Carolyn and spider friends performing "Power" from Stage Right's Sleeping Beauty this Friday.

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Actors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper Headlines

My daughter and I were talking about prop newspapers, and she suggested making a newspaper prop with headlines such as “Actors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper Headlines” Similar:Digital Humanities: A DefinitionDoes the world need another working defi…AcademiaMany things in the world are awful, but my latest #Blender3D work on my #steampunk control…One of many…

Schiller schools internet on correct Apple device plurals, but Cook says “iPad Pros”

“Siri, is the world ready for Apple pod people who are also grammarians?” According to Schiller, multiple Apple products should be referred to without pluralization, for example the plural of “iPhone” is “iPhone” or “iPhone devices.” It seems years of rampant misuse have taken their toll, finally and absolutely corroding the exec’s resolve to maintain…

Why are we so bored?

On average we spend six to seven hours in front of our phone, tablet, computer and TV screens every day. All this is simply becoming boring. Instead of performing varied activities that engage different neural systems (sport, knitting, painting, cooking, etc) to relieve our tedium, we fall back on the same screen-tapping schema for much…

What Borges Learned from Cervantes

Borges reinvented Don Quixote as a playful novel, full of surprises and unexpected anticipations of the way we read today. Across genres and over decades, his varied meditations opened new paths for readers. The following conversation took place during January 2016 between Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College,…

Celebration of Writing

  My freshman writing students are among the scores presenting their research in preparation for drafting their big term paper. Similar:The t-shirt many professors would enjoy wearing Inside Higher EdAcademiaMy son teaching chess to a young pupilCultureWriting skill matters in the workforce.BusinessMe (glares in iambic pentameter)Me: I need to post the opening lecture f…AcademiaUpdated a handout…

Out of the Zuckersphere, (back) into the Blogosphere

This is why I still blog. While commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to keep you churning out new content that attracts shallow attention, a weblog encourages reflection, the exploration of lateral thinking and deep linking, and the accumulation of ideas (your chronologically sorted, taggable history of posts) over time. Mark C. Marino…

The problem I just learned about calls for tea in the big mug.

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Former student: “I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, but…”

A third alum in the last few weeks has contacted me to thank me for challenging her while a student: When I look back on my time at SHU, I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, but yet again, this is proof that the skills you taught us so a few years ago…

Journalism isn’t dying. But it’s changing WAY faster than most people understand.

Think of journalism as falling into three basic baskets: The “what” basket, the “so what” basket and the “now what” basket. The “what” basket is filled with reporting in a straightforward manner on things that happened. “There was a fire at 8th and Elm Street today. No one was injured,” and all that. The “so…

Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case

Fair use is a concept baked into US copyright law, and it’s a defense to copyright infringement if certain elements are met. The US Copyright Office says the defense is decided on a case-by-case basis. “The distinction between what is fair use and what is infringement in a particular case will not always be clear…

For News Outlets Squeezed From the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust

Hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook followed BuzzFeed’s live video of two people putting rubber bands around a watermelon until it burst. We should all reflect on how journalism can make the news that is truly important interesting enough to compete with exploding fruit. Traditional media companies face the increasingly daunting task of hooking…

Chess tournament in Monroeville. Two losses, two wins.

The boy’s personal best in terms of win-loss. Trophy for performance at his level. A fun Satuday. Similar:Come see Carolyn and her talented castmates in The Fantasticks (Theatre Factory, Trafford …PersonalThe boy tied for second place in Saturday's Monroeville Chess Club tournament.Peter was the lowest-ranked player to en…GamesHappy memories of PC games I played with…

Jimmy Maher’s Appreciation of Infocom’s Classic Sherlock Text Adventure

I learned a lot while reading this enjoyable essay by Jimmy Maher. Looked at today, however, Sherlock certainly wasn’t a bad note to go out on. Being built on the sturdy foundation of everything Infocom had learned about making text adventures to date, it’s not notably, obviously innovative, but, impressively given that it is a…

The Minecraft Generation

It’s a world of trial and error and constant discovery, stuffed with byzantine secrets, obscure text commands and hidden recipes. And it runs completely counter to most modern computing trends. Where companies like Apple and Microsoft and Google want our computers to be easy to manipulate — designing point-and-click interfaces under the assumption that it’s…