeds into an “online” service and to manage even more, typically via the metaphor of the bookmark–continues as the rush. Twine may be the answer to all these troubles. Or maybe not.
On the platform of the web, it seems to me [...]

I’ve added a “record correction” to my Doninger post.
Thanks, Andy.

Why is it that the spaces I pay attention to are filled with hypertext and the tools, such as Gimcrack’d (could someone check the iphone on this one? Um, Jesse?), Hypertextopia, and now the wall outside my office at work? This is a good thing.
Thanks Susan for the links.
One genius of Storyspace is its editor, [...]

I honestly don’t understand why Vista would be such a complex problem with all the time for testing and development.
I just don’t get it.

I find this post by Ben Vershbow at if:book on hypertext strange and worrisome. It starts with comment on Jeremy Ashkenas’ web tool Hypertextopia and then dips into generalization and the condemnation of a class of objects.
He writes:
The site [Hypertextopia] is gorgeously done, applying a fresh coat of Web 2.0 paint to the creaky [...]