As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the high points of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’.
Meanland
Meanland: Developing online audiences
Meanland’s first video blog post sees Lisa Dempster, Director of the Emerging Writer’s Festival, discussing how an arts organisation might best become an online digital hub for the community it serves and why this is an essential audience-building tool.
Meanland: Beautiful statistics
A few visits later to websites of a couple of global curators, and it seems the thing to pull information together to make understanding a breeze, with superb bursts of colour or line drawings or typography or even emblems of some kind or another, is the Infographic.
Meanland: Editors, trolls and lovers
Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who…
Meanland: For and against a digital avant-garde
One of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of…
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Meanland: Copyright or wrong?
According to a recent article by Good magazine about 10 percent of American university students plagiarise from Wikipedia. Others, about 8 percent, copy from Yahoo Answers and Slideshare. These figures are based on a recent study released by Turnitin, a…
Meanland: The obscure object of e-reading desire
I’m delighted that less sycophantic views of the career of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs are being voiced – here on Overland, and also in the Guardian – and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one…
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Meanland: Travels with my iPad
I can’t imagine leaving home without a book. I’ve been travelling overseas recently. A good part of travelling and preparing to travel has always been about the book. Of course there are the novels and travel guides read before leaving,…
Meanland: The internet – friend or foe to the small magazine?
The spectre of the internet has been haunting Australian literary journals for well over a decade. But a few recent events seem to have transformed this spectral haunting into a brutal hunt. According to The Mercury newspaper, Tasmanian Premier Lara…
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