Author Archives: geoffreylong

Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and storyteller exploring transmedia experiences, emerging entertainment platforms and the future of entertainment as the Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios. He is an alum of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, a FoE Fellow with the Futures of Entertainment community, and a co-editor of the Playful Thinking book series from the MIT Press. His personal site can be found at geoffreylong.com.

Upgrades: The Realization of Magellan.

Thanks to a couple gigs finally paying off, and thanks to the Refurbished section at The Apple Store, I am at long last in a position to start realizing my dreams of a personal command center. This morning my new dual-2GHz G5 with 23″ Cinema HD display showed up via the FedEx guy, and I’ve […]

Bill Maher on the Bush 9/11 Campaign.

Following up on yesterday’s wish for someone to stand up and lay down the law, my good man Ken posted this yesterday, and I think it’s hysterical. In case you don’t read his blog (and why not?), I’m reposting it here: “And finally, New Rule: You can’t run on a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t run […]

Sometimes I don’t get Democrats.

So Cheney gets up there and basically says, “If you elect John Kerry we’re going to be attacked by terrorists.” (What he actually said was more vague, closer to “If this country makes the wrong decision in November, we’re more likely to be attacked by terrorists”, but what he meant was pretty clear.) And today […]

The wisdom of Jonathan Safran Foer.

In a

Responding to Matt.

Over at “How do you compile?”, Matt weighs in on my recent thoughts about digital storytelling. He takes me to task on my assertion that it may be more human to listen to others tell stories than to tell our own. I should have been more specific: I’m not saying that we don’t tell our […]

Hey, where’d the comments go!?

For those of you wondering why comments aren’t working at the moment, one of those comment-spamming jackasses decided to slam our server. We’re going to be upgrading to Movable Type 3.0 here sometime between now and next week, but until that happens comments are offline. Sorry about that.

Fitts’ law and other wisdom.

While surfing the exquisite Dustan Orchard’s 1976design blog this morning, I came across this post: Link presentation and Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ Law is a UI guideline that says: “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.” – Paul Fitts Tog goes into this more here. […]

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good: I’m about four hours away (I think) from being done with what is actually version 2.1 of a client project, but I’m thinking of it as the real 1.0. In other words, I’m almost to the point where I could dust off my hands and say, “Yep, that’s done.” The bad: I should […]

Not a bad Tuesday.

Any day whose media intake includes both Tori Amos and Quentin Tarantino is a pretty darn fine day.

Stupid, stupid Comcast.

I love Chicago. I really do. What I don’t love is the Comcast Internet service we’re getting out here. Back in DC, we didn’t have that many problems, but here in the windy city a gnat sneezes in Milwaukee and our ‘Net connection goes down. Grrrr. As a result, it’s 9 o’clock and I’m just […]