Cause and Effect (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 18) time loop. Ka-boom. The Enterprise is trapped in a
Rewatching ST:TNG A smart, character-driven story that follows the crew of the Enterprise-D through a short time loop (about a year before Bill Murray did something similar in “Groundhog Day”). After a chaotic teaser that ends with the Enterprise-D blowing to smithereens, we get a routine Captain’s Log, a relaxed poker game where Crusher impressively…
Never use very. Write the word damn instead. Your editor will strike out the damn.
My new inspiration as I work on my syllabuses
I applaud you, person who, halfway through the job, asked, “Why am I drilling these handrails directly into the sidewalk when I can just stick them into the ground?”
Sights, Sounds, and Smells of Elizabethan Theater
Somewhere during my education I picked upon the meme that “Shakespeare’s contemporaries referred to ‘hearing’ a play, not ‘seeing’ a play,” and I regularly trot it out to emphasize how growing up in an auditory culture meant that the average Elizabethan probably got a lot more out of casually attending a Shakespeare play than the…
Blender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk Spacecraft
When my kids were small, at bedtime we had interactive “blimpship stories,” set in a steampunk world. I would set up the latest plot developments, each child would pick a character they wanted to focus on, and I would play the DM as we role-played for 15-30 minutes. These stories grew amazingly complex and developed…
He couldn’t get over his fiancee’s death. So he brought her back as an A.I. chatbot
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious artificial intelligence website allow him to speak with her once more? […] There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and…
That Class Where Stanford Profs Projected Hundreds of Zoom Students on a Video Wall
Of course, not all institutions happen to have a video wall that’s 32-feet wide and 8-feet tall. But Stanford already did, in its Wallenberg Hall. So the three professors reached out to the university’s director of classroom innovation, Bob Smith, to see what they could rig up. No matter how big your screen, Zoom can…
To meme, or not to meme.
Candyland is a masterpiece of game design (John Brieger unpacks the specific cultural context of this classic)
Partisan Pa. websites masquerading as local news threaten trust in journalism, new report finds
People with financial interests to protect and political axes to grind are funding websites that resemble local news outlets, with the express purpose of manipulating the attitudes of the general public. Journalists are far from perfect, and no human being is truly unbiased; however, there’s a big difference between responsible journalism that leans left or…
Texas lawyer trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a cat
A Texas lawyer accidentally left a kitten filter on during a video conference call with a judge and was unable to change it, eventually responding to a judge’s query about why he was being addressed by a digital feline by saying: “I’m here live. I am not a cat.” Later, the judge wrote: “These fun…
Figured out how to configure my iPad as an external monitor for my laptop. Much more efficient when working between errands at the mall. Ready for Spring 2021. (Finally!)
A masked, socially distant museum visit. So nice to get away from syllabuses and email for a day.
Ford built about a half dozen of these custom cars designed by Allegheny Steel. I’m not a car guy so I can’t place it beyond that.
My son just handed me my serving of noodles in the butter substitute container. Recycling.
Most Television From Before 2000 Is Trapped in the Uncanny Valley
Just as the technological innovation of the mass-produced book paved the way for the new storytelling medium called the “novel,” technological innovations that allow audiences to rewatch TV shows and binge-watch whole seasons have changed the whole medium of episodic video storytelling. (Babylon 5 did it early and did it well — but the article…
Sound Design and the Wilhelm Scream
Ahh-aaggh!
Motivation Amid Crisis (Autotrophic Bat)
As part of an independent study project, a graduating Seton Hill student wrote a blog about self-publishing her original collection of fairy-tale adaptations. She’s a double-major in creative writing and graphic design, and she freely adapted each story and illustrated each one in a different style. (She’ll be self-publishing her anthology soon, and I’ll certainly…
You’re Doing It for the Exposure!!
The Oatmeal on working for “exposure.”
In November 2000, I was blogging about the US Presidential election, mirrors, Arts & Letters Daily, and more
In November 2000, I was blogging about Ursula K. Le Guin Why we perceive mirrors reversing things left/right but not up/down Pioneering blog Arts & Letters Daily (just a year older than my own blog) Nick Montfort’s constrained poem “Upper Typewriter Row“ The 2000 US Presidential Election controversy (ballot design, hanging chads, recounts, political cartoons)…