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:Yesterday my wife took this last known picture of our two teenagers. The boy is 20 today. PersonalAdvising incoming majors.AcademiaOpening night. They've got magic to do! CultureLoved part 1 of Alec Silverblatt's Mon Valley Medium. Part 2 tomorrow at 7. #pptplayt…CultureWhen your January term starts Dec 18. #partylikeaprofAcademiaI'm happy with today's #steampunk control panel. To…
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:Above the Forward Ops conference platform we see the chief engineer's station and a glimps…AestheticsIn May, 2000, I was blogging about…
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:First Day in the Theatre for Twelfth Night (May 3-12) Daughter: (is sad her “first day in …CultureYou cannot serve both…PersonalThe Last Jedi: Oh, the Feels.No spoilers here. (I managed to avoid al…MediaOops. I’m going to bed now. I’ll fix it tomorrow.Oops. I’m going to bed now. I’ll fix it …AestheticsLooking forward to Part 2…
Similar:The Miracle Worker opens tomorrow.PersonalIt’s been a while since something got me into a movie theater. Obviously I wasn’t in a rus… It’s been a while since something got …AmusingWhen she's grown and flown, I will miss the thick deposit of glitter in my back seat.When she’s grown and flown, I will miss …AestheticsLast day…
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Similar:Father-daughter bonding between takes.That’s a prop knife in my right hand. AestheticsSalesman at Pittsburgh Public Theatre. PersonalCrochet octopus for the win! Crazy costume for #pptplaytime Boougie Gentleman (adaptation …PersonalJust in case you can’t find the tweet that Trump, who got trolled for making a rookie erro…This is how the President of the United …PersonalPinkalicious — "Buzz…
[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:In June, 2000 I was blogging about anagrams, 1750 Paris, ambiguity, a hyperlink patent cl…In June, 2000, I was blogging about …AmusingDan Rather reflects critically on the so-called "Heroic Age" of TV…
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:13: The Musical Promohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40MbeApiX…CultureRemnants of a Legendary Typeface…
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…