This is a little story about an inspirational prose poem from the 1920s, a repeatedly unsuccessful US presidential contender from the 50s, a spoken-word recording released by Star Trek’s Mr. Spock in the 1960s, a Grammy-winning new-age anthem from the 70s, and a software company that taught my son to play chess. Similar:The Medium is…
After the break, we’ll tell you how important it is for you watch our live WeatherFear (TM) StormPorterCast (TM) Mobile NewsHole Coverage Team tell you to keep watching for the next XtremeSnowFerno (TM) WeatherUnleashed NatureBlast ScareCast (TM), so that the advertising manager can sell your eyeballs (and thus earn enough to buy his kid another…
Sara Heffernan designed these wonderful visual-textual gags. Graphic Design Pun Cards on Behance. Similar:My new inspiration as I work on my syllabuses I applaud you, person who, halfway …AcademiaIn Pittsburgh, science gets playfulImagine: sharing a secret with a friend …AestheticsMaking Interactive Fiction Mainstream: ReadersJon Ingold describes the gamelike storyt…AestheticsCreate Joy with Content Management System Hexcodes for…
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first…
The idea of students as customers relies on models of customer service that are not what experts in the field actually teach (as explicated in this letter to The Chronicle by Clara Burke). We develop crude quantitative evaluative tools while businesses use more and more complex qualitative focus groups and sophisticated assessments. And we apply…
In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…
“It’s quite gobsmacking to think that a story could be told for 10,000 years,” Nicholas Reid, a linguist at Australia’s University of New England specializing in Aboriginal Australian languages, said. “It’s almost unimaginable that people would transmit stories about things like islands that are currently underwater accurately across 400 generations.” —Scientific American. Similar:What Could Have Entered…
[Jobs] was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands. But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar he set for it, which was to be “far better” at some key tasks than a…
In the last chaotic days of Nazi Germany, in a train transferring concentration camp prisoners to Dachau, a teenager hears the cries of babies. At 14, William Glied has already lost his family. Similar:Fanciful Fun in Theatre Factory’s “The Fantasticks”A great review from Pittsburgh in the Ro…CultureCause and Effect (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 18)…
I know next to nothing about archery. According to this video, even the little I thought I knew was completely wrong. An archers with a quiver on his back is a movie icon which is widespread throughout the world. But putting arrows in a quiver on your back is not a good solution. It is…
Okay, I confess, I was once in the audience at an MLA session about medieval drama, when someone brought up a relevant computer simulation, and there was a disagreement over how to interpret the results. I raised my hand and said, “I created that simulation,” and weighed in on one side of the debate. It all…
I’m sure there are hipsters, even now, lamenting “I just think without the organic feel of the human arm, the selfie really loses something,” but we have not listened to them before, and we need not heed them now. —The Washington Post. Similar:One Child, One Laptop … And Mixed Results In PeruBecause you couldn’t go…
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. The original, “’Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle,’ was the tender Christmas message sent by Ian Maclaren to the readers of The British Weekly” (1898) uses an unfamiliar definition of “pitiful” and uses the gender-specific “man,” so the modernized version is understandably more popular.
“We hope these helpful new alerts will improve our users’ experience by prompting them to revisit the site in the event they momentarily turn their focus elsewhere,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sure, Saturn’s rings are cool, but the Earth is pretty awesome too, what with the water, the oxygen, the life, the chocolate. So let’s imagine just how awesome Earth would be if it also had rings. Ron Miller’s illustrations show various views of the earth with what that lucky planet Saturn has. —Ron Miller/Black Cat…
Back in 2009, the story of Alice and Kev, a blog about two homeless Sims characters, drew a lot of attention. (At the end of the story, the blogger asked for readers to help fight homelessness in the real world.) Here’s another interesting collision of the world of games and the world of social action.…
I remember wanting to like Voyager a lot more than I did. The first episode showed some promise, but I remember being disappointed with the first season. Looking back, I can see I was equally disappointed by the first Star Trek movie and the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Some moments from the show…
My colleague Mike Arnzen talked about the writing process with the Voice of America. Michael Arnzen teaches English and heads humanities studies at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. Mr. Arnzen is also an award-winning author. He says he understands the desire to write something and be done with it. “We’ve all been there. We feel…
Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people – including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75% of developers at…
I’m introducing text adventure games to the students in my online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course. A few years ago, when my son was 11, I made a screencast of him encountering a text adventure game for the first time. My students generally like watching this video, since it gives them an idea of…