An influential Islamic group successfully protested against the video game Faith Fighter, pictured above and also after the jump, claiming that it was offensive to Muslims, Christians, and just about all of humankind. The game, made by Italian design company Molleindustria, features such religious figures as Jesus, Mohammad, and Ganesh duking it out martial-arts style. I think the Globe and Mail describes the game best:

In the game Faith Fighter, caricatures of Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh fight each other against a backdrop of burning buildings. God attacks with bolts of lighting and pillars of fire while the turbaned Muhammad can summon a burning black meteorite.

Which is hilarious, just because the whole thing sounds so dumb. Molleindustria claims that the game was meant to “push the gamers to reflect on how the religious and sacred representations are often instrumentally used to fuel or justify conflicts between nations and people.” But the game’s website declares, “Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun!” Uh, OK.

Whatever. The point is, some Italian company made an offensive and silly game, religious groups understandably got pissed, and the game had to be revised to be not so offensive (now there’s a big black dot over Mohammad’s head, you see). So while Molleindustria has gone on to make Faith Fighter 2, I’m left here with a nagging question: how far is too far in storytelling? Read more »

I was going to post this in our Lit Drift Twitter account, but it’s just too good not to share on the main site. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, arguably the Internet’s most whimsical quarterly journal, has a syllabus up for a fake new course for Internet-Age Writing, called ENG371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era. Planned lectures include such topics as “Reading is stoopid,” “The Kindle Question,” “140 Characters or Less,” and “I Can Haz Writin Skillz?” Also note that attendance is “unnecessary, but students should be signed onto IM and/or have their phones turned on.” Delicious.

Coincidentally enough, I was recently messing around in my Scrivener, experimenting with structure and new styles of writing, and found myself trying to write a scene purely in text/IM speak. Uh, it shouldn’t come off as a surprise that it really sucked. Won’t be trying that again…until, of course, some more accomplished writer does it and somehow makes it work, in which case nose will be back to (digital) grindstone.

As an aside: I actually had to put this post title through an LOLspeak Translator because I just don’t know any better. Fail?

Read the syllabus in full here. [McSweeney's Internet Tendency via Bookninja]

Glancing through the NY Times film reviews last week, “Goodbye Solo” caught my eye. Set in Winston-Salem, a Senegalese cab driver and a washed-up old man develop an unlikely friendship as they traverse the roads of North Carolina. I was born in Winston-Salem and went back there for college, so the novelty of seeing W-S on the big screen at the Angelika Film Center in Soho was an opportunity I could not let pass me by. As it turns out, I was rewarded for my curiosity. Read more »

Amateur animators and procrastinators alike will love DoInk, a free web tool that makes it simple and fun to spend countless hours creating sophisticated animations. Find out more about DoInk, and watch a couple of animations (including an extremely impressive one made by me, ha), after the jump. Read more »

Did you know that Edgar Allen Poe considered himself not just an accomplished writer but THE BEST CRYPTOGRAPHER EVAR??? He loved to dedicate his genius to solving ciphers, puns, riddles, you name it, and he was known to boast that “nothing can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” Oh, and he also liked to remind people that “Edgar Poe” is an anagram for “a God Peer.” Nice.

In 1841, Poe challenged readers of Graham’s Magazine, where he was an editor, to solve a devilishly difficult puzzle a friend had sent him. He promised to post the answer in the next month’s issue, but flaked (could it be that he couldn’t solve the puzzle himself??). Today, The New Yorker is giving readers the chance to match wits with the self-declared puzzle master by offering that same puzzle. Read the text full of jumbled letters and numbers, and with the help of a few cryptic clues, find out for yourself if Poe was nearly as brilliant as he thought he was. [The New Yorker]

Is the theater world imploding? In a recent West End performance of A View From the Bridge, actor Ken Stott stopped the show to demand that a group of rowdy teenagers be removed from the audience. And Patrick Stewart apparently went ballistic on a fan waiting outside the stage door of Waiting for Godot, all because Stewart noticed the fan was trying to take a photo of the megastar during curtain call. Read more »

Check out IsReads, a biannual outdoor poetry journal that enlists volunteers to publish each “issue” by plastering the poems, printed on sturdy white paper, all over Baltimore, Maryland. IsReads favors experimental, playful prose–which probably reads either like it was written by an insane person to the people who don’t get poetry, or a tasty little morsel to the people who do. Anyone can submit poems via e-mail for consideration, and anyone can help publish the journal. Just contact the editors, and they’ll send back instructions and a PDF of the journal’s contents.

The journal’s emphasis on making poetry more accessible to the public has been hailed as something of a revolutionizing force for the languishing industry, but founder Adam Robinson has remained fairly modest. He says: “I don’t expect that by doing this I’m going to change anybody’s life. But for the ten seconds people stand in front of it, I hope they just kind of wonder about poetry again.”

Photos and poems after the jump.  Read more »

Submitted by Stephanie. This looks like an interesting project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it:

SOCIAL (VIRUS) Gossip and rumor. Truth and lies. Storytelling is the social glue that binds us all together. Sure, some things are better left unsaid, but without stories, who would we be?

We, the NURTUREart Curatorial Students at Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, are curating an art exhibition that will explore the topic of social relationships as defined by the stories we tell each other, about ourselves and about others. We are wondering: Is all gossip bad gossip? Is all publicity good publicity? How are we united or divided by the stories we tell? How are stories told and how do we spread them? Are stories about the people in them, the people telling the story, or the people hearing it? Who is hurt, Who benefits?

We are calling for artistic entries – in any medium – that respond to this theme. We welcome ideas that respond to this theme in ways that we haven’t considered and continue to open up our inquiry. Read more »

Imagine if Florentino Ariza from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera had professed his love for Fermina Daza through e-mails instead of letters. Or if Homer’s Odysseus had a Twitter account (Oh, wait…). Or if Romeo and Juliet could text message each other:

Juliet: Fakn death. C U Latr.

Romeo: gud plan.

It’s reasonable to assume that if Romeo and Juliet really did have cell phones, they could have just texted their way through all their star-crossed struggles and misunderstandings. And ergo, no story. Matt Richtel of the New York Times points out that while technology may be doing wonders for the fiction and publishing industries, the fiction itself is having a hard time adjusting. Read more »