Here are two posts from The Professional Site:
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Choose Your Own Adventure books kept me coming back to the public library daily as a kid and I would be willing to bet partly influenced my decision to become a librarian.
A friend of mine sent me this link a while back and it’s taken me until now to sort through all of the analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I hadn’t realized that as the series went on, there became less choices in the books. I have always wondered what it took to organize all of the pages to point to different places throughout the book. (I made a Choose Your Own Adventure radio show CD in high school, so I understand the effort on a smaller scale.) Check out this site for more of the math behind Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Also of note were the Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever. It makes sense that these types of books, ones where you jump around inside the framework of the book, came around during milestones in video game computing. (For my students that know how much I love video games, you should imagine what it would be like growing up on this game. Yeah, no 3D cards, just text.)
The Lone Wolf books were cool because they had a page at the end with random numbers scattered across them. This was to generate a score for your character’s skill checks and attacks. It was a book where you were the main character and it played out like a variation on a video game. You were supposed to close your eyes and point to one of the numbers, but my teacher would always get mad at me during silent reading time.
These books really grabbed my imagination because, no matter how hard I tried to predict where the story was going, it could always take a crazy turn. Some smart authors even put fake endings into the book to trap you if you were just flipping through the pages.
The worlds that these authors created I can still remember. That’s why the samizdat quote is so poignant:
It was the fact that after reading it you understood the logic of Gibson’s world. And that logic was portable to any new scenario you could dream up.
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Justin Bieber got his start broadcasting videos of himself singing on YouTube, getting the attention of a record label. Now Web 2.0 stuff is creating some trouble for that record label. James Roppo of Island Def Jam Records is being charged with a couple of misdemeanors, such as endangering the welfare of children. A riot of fans broke out at a mall appearance on Friday; five people had to go to the hospital.
James Roppo is accused of not helping out the police in handling the angry crowd. Here’s what one officer had to say about it, from the Associated Press article:
“We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” said Nassau County Police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith. “By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”
You want to do what you can to keep the fans safe. Those are the people that make a star famous. But I’ll admit it’s an interesting step in technology ethics by requiring someone to write a message on Twitter. Is that covered under the first amendment? Is this like yelling fire in a movie theater?
Semi-related posts: