Culture Desk: My Life in Pencils

Devotees of the Blackwing had been paying up to forty dollars apiece for them after they were discontinued, in 1998. I received a box of twelve Blackwings, and I got hooked. The lead is ungraded, but it is definitely softer than a No. 2, and very expressive. The Blackwing motto is “Half the Pressure, Twice…

Context for Hayles, My Mother was a Computer (Ch 3 & 4)

My undergraduates are working their way through N. Katherine Hayle’s My Mother Was a Computer. They told me that they benefitted from the notes I wrote the other day, so I’m continuing the effort.   In Chapter 3, Hayles reminds us that the “worldviews of speech, writing, and code” are not merely theories, they are…

10 Things You Can Learn From the New York Times’ Data Visualizations | Visual.ly Blog

10 Things You Can Learn From the New York Times’ Data Visualizations | Visual.ly Blog Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations…

Paris Mayor Combats Noisy Nightlife by Deploying Roving Squads of Mimes

This is both creepily terrifying yet kind of awesome, in a drunk-whisperer, Pied Piper, passive-aggressive arrogantly Gallic yet obviously better than pepper spray and riot gear kind of way. You have encountered a “Pierrot de la Nuit,” or Night Mime. These “nocturnal artistic intervention squads” are officially being launched this weekend in 15 Parisian neighborhoods.…

Cool Infographics – Blog – 10 Tips for (journalists) Designing Infographics

Cool Infographics – Blog – 10 Tips for (journalists) Designing Infographics. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…

They Might Be Giants fans recreate ‘Apollo 18’ track by track — as text adventures | The Verge

If you were to draw a Venn diagram including fans of They Might Be Giants and those of interactive fiction (“text adventures” to the layperson), chances are there would be some significant overlap. From that overlap springs Apollo 18+20: The IF Tribute Album, which is in fact not an album, but a collection of interactive fiction commemorating…

The Death of Hypertext?

 “Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There…

My daughter likes Machinarium.

We finished the game over the weekend. Delightful. via My daughter likes Machinarium. – YouTube. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations…