One wild place. (Sunday.)

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After a successful piano recital.

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Sesame Street Is Moving to HBO, and the Symbolism Is Crushing

I’ve been fascinated by the rhetoric of headlines surrounding the “Sesame Street moves to HBO” story. * HBO gentrifies ‘Sesame Street’ –VentureBeat * Sesame Street Episodes Will Shrink to Half an Hour –Time * Sesame Street Is Heading to HBO, and Getting Even Bigger –Esquire * This episode of Sesame Street brought to you by…

TARDIS from today’s 3D printing class.

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A serious summer activity.

Once classes start again, we will all have less time for the game of life. Let’s do some serious playing while we still can. Similar:An interesting analysis of Trump's rhetorical strategy.In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent ana…CultureThe daughter sings and performs Shakespeare at the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival t…CultureThe girl is rehearsing for Hello…

Keyboard Shortcuts for Novelists

Use the command-alt functions to add sexual tension, plot twists, or a humorous interlude. —The New Yorker Similar:The Righteous MindI just finished “The Righteous Mind: Why…CultureStudents Speak Up: Trust Us With DevicesThe students who are, in the first few w…CybercultureStapler jam during a midterm exam.My years of watching MacGyver definitely…AcademiaDefend the Open Web: Keep DRM…

Updating Journalism Handouts

Jerz > Writing > Journalism I’ve spent the afternoon touching up some older journalism handouts, seeing which are still in good shape, which need some work, and which new ones I’ll need to create from scratch. I realize I’ve never actually written a handout on the inverted pyramid, writing leads, writing headlines, punctuating quotes from sources… of course there…

No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games – Offworld

Several times I assigned Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Entrepreneur, which described the rise and heartbreaking fall of her girl-centered, girl-positive gaming company, Purple Moon during the 1990s. My own daughter (who is 13) has enjoyed man more opportunities to be both girly and nerdy — something that seems to have been a lot harder 20 years…

A salute lost to history

History is complex and baffling and fascinating. Reading this (an explanation that the stiff-arm salute that we now identify with the Nazis was a general gesture that was common in America before WWII) made my head spin almost as much as reading about the myth of 8 unbroken hours of sleep. A group of about…

Started Making a Journalism Game in Twine

For a long time, I’ve thought about creating a game to teach the fundamentals of journalism. Last weekend during my son’s chess tournament I started roughing out the plot, and today I started using Twine to implement it. Since I already had the plot broken up into text chunks, I got a whole lot done…