I don’t generally like teaching with slide decks, but students are used to them. I use a typeface that makes it easy for me to pretend I’m creating Okudagrams for Star Trek: TNG computer displays.
Similar:The Surprisingly Savvy Weird Al Internet Machine When he talks about his business being…AestheticsThank you, anonymous donor of Mardi Gras candy.Okay, on closer inspection I see the red…AestheticsOn Her One Free Day Between Two Shows…[View the story “On Her One Free Day Bet…DesignInterface (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 3) LaForge, using experimental augmen…Rewatching…
I learned a lot while watching this video. I didn’t realize how much of this movie was driven by off-screen narration. The whole “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes” sequence was added in post. Similar:Prophet Motive (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 16) The Nagus's eccentricities a… Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark is…
When I do a career planning unit, I am often amused by the students who list “design skills” or “very creative” on their resumes, yet use the exact same MS-Word default resume template. A second observation is that students typically used their cover letters to describe their own emotions (e.g. as their burning desire for…
For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.
What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:When your January term starts Dec 18. #partylikeaprofAcademiaI feel juvenile enough today that this headline made me snicker.AmusingThe Great Gatsby Character Map SomethingSoSam.AestheticsConfessions of a Former Bastard CopMedium is not a peer-reviewed source, an…CultureBook geyser. My latest #Blender3D practice.In a…
I recently noticed that a blog post I created in 2003 has been getting a spike in traffic. Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife’s old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots…
Aristotle classified Plato’s work, representing Socrates’s defense against charges that he corrupted the youth of Athens, as a fiction. But what words! What a defense! (“Greatest mind of history / Solving life’s sweet mystery.” —Schwartz) For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your…
Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? lol = linguists overinterpret lol gtg = gtg tokenizes gatekeeping mcm = man-crush-monday connotes mania wcw = whoever created woman-crush-wednesday brb = befoggedly redefine brb Similar:Digital Storytelling (EL231: Topics in Creative Writing) EL231 “Digital Storytelling” (Dec 1…AcademiaSubtle Stylesheet Tweaks for Mobile SiteOn the mobile version of…
I paid a little attention to a long-neglected RSS aggregator for student blogs. It had stopped working at some point, and was no longer recognizing the RSS feeds generated by WordPress. Fortunately, the Feed Creator for WP RSS Aggregator does the trick — it generates RSS feeds automatically. I’m blogging this in part because every semester…
Similar:Elsa at noon. College “Intro to Chemistry” in the afternoon. Amy March at night.PersonalMy beautiful daughter says "Happy Valentine's Day" View t…AestheticsYou are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.Some people out there will never like yo…CultureMy crazy Friday night involved tweaking the graphic for an #MLAstyle…
Books symbolized freedom. Posters of 1942 quoted the president: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this…
I’ve taught Plato’s Phaedrus before, but in the past I have mostly focused on brief passages in which the characters discuss writing, which is really just a side issue. The purpose of today is mostly just to accustom my “History and Future of the Book” students to oral classical culture, in the hopes they’ll get…
Teaching students to write does not mean correcting their errors, or even preventing them from making errors. While I’m grateful that autocorrect catches most of my typographical errors, I have so far been unimpressed by software tools that aim to check grammar and style. Most of my students are pretty good readers and writers; if…
I used to enjoy buying my kids a $4 set of Legos for no special reason, figuring that some people spend that much for a fancy cup of coffee. My kids would cannibalize their Indiana Jones and Star Wars sets in order to create characters from the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell them.…
Similar:We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter ImplosionThe public disintegration of a platform …Current_EventsShe was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested…Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blu…CybercultureI just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999.I just dusted off a…
From Daisy Dunn’s review of Puchner’s The Written World: Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian epic Ramayanahad been preserved through an oral tradition that seemed destined to perish through overreliance on papyrus. Akhmatova remembered because she had to but Socrates simply chose to. He…
I recently came across a box of old writing, including a binder where I had saved some undergraduate papers. When returning a Beowulf paper for a Brit Lit survey, my instructor had stapled a page of hand-written notes that began, “You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here, much closer than…
Isn’t the news pointless and boring? Haven’t powerful people who have no personal stake in the matter and obviously have nothing whatsoever to hide called the lying fake mainstream news media the enemy of the American people?Why would anyone want to study journalism? Oh, wait… Former sports doctor Larry Nassar likely still would be sexually…
In English grammar, we use the definite article in front of a noun when we believe the listener knows exactly what we are referring to. Further, use of the word “the” suggests singular, as in The Pope. When you meet The Pope, then you’ve met The Pope. When you meet “the elderly” you’ve really only…