Unplugging for a Few Hours at Spruce Flats Bog

Visited a bog created when loggers cleared part of a forest. Laurel Summit State Park. Similar:I just caught myself thinking, “This doesn’t suck.” #medievalyork #mysteryplay #blender3d …I just caught myself thinking, “This doe…AestheticsCaptain Gearheart inspects progress on his #neovictorian #steampunk æther cruiser. Now fea…https://youtu.be/VXz7kspFimM AestheticsUnity3D Maze Game TutorialWorkspace for an in-progress Unity3D tut…AcademiaWhat a stunningly…

The Case for Slow Journalism: When to Unplug from the Endless News Cycle

Often when I see people in my social media feed criticizing “the media,” they are unfairly blaming journalists for how the social media ecosystem misuses journalism. Here’s an example from a post by someone arguing that CNN is being unfairly biased against Bernie Sanders. The complaint is that CNN criticizes Sanders for making a claim…

The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave

There’s so much I don’t know! When teaching rhetoric, I often use “Is light a wave, or is it a particle?” as an example of a false dichotomy. My high school physics teacher (Rear Admiral Edward Metcalfe Peebles) set up a lecture giving us the “pro-wave” evidence and the “pro-particle” evidence and inviting us to…

New data on the first three jobs held by graduates of six popular majors

“There is an enormous part of the economy hungry for graduates with skills in analysis and communication — skills students are honing as they conduct close readings of texts, persuade their classmates in seminars and hone the style and structure of papers,” Sentz said. That might not be clear to students, however, or to college…

How do you spend your last week of summer break?

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Fast-paced, articulate cast shines in Viking-themed Othello

I saw my first Food for Groundlings show this weekend. It won’t be my last. I see a lot of theater, and am used to seeing professionals here or there stutter or jump a line. But the actors in Othello at CCAC Sunday night really impressed me with their mastery of Shakespeare’s verbiage. Desdemona in…

A scene from the movie "The Matrix," symbolically showing objects formed out of shifting lines of computer code.

Is this why oldsters love nostalgia?

I’m 50. I’m in my office casually sharpening my CGI skills, and I get a huge rush when tweets mention a Usenet thread I joined in 2001 & a video game I played in 1992, and I can see the glittering green matrix code explaining it all. Similar:Male Microsoft Leaders Ignored Women Who Really Hated…

Students in a Finnish community college learn how to spot "fake news".

Finland is Winning the War on Fake News

This is story is from May, but it’s very relevant. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image…

Branding Essentials for the English Major: 4 Examples of How to Re-package Your Skills for Employers

It seems every week some “expert” publishes an article lamenting on the fact that if college students want to ensure they can get a good job after graduation, they should steer clear of “worthless” majors. Go into business or technology, say the authors. Stay away from things like English literature or creative writing. This argument…

Interior Detail of Steampunk Convertible Gazebo

Spent much of Tuesday wrestling with code to display messages like “Press E to Open” and connecting them to animations. I’ve done this sort of thing before, but there’s a difference between hacking something to make it work once, and developing a workflow that facilitates churning things out. Plus I keep getting distracted by little…

Set Phasers to Teach!

Fans of Star Trek have thus already been introduced to the plays of William Shakespeare, and experienced intertextual analysis in action as the aforementioned Star Trek episodes directly relate to Hamlet and Henry V. The same can be said of the motion picture The Wrath of Khan, which portrays Ricardo Montalban’s villain as a futuristic Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.…

A collage of screenshots from the Unity3D game design engine shows a character in a natural-looking pose, with her feet at different levels.

Detailed Articulation of Feet in Unity3D

I’m following a lot of tutorials, and continue to make progress in Unity3D. My character’s feet now react better with the environment. Here she is standing casually with each foot at different levels. With the right code attached to each foot, she will adjust her stance automatically, according to the height and angle of whatever…

Video-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan Issue

Scholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces the history of video game scapegoating, noting that while the panic used to be bi-partisan, and then-senator Hilary Clinton targeted video games in 2005, now it’s mostly GOP voices who blame video games for violent actions such as mass shootings. (Incidentally, the Va Tech shooter preferred Sonic the Hedgehog,…

Montage showing photos of the cast members for The Fantasticks.

Coming up for the girl is another classic show: The Fantasticks.

So looking forward to seeing her in this! Oct 18 – 27, 2019 at The Theatre Factory (Trafford, Pa.) Similar:California Political Cyberfraud Abatement Act Pulled by AuthorCalifornia’s Ed Chau withdrew his propos…CultureI’m really enjoying the embossed labels. #Blender3D (Making props for my fantasy #steampun…AestheticsThe Evolution of 'Star Trek'(Infographic) | Space.comThe first 45 years of Star…

Steampunk Ex Machina

In the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my kids, the characters would embark on Earthbound adventures or welcome a visitor arriving via “the gondola.” Serving the same function as the transporter or shuttlecraft in Star Trek, it could conveniently break down when I needed the characters to be isolated, and it could miraculously…

Medieval illustration of two people in curtained, barrel-like baths.

Addressing Our Biases: Medieval Bathing

Did medieval people bathe? If you already believe that the middle ages was “The Dark Ages” (a bit of very successful propaganda created by Protestant intellectuals in order to distance their own accomplishments from the Catholic roots of the Renaissance) then you are likely to perpetuate the myth that everything about life “back in the…

Greebles make me happy.

Before CGI, filming a science-fiction story typically involved constructing a physical model of a spaceship or planetscape. In order to trick the eye in to thinking you were looking at something huge, model-makers added tiny random bits of detail, often re-purposing off-the-shelf commercial model kits or using any kind of junk they could get their…

My second greenscreen test.

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Blender 2.8 Released. Please leave us alone together for a few days.

I’ve been using the beta for months, but the Blender 2.8 release has finally dropped. Blender is a super-powerful, completely free 3D design tool. I’ve been playing with it for years, and this summer I ramped up my skills considerably. Here’s an animation of “MoonBot,” a character from the steampunk bedtimes stories I used to…

Medieval illustration of a man about to plunge his hand into a pot of boiling water, as another man stirs the pot.

Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt

How could an ordeal-administering priest make boiling water innocuous to an innocent defendant’s flesh? By making sure that it wasn’t actually boiling.