Sunday, 5 October 2003
alex in the paper, and on the web
It seems our local newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, sent a photographer and a tape recorder to my kids’ school during school picture day last month. My younger son, Alex, is quite a clothes horse, and had demanded to wear his “wedding suit” (from my sister’s June wedding) that day—which made him an excellent subject for the newspaper cameras.
We didn’t know any of this, of course (“Anything interesting happen today?” “Nah.”). Until this morning, when we found Alex’s picture in the paper. Turns out it’s also on the web as a multimedia presentation (requires Flash).
slow but steady progress on paper
I clearly won’t make the deadline of having it done today, but I’ve made a lot of progress on the paper, and am confident that I’ll have a reasonably well-thought-out version to post online by the time I get to the conference (11 days).
Here’s the quote from Bourdieu’s book Homo Academicus that I’m using to begin the paper:
Not hard to see the connection to the blogosphere, is it?
you are likely to be eaten by a grue
Last night on the way home from dinner at Weez’s house, Lane and I got into a conversation about early computer games, like Adventure and Zork. My first introduction to computer games was Hunt the Wumpus, which I carefully typed into my father’s TRS-80 computer back in the late 1970s, and saved onto our state-of-the-art cassette tape drive, but Zork was the first game I really loved. I bought pads of graph paper, and laboriously mapped out all of the various tunnels, paths, and twisty passages. I told Lane about Zork, and how it was like being part of a story—he’s so much like me that I knew that would appeal to him immediately.
I got so caught up in talking to him about it that I missed our exit on the highway. “Uh-oh,” I said. “That was our exit.” His reply? “It is dark. There might be grues.” I laughed so hard we nearly missed the next exit, too.
So tonight we set out to try to find a copy of Zork to play on our computers—and we were successful. It’s not OS X native, but it works. And it was truly wonderful to sit on the couch, one child on each side, re-exploring the world I’d spent so much time in twenty years ago. They shrieked with delight in the Loud Room, when each command was repeated back to me as an echo. “Pick up the platinum bar.” “Bar…bar…”
After we’d played for a while, Lane asked whether it would be possible to find a copy of Adventure to play, too. I wasn’t sure that would be as easy to find…after all, “adventure” is a pretty common word. But Google came through for us, and we quickly found Rick Adam’s wonderful site, “A history of ‘Adventure’”, complete with downloadable versions.
It’s a testimony to the power of these text-based games that they held the interest of my media-saturated six and nine-year-old sons for forty-five straight minutes—and would have for much longer if I hadn’t realized it was getting late and sent them off to bed. Tomorrow I’ll install Zork on their Macs, and buy them some graph paper.
I feel like a kid again. :)
