I voice the role of Electron Jones in this audio detective series. The first episode was released today. I also made the posters with #Blender3D (my first project using the Cylces renderer). #design #drama #aesthetics

Making this illustration in Blender3D was almost as much fun as voicing the role of Electron Jones. This was my first project using the Cycles rendering engine. In the first episode of “Electron Jones,” the narrator describes looking down on a “levi-train” as a lunar transport takes off into the twilight sky in the futuristic…

Adding details to a clip-art silhouette, for a project that will be released in a day or two. #design #aesthetics #modding

An important but small detail in a Blender3D project I just finished is this trench-coated character. I started with a clip-art silhouette, but it looked pretty drab. Thanks to a little pixel-doctoring in The GIMP, I touched up the center image. The schlubby pant cuffs on this guy don’t fit the character, so I smoothed…

What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means

 As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub “grievance studies” — “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy” — which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense. Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could…

Opinion | Fake News Comes to Academia

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.

Gender, Place & Culture, for instance, published a 2017 paper that wasn’t a hoax analyzing the “feminist posthumanist politics” of what squirrels eat. This year Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, published an analysis of a one-woman show featuring “the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat.” The performance supposedly offers “a synthaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychological fallout.”

Star Wars: The Last Jedi abuse blamed on Russian trolls and ‘political agendas’

More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…

Photograph by Ellen Cantor from her Prior Pleasures series © The artist. Courtesy dnj Gallery, Santa Monica, California (Harper's)

The Printed Word in Peril: The age of Homo virtualis is upon us

Who, I thought, besides a multidisciplinary team in search of research funding, could possibly imagine that a digital account of the impact of reading digital print on human cognition would be effective? For such an account rests on the supremacy of the very thing it seeks to counteract, which can be summarized as a view of the human mind/brain that is itself computational in form.

Anime Treatment of Star Wars

I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing. Similar:The Incredible Shrinking Ad…

The Decline of Humanities Enrollments and the Decline of Pre-Law

It’s a myth that humanities majors don’t care about post-graduation employment. What changed was the safety valve of subsequent law school enrollment.

Law school was long the default post-graduation plan for majors in qualitative fields. As long as you had the prospect of a lucrative legal career after college, you could safely major in English or poli sci. Those students didn’t ignore the vocational imperative; they just postponed it. And for a long time, that worked pretty well.

But the Great Recession, combined with AI and offshoring, did a number on law as a career option.

I had a grand time recording this little story about a misunderstood genius who just wants to build a wall. #amontillado #masonry #poe

The Cask of Amotillado (read by Dennis Jerz, for WAOB Audio Theatre) Similar:Today's 10 sq cm of #blender3d #steampunk control panel. #aesthetics #design #blender3dartAestheticsMale Supporting Characters in Recent Disney Princess Films Dominate the DialogueThe silly click-baity headline in the Wa…BusinessWhat the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they …Academia‘This is no longer a debate’: Florida sheriff…

Headshot of U.S. President Donald J. Trump

How Trump Is Making Journalism School Great Again

This is an important time to teach people what journalists do and why it matters. “The media” is much larger than “journalists devoted to the objective coverage of the news.”  If you don’t like the slant, or the shallowness, or the opportunism of the media you run across, then check out several different sources, including…

Top U800. #chesstournament

Similar:This class has been everything that I expect it would be and I cannot believe that we are …Some days are slogs.  Some weeks are slo…AcademiaAnd so it begins.BooksToasting Shakespeare at the Bard's Birthday BashOrganized by Pittsburgh Shakespeare in t…CultureBoy that feels good. AcademiaVote for Carolyn's Headshot — Round 2 Vote for Carolyn’s Headshot –…

Chess tournament in Monroeville.

Similar:I am happy with how this turned out. My mother told me about this story when I was little,…PersonalShe was a musical ingenue Sunday, filmed a slasher movie past midnight Monday, and was pre…AcademiaMy third time seeing @shu.pippin. I'll be back tomorrow for closing night.PersonalGil Gerard (1943-2025) I built a model of the two-pronged Sta…CultureOverheard:…

Under my academic robes… photographer vest with 3 frozen ice packs. #heatwave #HonorsConvo @setonhilluniversity

Similar:After my conference talk, a post-audition, pre-Jane-Eyre-performance dinner with the girl.PersonalWhat, exactly, am I looking at here? I’m so confused.What, exactly, am I looking at here? I’m…PersonalHeadphones, Croutons and RhetoricME (with crouton tongs in one hand and s…CultureAnnie 2012 with Annie 2017. Annie 2012 with her Warbucks. "Together at last. Together …PersonalI regularly teach Uncle…