While everyone complains about the subjects their parents forced them into, I am in the dance studio every lunchtime. Dance gets me into school. Dance gives me something to pour my head and heart into. It gives me a feeling of belonging, creativity, security and freedom. | Then the bell rings and it’s back to Ohm’s…
You are invited to time travel to two art exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen: the Sir Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813 or the Shakespeare Gallery as it looked in 1796. These two Georgian blockbusters took place, years apart, in the same London exhibition space at 52 Pall Mall (it no longer exists). When Austen visited…
Before a school play, a principal worries parents will complain about all that lost test-preparation time. [T]his principal assumes I will be alarmed that my child takes a weekly visual art class, a dance class, and a music class. She is pretty sure I’m going to think there’s something fishy going on, that Real Learning…
This is nice, but what I really want to see is an Elizabethan-style revenge play featuring Clippy. December 9, 1968… in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links,…
Leonard exists in slow motion but lives in a regular speed world. When he discovers his office crush is getting transferred to Florida, Leonard decides he must somehow become regular speed to win her heart before she leaves town for good.
9 Photography Tips
Lighten Up — The Nib — Medium.
Sara Heffernan designed these wonderful visual-textual gags. Graphic Design Pun Cards on Behance.
Blogging this so I can assign it to my “Video Game Culture and Theory” class.This history of video game graphics is a walk down memory lane | Polygon.
In one of the most compelling chapters, “‘Others play at dice’: Friendship and Dungeons & Dragons,” Jeffery L. Nicholas offers several examples of friendships between characters and players in D&D (as well as friendships from Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, A Song of Ice and Fire, and his own life. “One reason Aristotle…
Victorians had to stay still for 3 seconds for formal portraits, which makes them seem stiffer than they really were.
“It’s sad, but my students don’t even have the supplies they need for an exercise as simple as depicting patriarchal oppression with a mannequin that has been painted orange, set on fire, and then doused with a bucket of warm urine,” said Robert Kessler, a sixth-grade art teacher in Cleveland, noting that his supply closet…
I wish I had time for cool stuff like this… only a month left of summer break for me, and my wife is going out of town Monday-Friday, so I’m both father and mother to the kids this week. Not much chance for playing with retro design elements, but I can at least save the…
Wonderfully weird retro pop art. Jon recalls his first encounter with the iconic Peter and Jane books: ‘Like many people of my generation, I learned to read with Peter, Jane, Mummy, Daddy and Pat the dog. As I struggled with the unfamiliar letters, my eyes where invariably drawn to the picture on the opposite page,…
“From a photographer’s perspective it makes our photography process more similar to the days of film, where you went out you did your assignment, dropped off your roll of film, and went off to do another assignment. Now you download your cards, color correct and caption it. It takes away from the creative process of…
Creativity alone does not foster innovation, nor do abstract scientific or mathematical concepts. Innovators also need to know how to render those creative ideas into working products that can be put into use. In order to bridge the chasm between abstract idea and utility, some educators are advocating for an expansion of the popular STEM…
My favorite: “Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.” —The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar.
Green and Larson both admit that even the most seasoned gamers might be disturbed when they realize they can’t simply “win” this level by battling some final boss or shooting at a group of hungry zombies. But this discomfort is part of the point — by allowing player to fail in a certain sense, they…
My father was a little distressed to learn that diagramming sentences was not a big part of my education. Learning Latin in high school was the best grammar education I ever got. After that, nothing about English (or, later, German and Old/Middle English) ever worried me. Most kids hated it. But for the kids who…
I took my daughter to an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed library summer reading wrapup party, where she threw herself into every craft table. Then she wore one of her creations as we went grocery shopping. Meanwhile, my son, who stayed home to watch another DVD lecture on superstring theory, took out the garbage without being asked. Today…