We’re kind of in the eye of the storm, between a whirlwind summer and the routine of the academic year, and I really couldn’t disagree with my wife when she reminded me of this project. I remember using my original iPad 1 to sketch out the measurements for the wood I intended to buy in…
I didn’t expect a pseudo-Elizabethan rendering of Star Wars to be great literature, but the R2 soliloquies add an unexpectedly amusing new narrative layer. So far, I can say the “Chorus” character is overused, too frequently walking onstage and delivering lines of exposition that ought instead be woven into the expanded dialogue between the characters.…
Moodle is a free course-management tool that many schools (including mine) use to manage the online components of courses (including computer-graded quizzes, discussion forums, and the submission of online papers). The tool is powerful, but the interface offers a bewildering array of options, so that casual users are often dismayed by how many checkboxes it…
Sample, improved lyrics: “An old man turned 98 /He won the lottery, and died the next day (from a severe paper cut from his lottery ticket).” Similar:Why Fears of Fake News Are OverhypedFacebook seems to have made changes that…CultureIn June, 2001 it seems I only blogged three times…I’m not sure what else I was doing…
Jon Negroni creates a meta-narrative to connect every Pixar movie, using Boo as the still point in the turning universe. Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies…
Because apparently I am not already nerdy enough, the universe presented me with this version of Star Wars, written in the style of a Shakespeare play. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars® | Quirk Books : Publishers & Seekers of All Things Awesome. Similar:I was part of a nerve-racking, thrilling attempt to break a world record I…
The students who are, in the first few weeks, more interested in their handheld devices than in what I am saying in class are usually the same students who are failing the course around midterm. Access to these devices does not cause students to fail; rather, the student’s attention to the device is an outward…
The headline is hype. How about “Lego faces are getting more diverse?” That would be just as true, and less misleading. Many of the recent sets come with heads that you can rotate — a happy face on one side, a scared or angry face on the other side. So it’s also true that Lego…
It’s rather hard to believe it took them so long. DC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital Comics. Similar:The Maquis, Part 2 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 21) Sisko must stop the diss… Rewatching ST:DS9 Hudson and Sisk…EthicsColossal Cave: The Board Game by Arthur O'DwyerThe kids and I enjoy nerdy…
Below is a snippet from “Texty Cloak of Darkness,” which aims to use prose conventions to emulate game-state changes and alternate endings (in a medium designed to be linear). Since our encounter, such as it is, has already begun, it may as well happen in a place. The foyer of the opera house is where…
I am working on some conference papers that touch on coding as a liberal art. While reviewing classics, like Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line and Knuth’s approach to “Literate Programming,” From the insightful and quirky “A Mathematician’s Lament,” by Paul Lockhart. A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he…
A pleasant little success story. “TEI” is the “Text Encoding Initiative,” an international effort to define and standardize the digital representation of texts. [I]n 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of ISO5218:2004 to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being given as 1 for male, 2 for…
A thoughtful response to “Creative People Say No.” Here’s a different idea about how creativity and success works: you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re…
The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do. “I think the challenge for me is to use…
“Iffy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. “Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion in five…
“Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. “Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion…
Great example of satire. Blogging this so I can find it the next time I need a contemporary example (and when I want to start a class discussion about gender). You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play…
My Ouya arrived — a Kickstarter-funded gaming console. I have never been a console gamer. Lately, I haven’t even been a PC gamer — when I have the time I would much rather create in Blender 3D or, in the past year or so, make a video. But the principle behind the Ouya — that…
Be still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk — which has inspired books, art and fashion — hinges on the idea of a future in which we use steam, rather than oil or electricity, as our primary source of energy. Still confused? Think 19th-century fashion and technology, but applied to a futuristic world. Or check out bing…
Very insightful…. A reminder that even the much-praised Dove “we are exposing their advertising techniques” campaigns are just that — campaigns, designed to sell a product. (The parent company of Dove also owns Axe, which is blatant in its use of demeaning sexual stereotypes.) Brave, strong, smart? Not enough. You have to be beautiful. And…