Work-Life Balance, from 11(!) Years Ago

I think I’m managing work-life balance pretty well. I’m not ready to give up the sweet cheeks and sticky paws — not yet. I’m being pawed and kissed by a lollipop-slurping preschooler at the moment, so I’m signing off for now. Everything else is going to have to wait. Source: So, What’s in It for…

Homage to Poe

Michael Dirda offers a thoughtful assessment of Poe’s career. My initial puzzlement about Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was hardly surprising. His fiction can seem too rhetorical, too thickly textured, too literary for most young people. Still, Basil Rathbone’s recording did persuade me to give the writer another try—sometime. The opportunity finally arose in high school…

"She even disgraces the name of Linton." –Heathcliff, on his simpering wife Isabella, in Wuthering Heights. #burn

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Could We Just Lose the Adverb (Already)?

I can’t really get myself that worked up over prescriptive grammar issues, but I do enjoy reading the arguments. The adverb is an incoherent lexical category, a catchall. How are “there,” “yesterday,” “quite,” “assiduously,” and “indeed” all members of the same family? As we learn in school — in a definition that dates from Dionysius…

Narrow Parsers

Creating n00b-friendly interactive fiction by deliberately reducing the number of available verbs? Intersting… Though I rather liked the results when I experimented with diegetic (in-game) hints delivered by an NPC who gets more and more specific to help the player accomplish some orientation tasks. Parser IF is fundamentally driven by player action, by game verbs, in…

Unmarked assignments in my queue: 0

This app, which sports a little red notification bubble showing the number of unmarked assignments on my to-do list, controls much of my life during the school year. This app doesn’t show the number of committee meetings I have to attend, the minutes from committee meetings I have to post, the assigned tasks I have…

Dennis G. Jerz | Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism, Seton Hill University | jerz.setonhill.edu Logo

Clickbait writers hate this English professor’s time-saving trick!

Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird trick! You won’t believe how punctuation can save you time. Will you regret clicking that headline phrased as a question? (You can safely avoid clicking any headline phrased as a question, promises an emotional reaction, or hedges a claim with “may” or “could be”. You won’t miss anything important if you don’t click that bait.)

Waiting for the sound of bagpipes. #setonhillgrad 2016

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Lining up for Honors Convocation 2016. #setonhill

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The last submissions of this o’er ripe term, Ungraded, mock me though this app. And thus, Procrastination midwifes this blank verse.

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Monument Valley: Minimal story, but an engaging world and a satisfying ending.

I was in no rush to finish the beautiful mind-puzzler game Monument Valley. Minimal story, but an engaging world and a satisfying ending. Similar:Social Distancing: Because the Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the FewEmpathyReport: Many U.S. Schools Can’t Afford Mannequins, Human Urine For Art Classes“It’s sad, but my students don’t even ha…AestheticsThat…