Elijah Meeks's Blog, page 5
January 11, 2010
Quest for Glory Fan Art
Not the kind you're expecting, but rather watercolor interpretations of AGDI's remake of the classic Sierra On-Line 16-color sequel to the only briefly named Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero. Now, before you scoff, I know the artist and she's eminently capable of producing more detailed work, but the goal here was to recreate the sense of 320×200 resolution with limited colors in the style of Persian miniatures.
Having Tea with the Enchantress Aziza
The ending scene with the sultan
The...
December 16, 2009
Beautiful Prezi
Prezi is a presentation creation package that advertises itself as the living presentation tool. All the cool kids at DAC09 were using it, and it's particularly appealing because it allows you to embed swf into the presentation, so maybe we've finally got an awesome presentation tool that can put a rest to the one that Tufte so despises.
To demonstrate, here's my own Prezi from DAC09, for my paper "Scholarly civilization: utilizing 4X gaming as a framework for humanities digital media":
November 18, 2009
Son of the Great River Nominated for a Cybil Award
I found out over the weekend that Son of the Great River was one of the nominees for the 2009 Cybils in the Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy category. I'll put up a more detailed post later that gives me a better chance to express how excited I am by this news.
November 16, 2009
The Emergent Majesty of Dwarf Fortress
. . . . . . .
. . @. . D
If . . . . . makes you quiver in your boots, but maybe you're no longer so worried about suffering Yet Another Stupid Death and instead you wish you could get together some friends to assemble a ballista and shoot the damn dragon, then you're Dwarf Fortress material.
As an aside, if you have no idea what that @ symbol is supposed to be up there, then there's not much I can do for you. Back to Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress is a Rogue-like virtual life simulator...
October 23, 2009
The Visual Display of Knowledge
How would WOPR describe a recession? I suppose a little like this. There are collections of creative visualizations like Data Beautiful and theorists like Edward Tufte from whom we can draw rules for the visual display of information. But how do we use creative (visual) expression of knowledge to portray complex, deep and novel theoretical claims? If I have new scholarship and want to convey that new scholarship to my colleagues, is there a time when the best method of conveying that...
October 15, 2009
We're Still Far Away From a True Image Search
Years ago I'd mentioned to a friend how someone should create an image search based on images and not on phrases. So I could put in a picture of a Ding Tripod and get all sorts of images that somehow shared visual similarities with Ding Tripods across the world (Even if the image name was J00001.jpg or someweirdmayanthing.png). Just played around with Google's Similar Images search, expecting that the folks who just handed 30 million books to Stanford had finally gotten it. They haven't. ...
October 10, 2009
Craigslist is Dying?
Unlike the earlier fear that Wikipedia is on the decline, this one seems serious. Outsourcing bogus Craigslist ads is a staple of sites like Rentacoder, and even with Craigslist experimenting with account verification via phone, it doesn't seem like it'll be enough. Of course, Craigslist has other problems, but it's this structural one that might kill it. Imagine a world where every spammer can create a phony ad…
October 9, 2009
The Underculture
Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper? Yeah, maybe.
Because while you've been desperately trying to keep up with the mind-shattering connectedness of Facebook and Twitter, an entire culture based on shows, books and, well, tropes you've probably never heard of has sprung up, organized itself and managed to co-opt the very classics you've neglected to read. Didn't realize the Epic of Gilgamesh has elements of a Zombie Apocalypse in it or that the Anenid has anything in common...
October 6, 2009
Bipolar Blogposter!
As a note to my fan(s), I'm going to break the triforce and try to maintain my off-the-wall and primarily socially-oriented, web-enabled posting at Seven Lions while donning the Digital Humanities Guy outfit and posting on the more academic stuff over at HASTAC, where I'm a HASTAC Scholar (The pay isn't so great, but you get low-level membership into the Illuminati, so it's a career builder). So if you want to read my critique of current Digital Humanities projects, you'll have to look
September 11, 2009
Wikipedia Propaganda Posters
Rather than use some kind of creative title, with allusions to timeless pieces of art, I decided to go for the lowest-common denominator, because I think people need to spend a little less time talking about Wikipedia and a little more time creating subversive works based on the implications of its status as the first Internet-enabled global cult of disinformation.
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