New Media Studies Autoblog, Summer 07

Where stands literature in the age of New Media? Check out Urbis. Conceived in the mid 2000s, Urbis is a means for writers to kindle their craft as the New Media generation demands vigorous creativity and uniquity. Essentially, Urbis is a social network for writers to share and critique each others’ poetry and prose. But what makes this network unique is its complex crediting system.
Each new member is granted with a number of credits. And as one member uploads a piece of literature, another member can critique it. The critique will remain hidden to the intended author, who must spend an amount of credits proportional to the word-length of the critique. Credits may be received by critiquing another member’s literature. Again, credits are proportional to the word-length of the critique, so a longer critique yields a greater credit income. Abuse of this system has led to the implementation of some […]

Original post by humanisticmystic

Last week I had to turn in a paper for my Writing Systems of the World linguistics class, and my topic was ancient runes. In the Oxford dictionary, a rune is defined as 1) a letter of an ancient Germanic alphabet; 2) a symbol with mysterious or magical significance. So from 200 BC to about the 8th century, runes were a writing system that had a strong magical connotation.  Well, today I was reading Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince for the 468256 time, and one of the subjects at Hogwarts is Ancient Runes! I thought this was kinda cool because there is a strong sense of magic associated with ancient runes, and it is also a subject offered at the magical school.
Random, I know, but I find things like this interesting.

Original post by Ashley