Author Archives: James Crowley

WorldCat’s new canonical URIs are ugly and stupid

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 – 13:13:44 +0000

WorldCat is now permanently redirecting straightforward, hackable identifier-based URIs, to new, absurdly long canonical URIs . This means that a link to something like: http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780060817084 now becomes: http://www.worldcat.org/title/marley-me-life-and-love-with-the-worlds-worst-dog/oclc/58431841 Besides being longer and uglier, the new canonical URI forces a loss in semantic precision. It’s no longer sensible for me to reference multiple editions of the [...]

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Implementation methods in interactive fiction

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 – 15:06:20 +0000

Emily Short has an interesting post charting the “whole gory evolution [...] of my implementation strategy”. Useful comments follow about the more general programming issues, and both Andrew Plotkin and Mike Gentry comment on their own implementation methods. (As it happens, I was in a few of the same undergraduate Classics classes as Emily Short. [...]

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Actually, that wasn’t as cathartic as I’d hoped.

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 – 00:10:16 +0000

Quote of the day: [W]hen you get to the point where you see watching Zombie Lake as some kind of solemn obligation, it’s a circumstance that bears some investigation. That’s Todd of Teleport City, part of the latest roundtable from The B-Masters Cabal. I’ve been reading B-movie reviews from these folks for years—hell, I still [...]

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A bad week for screenwriters

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 – 16:02:25 +0000

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009). Blake Snyder (1957–2009). John Hughes (1950–2009). Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) and Blake Snyder (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) were very different writers, but each was a craftsman with a family history in showbiz. (Schulberg was the son of a studio head; Snyder did voice work as a child for his [...]

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I Broke Twitter

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 – 11:46:52 +0000

Just went to use Twitter for the first time in months (I don’t even follow people, except through Google Reader), and the site is down from a DOS attack. Oh, well.

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