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…
Similar:‘People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of Moby-Dick reading ma…When I went off to college to be an Engl…AcademiaJerz Family Tin Can Robot Warshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIBQkobPW…PersonalCarolyn at about 7yo drew Titania in love with Bottom. #tbt #midsummerArtSetting up high, medium and low levels of detail for this element of a city wall.…
The brain-as-computer is a powerful meme. It’s no more accurate than metaphors inspired by fluid dynamics or automata, which were cutting-edge technology in their time, says Robert Epstein. The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of…
I think I must be doing something right if the professionals I see each year at Computers and Writing are as likely to mention seeing Facebook pictures of my kids’ achievements as they are to bring up topics about, you know, computers and writing.
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…
I have not had much luck with Zagg keyboard cases before (I think this will the fifth time I’ve asked for a replacement, across three different products), but Zagg itself has followed through every time. Similar:Lego goes steampunkBe still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk —…AestheticsAt the Stage Right Gala.PersonalThese buildings are so much better than my first…
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…
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…
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.)
Similar:The chief engineer of a fantasy #steampunk flagship needs a small booth for shift change r…AestheticsHow Not To Make Professional ContactsTowards the end of my year-long radio ne…AmusingMy simulation project does not require me to master medieval daub and wattle architecture….My simulation project does not require m…AestheticsAfter your shift at the protocol station, join me…
Similar:Anime Treatment of Star WarsI am not particularly into anime, though…AestheticsAs Twinkle Twinkle is to Suzuki musicians, so is a wooden shipping crate to CGI modelers. …https://youtu.be/diQF9buONqY I ha…AestheticsMy third time seeing @shu.pippin. I'll be back tomorrow for closing night.PersonalFeeling Like an Impostor at 49I reminded my Shakespeare students that …AcademiaNow I can relax a…
Similar:Star Trek: The MenagerieJust finished watching a two-part episod…PersonalHow We Can Help Students Survive in an Age of Anxiety Today’s students have also lived…AcademiaDaily 10sq cm of control panel eye candy. #blender3d #blender3dart #steampunkAestheticsPeter vs. the PenguinsFor the past hour, Peter (who is not yet…AmusingCertainty vs. uncertainty: "In which are we more likely to be…
Similar:I'm Asking My Students to Be Deliberate about the Word "Novel"In the past few years, I have noticed mo…AcademiaEric Bentley, Critic Who Preferred Brecht to Broadway, Dies at 103One of the few harsh critics of Arthur M…AcademiaRandom eye candy for props in my #Blender3D #retrotech project. Turned two circle logos in…PersonalFamily ( #StarTrek #TNG Rewatch,…
[G]ames is a bit more financially brutal than either theatre or poetry, which is funny, because poetry is already financially brutal. It is harder to get people to pay for games than for any other artform I work in. I could make more money for less work elsewhere. That said, in both theatre and poetry…
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:White House photo access controls public imageRather than permit photojournalists to s…CultureRandom #steampunk workstation with a porthole, because why not. Most of the surfaces are f…AestheticsKLINGON STYLE (Star Trek Parody of PSY…
You don’t want to use Courier New and 1.25 inch margins on your term paper. You want to go home and rethink your life. A true Jedi uses the power of the Font for emphasis and visual rhetoric, never for stretching a 6-page paper to 10 pages. Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to…
This sounds like the plot of a Young Indiana Jones episode, or maybe Johnny Quest. William Gadoury is a 15-year-old student from Saint-Jean-de-Matha in Lanaudière, Quebec. The precocious teen has been fascinated by all things Mayan for several years, devouring any information he could find on the topic. During his research, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan…
One day when I was an undergraduate working for one of two competing student papers, two rallies were held on opposite sides of the downtown mall. One group held signs like “Keep your laws off my body,” and “Keep abortion safe and legal,” and the other group held signs like “It’s a child, not a choice”…
There can be no true distinction drawn between the effect of word processing on the literary imagination and its intervention in the working lives of the women employed as noncreative automata…. How can we know who was working where, what relationship each female amanuensis had with each new device that came to take her work away?
Interesting essay challenging the notion that medical difference equals pathology. With Children of a Lesser God, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, “Flowers for Algernon,” “Cathedral,” The Glass Menagerie, The Miracle Worker, and The Sound and the Fury, I can see putting together a special topics literature course on pathology and pathos…