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…
Let’s hope many, many more journalism stories end as happily as the Kirby Delauter saga. Local official Kirby Delauter posts Facebook rant, threatening legal action against a reporter for “unauthorized” use of his name. Newspaper editorial mocks the threats, in an editorial titled “Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter.” The internet loves the story. Kirby Delauter issues…
This breaking news story confuses “honing” and “homing.” I make mistakes too, and would certainly make even more if I were writing up breaking news on a story that is deeply personal to everyone in the world who values the freedom of speech. The manhunt for two men suspected in the massacre at a satirical newspaper’s…
The Battle of New Orleans was a series of engagements fought between December 23, 1814 through January 8, 1815 and was the final major battle of the War of 1812.[5][6] American combatants,[7] commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson, prevented an invading British Army, commanded by General Edward Pakenham, and Royal Navy, commanded by Admiral Alexander Cochrane, from seizing New Orleans as a strategic tool to end the war.[8][9][10][11] The Treaty of Ghent was…
What Happens When Clickbait Headlines Avoid Mentioning the Young Boys Wouldn’t Slap the Girl? Headlines like these are all over social media right now. Young boys asked to slap girl in social experiment What happens when you ask an Italian boy to slap a girl? You might be surprised. What happens when you put a…
I think it’s a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Homer is an “it.” A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared. Today we have an author obsession—we want to know biography all…
I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every…
Prufrock cannot bring himself to ask his companion the “overwhelming question” (which he never identifies) that carries us through the poem. He is paralyzed by the same overwhelming fear of missing out (yes, “FOMO”) that plagues a generation facing endless options and clear few choices: “In a minute there is time / For decisions…
I particularly value blogging because of the visibility of older content. Facebook and Twitter don’t make it easy for you to contextualize links pointing to something relevant you posted a month or a year or decade ago. It may seem right to ask, after so many years: what is left to discuss about blogging? We…
I read this short story as a kid. Not sure how I came across it, but details from this story are burned pretty deep in my head. Jon’s orientation came from the screens. As he grew older, he became aware of the world beyond—the real world outside the Learning Maze. The world which had once…
Authors of overhyped link text are like scam telemarketers. They use their knowledge of language and human psychology to manipulate you. Similar:Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?Not a day goes by without The Girl remin…BooksDid Google just kill PR agencies? Lots of links, lots of repeated key wo…BusinessFilmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their…
“Punctuating dialogue properly is important,” says the old man, “But actions speak loudly, too. When I offered you tea, and you unlaced your boots at my hearth, we didn’t need any words stating that there was a comfortable lull in our conversation. The careful placement of details created a little pause. It was a good example of showing rather than telling.”
On a web page that I posted in Nov 2000 (on a confusing presidential election ballot that caused controversy in Palm Beach), I included a link to Lycos, a has-been search engine wanna-be, which at the time must have had a convenient way to track backlinks. I haven’t even thought of Lycos for years. The…
If the pre-1978 laws were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works published in 1986 enter the public domain on January 1, 2015. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research,…
The rule against split infinitives is a bookish restriction serving no real function in English. However, many people have memorized the “no split infinitives” rule and take it very seriously. It’s best never to split infinitives (unless you want to really emphasize the risk you are taking). More: Split Infinitives in English: Not Actually Wrong, But…
Jerz > Writing > Grammar and Syntax > The short version: “based off of” is slang. Use “based on” instead. When I first started noticing the phrase “based off of” in student papers, I thought it was just a careless typo. But I’ve noticed it more and more in online writing and in casual speech. (UPDATE — by 2020, I…
These are straight vertical and horizontal lines. It’s your mind that’s twisted. Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute made a Lego checkerboard and placed white and purple M&Ms on the squares in a way that makes the board appear to bulge. Illusion Chasers, Scientific American Blog Network. Similar:Helvetica Bold Oblique Sweeps FontysHelvetica Bold Oblique was the…
Fascinating example of new media journalism: a graphic novel investigative report. The content is noteworthy, too: our lives have already changed now that we regularly give away our privacy in return for various benefits (lower prices, connection to friends). The corporations who use our data benefit more than we do, and many of us now…
I have found that archaeologists are seldom receptive to the notion of ancient astronauts—although one could argue that, when the archaeologists went looking for answers, all they managed to find was an even bigger and more mysterious stone block. —The New Yorker. Similar:Teenage Usability (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)Teens often work on laptops with track p…CybercultureMemory of…
A favorite observation about millennials, both in the workplace and in their daily lives, is how wired in they are with their preferred technologies. Why can’t they just pick up the phone and talk? Surely, their obsessive use of technology is driving this generation to be more isolated and cynical (and more eye contact–averse) than…