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Digital world

Illustration of laptop as a slot machine
Summer 2018

Betting your digital dollar

Vast, haze-filled casino floors where rows of flashing colors light up expressionless faces endlessly feeding coins into a machine. Men sporting Hawaiian shirts rake piles of plastic chips across green felt tabletops, all seeking the hedonistic rush of hitting a jackpot seemingly just out of reach.

This is gambling as many of us know it. However, the combination of luck, wagering, and a chance at a payoff is far from a modern concept. As far back as the Paleolithic era, humans wagered on the roll of crude dice made from knuckle bones. Nonetheless, the staples of contemporary gambling—slot machines, card games, craps tables—may be considered … » More …

Winter 2017

Lit Bits: Electronic literature on the web

Redshift & Portalmetal” by Micha Cárdenas. Your planet is dying. You have an apparent choice: travel to the Ice Planet and start over, or stay and try to help. Every layer of this piece is rich with video, audio, and a textual narrative that triangulates between science fiction, philosophy, and a sort of future-tending Romanticism.

High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, an Interactive Poem was created and conceived by the High Muck a Muck Collective. You enter this gorgeously illustrated and written story by clicking on a lottery card–an appropriate visual metaphor for taking your chances on a narrative that determines itself as … » More …

New and Noteworthy
Spring 2015

New and noteworthy

 

Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era

T.V. Reed

Routledge, 2014

T.V. Reed, a WSU English and American studies professor, examines the impact of digital communication and the Internet on how we live.

 

Whole in the Clouds

Kristine Kibbee ’00

The Zharmae Publishing Press, 2014

Cora Catlin, the unhappy orphan protagonist in Kibbee’s debut novel, and her dog Motley discover the meaning of friendship and a magical world in the clouds.

 

Two Bits and Odd Days

Thomas A. Springer ’86

2014

Springer, a Tacoma high school teacher and creative writer, offers a selection of his poems from the … » More …

Summer 2010

Shall I Eat a Peach?

At the risk of sounding either shopworn (which I hope I’m not) or like a Luddite (my identification with said philosophy depending on the day of the week), the thing I’m most looking forward to in “retirement,” besides being able to focus full-time on farming and my craft, is being able to go as long as I want without having to stare at this computer screen.

Don’t get me wrong. This computer is a marvelous thing. Besides serving as a super-charged typewriter, it gathers all sorts of information, almost effortlessly, in far less time than that outmoded method of reading books and poring through abstracts … » More …