Sweet Lenten Regrets
This Lenten evening / Your orphaned feast occasioned / My penance haiku.
Industriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime.
The girl amusing herself on our 70m commute to rehearsal, as we listen to the LibriVox “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.” Similar:Another #neovictorian control panel for a personal #steampunk project. #design #aesthetics…AestheticsNew Video Game's Second-Person Shooter Mode Features Someone Just Describing Game To YouI’m introducing text adventure games to …AmusingWorld Trade Center Literary and Cultural Reflections…
Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K. (Frank Rich, Vulture)
“Oklahoma! was greeted as jingoistic entertainment in 1943, perhaps in part because a wartime audience didn’t want to see that the musical’s celebration of the platonic ideal of Great America was qualified by a brutal acknowledgment of how cruelly America can fall short.” –Frank Rich
Elmo? Yes, I do mind. I learned far more from Bert.
Like plenty of people my age, I grew up watching Sesame Street. As a parent of kids born in 1998 and 2002, the new-to-me dominance of Elmo was notable (and annoying) when I showed Sesame Street to my kids. We purchased a handful of videos and games, and regularly cycled through the videos and games…
Me Checking into My #4C19 Conference Hotel Room
I’ll just mark a few more papers before heading out for a bucket of ice. Similar:Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’In a two-hour conversation with our colu…Current_Events‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves In literary circles, the practic…CultureThe new marshmallow test: Resisting the temptations of the webThe Stanford marshmallow…
I was part of a nerve-racking, thrilling attempt to break a world record
I drove the girl and myself to the Palace Theatre at 6am to audition for Children of Eden, the show that Stage Right announced at 5:30am that morning, cast and rehearsed throughout the day, and produced the same night at 8. Â Hovering over the stage, a projection counted down the 14 hours and 30…
PAC-MAN: The Untold Story of How We Really Played the Game
A fascinating study of the thinginess of a video game. Put in your quarter, hit the one-player button and grab the joystick. All you have to do is move Pac-Man through a series of tight cornered mazes, trying to eat all the dots and fruit on screen while also trying to out-maneuver a group of ghosts…
Wonderfully Detailed Tribute to 1970s British TV Show Space: 1999
“A middle aged geek” puts it well: “Utter nonsense, yes, but very well-made nonsense.” The incredibly detailed miniature effects and feature film production design of Moonbase Alpha make the original Star Trek’s balsa wood & cardboard sets look like a fifth grade play. While the story of ‘unknown magnetic radiation’ causing crewmen at the base…
In 2019, I have a college student who annotates readings like this!
I asked students in my online “Dystopia in American Literature” class to demonstrate “whylighting” — not just highlighting a passage, but adding a note explaining why it’s worth noticing. If this were an in-person classroom, I’d just walk around the room and glance over their shoulders to confirm that they’re dong the work. In this…
Wonderful Retro Control Panel in Seton Hill University Dining Room
I gather the purpose of these consoles — maybe a dozen, scattered on pillars throughout the school’s Lowe Dining Hall — was to call for service? I seem to remember seeing some text on at least some of the consoles. I’m curious! Similar:Beard Typeface GuideChristian Goldeman felt compelled to mat…AestheticsHow exactly do bridges bridge? How…
Pop Culture Showdown with My Retro Daughter
The girl tried to weird me out with a video of the Latvian “blblblblbl ah ah” guy. I retaliated with Devo’s “Whip It” and Max Headroom, then finished her off with “Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.” Similar:Kirk's manly, sensitive advice to young CharlieIn popular culture, Captain Kirk from th…CultureNovel defined: a…
I just finished “Beyond Eyes” and I think there’s something in my eye.
My 20yo son, who plays a lot of Star Wars battle simulations, was very taken with the music and story. I had read about this game when it came out, so some plot points were spoiled for me, but I still teared up at the end. You can find it for a very reasonable price…
Unity Normal Problems (Importing an object from Blender 2.8b)
I had a complex model that I created in Blender 2.79, and imported (with some tweaking) successfully to Unity 2018 a few months ago. When I switched to Blender 2.8 and Unity 2018.2, I found big problems with my model. Blender 2.8b tells me that all the normals are exactly what I expect — the…
Lonely Among Us (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 6) Crew-posessing spark roams and a droid cosplays Holmes, that’s a-homecloud
Conflict between two species who petition for membership in the Federation turns out to be the B-plot. On its way past a mysterious optical special effect, the Enterprise picks up a strange glowing spark via the sensor array, and as such entities tend to do in Star Trek, it starts wreaking havoc. We get a lot of exterior shots of the ship, some alien character designs that would have worked better in background shots, a glimpse at a sensor relay room we’ve never seen before (though it’s pretty obviously a redress of Engineering), and some glimpses of the Crushers at home.
When she’s grown and flown, I will miss the thick deposit of glitter in my back seat.
When she’s grown and flown, I will miss the thick deposit of glitter in my back seat. Similar:Dress rehearsal of The NutcrackerPersonalSiblings gotta sib.Personal"A Mushroom at Last… A Mushroom Forever"I asked my 10yo why she was moping. “…AmusingGetting there.Getting there.PersonalFall 2017 Grades Submitted. No professional tasks until Tuesday. Bliss!PersonalA pleasant Independence Day photo shoot with…
Carolyn featured on Steel City News for The Nutcracker
The credit at 0:30 should read “Carolyn Jerz.” (She’s used to people spelling it “Caroline”.) Similar:Christopher Robin made for a pleasant family outing.PersonalThe Staying Power of "A Christmas Carol" — Dennis Jerz, for WAOB Audio Theatrehttps://youtu.be/_US-PnhJ5FU What mak…BooksDo the Best Professors Get the Worst Ratings?To summarize the findings: because they …AcademiaCopspeak, "the past exonerative" tense,…
The girl will be performing as the Dew Drop Fairy in the Dec 8 evening performance of The Nutcracker. @westmorelandsymphony @laurelballetperformingco
Similar:Finished Reading "Fibble," Book 4 in "Heck: Where Bad Kids Go."I finished reading to my daughter the fo…BooksHappy Flag Day! All flags matter, but nobody needs to say that out loud.Happy Flag Day! All flags matter, but…AestheticsMy parents holding a picture of the family I took with my first SLR camera in 1987.PersonalStage Right Theatre…
Today’s Computer Displays Distort Pixel Art Designed for 1980s CRTs
As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
Adding details to a clip-art silhouette, for a project that will be released in a day or two. #design #aesthetics #modding
An important but small detail in a Blender3D project I just finished is this trench-coated character. I started with a clip-art silhouette, but it looked pretty drab. Thanks to a little pixel-doctoring in The GIMP, I touched up the center image. The schlubby pant cuffs on this guy don’t fit the character, so I smoothed…
Anime Treatment of Star Wars
I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing. Similar:I went down fighting.PersonalRemembering…