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Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester

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Apparently these are two famous and physically attractive celebrities who are popular enough that lots of people will wade through lots of words in order to look at pictures of them doing things that celebrities do. Which presumably does not usually include talking about the federal budget.

Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the [...]

Culture | Current_Events | Journalism | Rhetoric

Sorry, but I am done hearing about the “Cruise from Hell” story. Done.

Screen Shot 2013-02-19 at 5.18.06 PM

Okay, so yeah. One of these describes a very unpleasant, completely ruined vacation. The other sounds like hell.

Cyberculture | Design | History | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology | Usability

From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely [...]

Books | Culture | Education | History | Humanities | Rhetoric | Science

Seeing and Believing (“Knowledge for Children”)

Patience and hard work are also attributes of hunters, peasants, and Benedictine monks. What sets scientists apart is their rigorous observation of natural phenomena, allowing patterns to emerge that can be expressed in abstract formulae, which, in turn, can be applied to produce identical results any time they are reapplied in identical conditions. To “do [...]

Books | Culture | Essays | Humanities | Literature | Rhetoric | Writing

Elizabeth Gilbert Versus Philip Roth: Is Writing Torture?

That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for [...]

Academia | Culture | Education | Essays | Government | Literacy | Rhetoric | Writing

A warning to college profs from a high school teacher

My students did well on those questions because we practiced bad writing. My teaching was not evaluated on the basis of how well my students did, but I felt I had a responsibility to prepare them for the examination in a way that could result in their obtaining college credit.

I would like to believe [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Games | Media | Rhetoric | Writing

Procedural Enthymeme with Inform7

Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without [...]

Amusing | Culture | Current_Events | Rhetoric

I Gotta Get the Bread & Milk

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Fired Applebee’s Waitress Writes About Tips, Fairness

This didn’t even happen at my table. The note was left for another server, who allowed me to take a picture of it at the end of the night.

Someone had scribbled on the receipt, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?”

I assumed the customer’s signature was illegible, but I quickly started [...]

Aesthetics | Amusing | Culture | Design | Media | Modding | PopCult | Rhetoric | SciFi | Weirdness

PULP-O-MIZER: the custom pulp magazine cover generator

I don’t know what the text I wrote means, I just like it.

Oh, phooey. I tried to save my image with my iPad, but it didn’t work. Well, it was fun anyway.

PULP-O-MIZER: the custom pulp magazine cover generator.