Latest news with #CalebMadison
The Verge
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The Atlantic is making a big push into games
Daily puzzle games are seemingly everywhere right now, and starting today, you'll be able to add a new stop to your puzzle rotation: The Atlantic. The publication is launching a new hub for its growing game offerings, including already available games like Bracket City and Caleb's Inferno Crossword Puzzle, as well as some new puzzles. You'll be able to access the hub on both the web and in The Atlantic's app. Caleb Madison, The Atlantic's director of games, gave The Verge a demo of most of the games available in the hub ahead of today's launch: Bracket City, which The Atlantic licensed earlier this year, requires you to solve clues nested in brackets that eventually resolve into a fun fact about that day in history. Stacks, a new game, is kind of like Tetris meets Wordle, Madison says. You have a bank of words that you have to place in the correct order, on top of letters already on the board, to form other words. In Fluxis, another new game, you try to figure out words that build off the previous word and incorporate some kind of characteristic. Madison showed me an example of needing to build an adjective off the word 'checkerboard' — he went with 'arduous.' Caleb's Inferno Crossword Puzzle, which is already included in the monthly Atlantic magazine and available online, is last game Madison showed me. Caleb's crossword is a narrow rectangle instead of a square, but as you move farther down the puzzle, the clues get more difficult to solve. Madison doesn't necessarily see The Atlantic's games as replacing your visits to other daily puzzles. 'I think people have a pretty ravenous diet for new games, so I don't think coming to The Atlantic precludes any of these other amazing games that are at The New York Times or Apple News or LinkedIn,' Madison says. 'What I feel like The Atlantic has to offer that's different from those publications is a little bit more of a bespoken, artisanal aesthetic.' Madison also tries to bring an 'aesthetic narrative component' to games to help them feel 'immersive and special.' Bracket City, for example, has some city-themed elements sprinkled throughout, like the 'fan mail' email being mayor@ Like with The New York Times, some aspects of The Atlantic 's games will only be available if you're a paid subscriber. Bracket City and all of its archives are free. The full archives for Stacks, Fluxis, and The Atlantic 's daily mini crossword will be behind a paywall, however; nonsubscribers will only have access to the three most recent puzzles for those games. All of the Caleb's Inferno crossword puzzles are exclusive to subscribers. Madison says he has 'a lot of plans' for more games, including long-form games of some kind. 'I'm trying to make no assumptions as to what that would look like and just forge forward creatively to see what a more layered day-to-day experience would be like.' He didn't want to give anything specific away, but he says, 'I am excited to innovate in the game space and bring unique and authentic, long-form game experiences to The Atlantic users and to people online.'
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Brilliant Stupidity of Internet Speak
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: 'Financially, whatever happened in July can't happen again.' For whatever reason, the people of the internet saw one man's budgeting struggles as a blank template for their own posts, which got stranger and more ornate as they went on—until we reached what, for me, was the post of the year: 'What happened to my ankles tonight mosquitologically can never happen again.' 'Mosquitologically'—it's so good. Over and over, we come up with amazing things to say. That is why I felt moved earlier this year to write a defense of what some call 'brain rot' language, a type of internet-inflected speech full of grammatical oddities and references to memes. I called it both mind-numbing and irresistible; when I talk the way that people talk online, I feel a little dumb, but also funny and current. Sometimes, these novel internet phrases—it's giving; if you even care—are the best way to express what I'm thinking, and so it would be counterproductive and masochistic not to use them. But long before the internet, there was spoken slang, the result of various cultures' and identity groups' innovations. This type of language originated in the margins, my colleague Caleb Madison wrote. In 14th-to-17th-century England, many people were pushed to the fringes of society as the country transitioned to capitalism. Over time, they 'developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant' to allow them to speak freely in front of law enforcement or rival groups. Throughout The Atlantic's history, writers have kept a close eye on American slang; sometimes, they've fretted about it. An un-bylined piece from a 1912 issue bemoaned the state of American conversation and the laziness of 'canned language' (apparently too many people were saying 'It is a benediction to know him' at the time). Similarly, last year, the writer Dan Brooks argued that the internet is awash in 'empty slang,' and that the country is facing a 'language crisis.' The Brooks story distinguished between valuable slang and useless slang, a distinction that also came up in another un-bylined essay, titled just 'Slang,' from 1893. The writer posited that people use slang 'whenever one's own vocabulary falls short of the demands of one's thought.' They argued that good slang replaces 'inadequate' existing words, while bad slang is meaningless. Good slang is valuable, in the end, because it solves a problem—'Every new word which has a new meaning of its own, and is not a vain duplicate or pedantic substitute for a sufficient old one, enriches the language.' This is not to say that all linguistic innovation should receive a warm welcome. Over the years, The Atlantic has also covered plenty of bad slang and uninspired turns of phrase, of which the internet has produced oodles. In a 2014 issue of this magazine, the writer Britt Peterson unpacked the linguistics of 'LOLspeak,' a formerly common internet dialect that has thankfully fallen out of favor in the years since. It originated from 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' cat memes—a relic from a simpler and cringier time in online history. LOLSpeak was 'meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cat's brain,' Peterson wrote, but 'ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast).' The rise of social media in the mid-2010s led to all sorts of experiments like this (remember the 'Because Internet' phenomenon?), many of which were similarly so annoying that they couldn't possibly last. It's very obvious to say that language is always evolving, whether through misunderstanding or appropriation or relentless posting. But not all change lasts. We keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and what usually does are the words and phrases that are instantly intelligible, useful, and simply funny. 'Mosquitologically': Why didn't we have a word for that? Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Brilliant Stupidity of Internet Speak
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: 'Financially, whatever happened in July can't happen again.' For whatever reason, the people of the internet saw one man's budgeting struggles as a blank template for their own posts, which got stranger and more ornate as they went on—until we reached what, for me, was the post of the year: 'What happened to my ankles tonight mosquitologically can never happen again.' 'Mosquitologically'—it's so good. Over and over, we come up with amazing things to say. That is why I felt moved earlier this year to write a defense of what some call 'brain rot' language, a type of internet-inflected speech full of grammatical oddities and references to memes. I called it both mind-numbing and irresistible; when I talk the way that people talk online, I feel a little dumb, but also funny and current. Sometimes, these novel internet phrases— it's giving; if you even care —are the best way to express what I'm thinking, and so it would be counterproductive and masochistic not to use them. But long before the internet, there was spoken slang, the result of various cultures' and identity groups' innovations. This type of language originated in the margins, my colleague Caleb Madison wrote. In 14th-to-17th-century England, many people were pushed to the fringes of society as the country transitioned to capitalism. Over time, they 'developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant' to allow them to speak freely in front of law enforcement or rival groups. Throughout The Atlantic 's history, writers have kept a close eye on American slang; sometimes, they've fretted about it. An un-bylined piece from a 1912 issue bemoaned the state of American conversation and the laziness of ' canned language ' (apparently too many people were saying 'It is a benediction to know him' at the time). Similarly, last year, the writer Dan Brooks argued that the internet is awash in 'empty slang,' and that the country is facing a 'language crisis.' The Brooks story distinguished between valuable slang and useless slang, a distinction that also came up in another un-bylined essay, titled just 'Slang,' from 1893. The writer posited that people use slang 'whenever one's own vocabulary falls short of the demands of one's thought.' They argued that good slang replaces 'inadequate' existing words, while bad slang is meaningless. Good slang is valuable, in the end, because it solves a problem—'Every new word which has a new meaning of its own, and is not a vain duplicate or pedantic substitute for a sufficient old one, enriches the language.' This is not to say that all linguistic innovation should receive a warm welcome. Over the years, The Atlantic has also covered plenty of bad slang and uninspired turns of phrase, of which the internet has produced oodles. In a 2014 issue of this magazine, the writer Britt Peterson unpacked the linguistics of 'LOLspeak,' a formerly common internet dialect that has thankfully fallen out of favor in the years since. It originated from 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' cat memes —a relic from a simpler and cringier time in online history. LOLSpeak was 'meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cat's brain,' Peterson wrote, but 'ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast).' The rise of social media in the mid-2010s led to all sorts of experiments like this (remember the 'Because Internet' phenomenon?), many of which were similarly so annoying that they couldn't possibly last. It's very obvious to say that language is always evolving, whether through misunderstanding or appropriation or relentless posting. But not all change lasts. We keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and what usually does are the words and phrases that are instantly intelligible, useful, and simply funny. 'Mosquitologically': Why didn't we have a word for that?
