Carolyn plays a teenager who’s outside the “in” group that’s stalked by a killer. She has some action sequences that I know she’ll enjoy filming. I also have “two and a half scenes” playing her father. Similar:No more braces!PersonalAn Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC'Among the attractions at the 1958 World’…BooksIn March, 2001, I was…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. As science fiction, this was an interesting premise with great production values and character moments, that ultimately didn’t deliver any real drama because our main characters lacked any significant agency. The Child opens with some lovely footage of the Enterprise alongside another starship, and a…
Visited a bog created when loggers cleared part of a forest. Laurel Summit State Park. Similar:The Miller of the Dee; by James Baldwin; read by Dennis JerzI showed up at the recording studio for …AestheticsApparently I’m using boolean modifiers to carve out negative-space greebles for a texture …AestheticsThe intelligence coup of the century: For decades,…
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…
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…
“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…
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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…
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:Rt Covid-19 — How Quickly Coronavirus is Spreading…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
So looking forward to seeing her in this! Oct 18 – 27, 2019 at The Theatre Factory (Trafford, Pa.) Similar:My 13yo and 18yo enthralled by WarGames.Wife likes movies. Son likes military th…CultureThe insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’It is 50 years since I first collected t…CultureAnother 10sq cm of background…
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…
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…
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…
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