Teen girl standing in front of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" poster (with cartoon Romans)

I played Pseudolus freshman year in college. Haven’t seen the show in a while.

Similar:Why scientists should care about artMy artsy daughter loves stories about sc…ArtBuilding a ridiculous amount of detail as I create tiles for distant sections of a #blende…AestheticsChess tournament.PersonalSeton Hill students Emily Vohs, Elizabeth Burns, Jake Carnahan-Curcio and Carolyn Jerz in …Seton Hill students Emily Vohs, Elizabet…AcademiaPracticing my Unity3D design skills. Forgot to turn on gravity.https://youtu.be/PkxxiPAmTFg…

‘A slow-motion disaster’: Journalism museum in talks about possible building sale

Last year, SHU did not sponsor a bus trip to Washington D.C., so I did not arrange a field trip to the Newseum. Seeing a chunk of the Berlin Wall, an antenna from the World Trade Center in front of a display of 9/11 front pages from around the world, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s cabin, and…

Research Before Google Books (from 2006)

Me: It took a few days for the spool of microfilm to arrive via interlibrary loan. I’d use this steampunk contraption to manually seek the right page in the book. But I found it. Crying stock photo child: (Sniff) Checking sources was scary ‘n’ hard in 2006! Me: Yes it was, crying stock photo child. Yes…

How Facebook is killing comedy (and other indie content creators)

Facebook has monetized access to online content. The mobile apps make it difficult for you to actually leave Facebook to follow a link, which means Facebook is increasingly showing other people’s content, bypassing the creator’s own ads (and their “subscribe” and “comment” and “contact us” and “archive” buttons). As Internet comedy writer Matt Klinman puts…

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

It was pleasurable to encounter a familiar reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (which I just assigned in my Media & Culture class) in this Atlantic article on memory in the digital information age. With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s…

On the Importance of Nonverbal Feedback in the Classroom [an Anecdote]

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.

A rare win for Dad.

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How Star Wars was saved in the edit

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:Pope Francis calls for "news communicated with serenity, precision and completeness"Pope Francis recently addressed Italian …CultureYounger Americans…

The Cover Letter That Led to Awesome Interviews

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…

Research Poetry (communicating research results and expressing their significance through poetry)

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.

Fie upon your multi-page, ad-stuffed crapfest of shame. (Don’t click!)

What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:While at Sadecky's Puppets to record the role of Heidi, Carolyn met a new friend.We spent Sunday afternoon at the Sadecky…AestheticsBryan A. Louiselle, 1966-2022 (musician, composer, orchestrator, musical director)I was Mayor Shinn to Bryan’s Harold Hill…CultureWhat’s Up With That: Why…

Updated a post about Sarah Rush — the “launch when ready” crew member from 1979 Battlestar Galactica

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…

Apology of Socrates, By Plato

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?

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:Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviewsAn amazing story of hope and dignity. T…BooksFalse equivalency in…

Blog RSS Feed Generator for WP RSS Aggregator

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…

If I am not a pedagogical god, at least my marking app has no ungraded submissions.

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During World War II, Literature Reigned Supreme

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…

Certainty vs. uncertainty: “In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?”

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…

What Grammar and Style Checkers Miss

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…

Inside the utopian, brick-loving world of LEGO’s adult fandom

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.…