Hum de dum. Not paying any attention to current events at all, just thinking about possibly teaching Richard III in my Shakespeare class this fall. Oh, look, Dwight Goodyear posted commentary on Agnes Heller’s book The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History. How interesting. You know, to those of us who care about…
My “Media Aesthetics” students worked with students from Elizabeth Jacobs’s “Social Psychology” class, where students wrote editorials and designed infographics about cognitive dissonance. My students helped the psychology students with their drafts, then chose essays they thought had a good chance of going viral, and used WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and Hootsuite to publicize those selections. Similar:He Googles…
Similar:The boy tied for second place in Saturday's Monroeville Chess Club tournament.Peter was the lowest-ranked player to en…GamesCelebration of Writing Fall 2019PersonalWhen you need to record footsteps on a sidewalk, and the carpeted studio has a brick wall.AmusingA support sloop on deck and in the landing bay. #steampunk #neovictorian #aesthetics #desi…AestheticsUnion siege cannon, printing press,…
I loved listening to her practice the “Money, money, money, money, money” monologue in her mirror. Similar:Seriously, Fuck You, "Kindle Unlimited"I’m just quoting the f-bomb in the link,…BooksHappy to see a familiar face in a slide during today’s Academic Affairs Workshop. Classes …Happy to see a familiar face in a slide …AcademiaMy Summer Project: A…
A Republican Facebook friend posted a link to this article, which acknowledges that there’s plenty to dislike about Trumpcare, but challenges the truth behind some of the statements that are driving online outrage. Remember the Trump administration’s strategy — do something that invokes outrage, pounce and call it “fake news” as soon as someone exaggerates…
Similar:They still need work but we have 2 weeks before classes start, so I feel pretty good.They still need work but we have 2 weeks…PersonalNo I didn’t exactly *plan* to spend my Sunday evening tweaking the pedestrian access to th…AestheticsThe girl got picked for an audience participation bit as the muse of comedy in Xanadu.…
An interesting piece. Easy-to-learn hypertext authoring tools like Twine and TextureWriter have encouraged many of my students to give this kind of storytelling a try. As longtime experimenters and scholars in interactive narrative who are now building a new academic discipline we call “computational media,” we are working to create new forms of interactive storytelling,…
In the early 20th century, print journalists often identified with the working class. Small newspapers were created by and read by people who live and often grew up in the same area. Online jobs tend to clump around big cities, meaning that reporters increasingly live in a media bubble that isolates them from the life…
Similar:The boy plays chess with his uncle before seeing The Fantasticks.PersonalA 20 sq cm section of #steampunk #blender3d goodness. #blender3dartAestheticsConnecting with the BoyToday my son asked me to take him shoppi…Culturei trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries – so that i could engage in real-t…I kept a journal from Feb 3 1983…
Members of the Herald’s editorial guild are boycotting Twitter this week after reporter Chris Villani was suspended without pay for three days for violating the company’s social media policy. Villani’s misstep? An April 20 tweet stating, “The notes found in #AaronHernandez cell were letters to his daughter & fiancee, saying he loved them & would see…
Similar:Bag a Bot DayAt midnight tonight, participants in the…Current_EventsThe Girl Wins the Upper Division Monologue in the 25th Annual Pittsburgh Public Theatre's …CultureMy son, volunteering at the local food bank.PersonalGetting in the Christmas spirit.PersonalEclipse!PersonalLeftovers from the food my colleagues brought in to bribe/reward those few students who sh… Leftovers from the food my colleagues b…Academia
Adolescence took a long time to be invented at all, and it took an even longer time to become a somewhat stable archetype. It’s only in recent human history that people a) live long enough for adolescence to be a different physical experience than adulthood; and b) live in a society that indulges an extended…
I’m not saying that the Upward Bound kids deserved to be punished because application writers didn’t follow formatting instructions. I am saying that formatting matters. When your professors put “formatting” on the rubric, they aren’t simply trying to make your life difficult. For the want of double spacing in a small section of a 65-page…
My daughter will be playing Dolly Levi Friday night. Similar:The woman yelling at a cat is probably not facilitating a nuanced, evidence-based intellec…AcademiaCookies. That is all.AestheticsDragging Myself to a New Skill Level with Blender 3DWorking on some very complex stuff in Bl…AestheticsMy mom’s Lionel train set (a gift from her father in 1948) had been…
Mix the paranoia of 1984, the absurdity of Brazil, the pathos of Chekhov, the social commentary of Moliere, and a healthy dose of “When Mike and Carol swap jobs, the Bradys are on a collision course for wackiness.” Quantum Theatre’s “Collaborators” is a fascinating study of power, integrity, and compromise. (Sound designer Joe Pino directed…
Similar:In Which I Bow Before the Mistress of Teen SnarkThe Girl: I’m sorry I’m being so… Me:…CultureI’m not making a serious attempt at recreating specific architecture, just trying to conve…I’m not making a serious attempt at recr…PersonalCome see Carolyn and her talented castmates in The Fantasticks (Theatre Factory, Trafford …PersonalI'm happy with today's #steampunk control…
A good exploration, in the light of current interest in “fake news,” of the troubled relationship between conservative Christianity’s understanding of truth and secular experts’ understanding of facts. (Mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism have negotiated this difference much more smoothly.) But it wasn’t Christianity, or religious faith itself in general, that helped make Republican voters more likely…
Analyzing humor, as E.B. White famously said, is like dissecting a frog; few people are interested and the frog dies of it. Nonetheless, writing humor is a highly logical exercise — fit idea X into form Y for humorous result Z — and can therefore be broken down in ways that more slippery kinds of…
Similar:Fight choreography via teleconference. As You Like It @steelcityshakespearePersonalA support sloop on deck and in the landing bay. #steampunk #neovictorian #aesthetics #desi…AestheticsFormer student: "I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, …A third alum in the last few weeks has c…AcademiaWinners Chosen in Annual Shakespeare Monologue and Scene ContestMichael Henninger took this wonderful…
Art conveys significance; however, much of that significance is constructed by the receiver. That’s why I care less about what a work of art “means” and more about what it “does.” Understanding what a work of art does requires interpretation. The context of a work of art can contribute to the significance of the artwork in surprising…