When the kids were little, my wife and I managed their media consumption with the help of reviews from sites like Common Sense Media. (Or maybe a competitor. It was a long time ago… I emailed the webmaster to correct a detail they got wrong in a VeggieTales review.) I’m impressed by the level of…
Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza. Similar:Still More FaceTime FunI realize that video-chatting teenagers …MediaChurning Out More Non-profit Arts PromosAs part of my volunteer work for a local…AestheticsIt's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood: Mister Rogers and Educational IdeologyI recently lamented that my kids are gro…AestheticsTeaching myself the #Unity3D game engine. Each step…
For confessionals or tapdance routines vertical video is fine. When my students do multimedia projects I remind them that the video screen in our classroom is horizontal, so if they do use a vertical video there’s plenty of room for them to add infographics and annotations. Or they can actually edit a vertical video. If…
Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. […] A trained and tested LLM, when presented with a new text prompt, will generate the most likely next word, append it to the prompt, generate another next word, and continue in this manner,…
Look what I found on my shelf in a closet. #history #archaeology #media Similar:Dress rehearsal for Mamma Mia. This weekend only.PersonalThinking about physical therapy and cheerful, chatty older gents…I feel like I’m living in a sitcom. A…CultureMy third time seeing @shu.pippin. I'll be back tomorrow for closing night.PersonalHappy memories of PC games I played with…
This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:The last submissions of this…
I’m sure the good-apple cops will fairly and thoroughly investigate reports about someone stealing newspapers containing a story about alleged rapes at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house. Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a…
Ascending the path to High Hrothgar? No, just the steps from the parking lot at the appropriately named Seton Hill University. (It’s 101 steps, by the way.) Similar:Celebration of Writing — a big presentation day for freshman writing classes.PersonalPinkalicious — "Buzz Off"My daughter plays the Bumblebee in “Buzz…AestheticsMy virtual army of grey capsules is just…
This is offensive, deeply troubling, and, sadly, totally predictable. Julian Dibbell documented similar behavior 30 years ago in his article about sexual assault in the text-only virtual world LambaMOO. (Content warning… sexual assault in a multi-user virtual environment.) A woman has revealed she was ‘virtually gang raped’ by four male avatars in Meta‘s Horizon Worlds –…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The Ship On a mineral survey of a planet that just happens to look like Southern California, O’Brien trades playful barbs with crewman Muniz. Unlike most episodes where the leads have all the fun, this mission is fairly crawling with random crew we’ve never seen before. An unidentified ship appears randomly and crashes…
In general, I find Canvas a fairly decent system, but after a particularly frustrating hour wrestling with rubrics, I decided to spend two more hours blogging about my frustrations. I would expect a drop-down list to be populated with all the rubrics I’ve already created for my current class, and it would be a nice…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf and O’Brien want to search for overdue Sisko and Dax, but Kira invokes the Defiant’s standing orders to guard the station. When the captain’s damaged runabout turns up, we learn Starfleet wants him to prove that, per Odo’s intelligence, Gowron is a Changeling. Quark shows concern for Odo: “That’s one depressed ex-changeling.”…
I voiced Jack Rollins, writer of the popular holiday songs “Frosty the Snowman” and “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” in another “Whispers of the Past” documentary focused on Scottdale, Pa. Similar:Parchmap – Interactive Fiction with automapping, autocomplete, navigation, note taking, an…Parchmap is a wonderful expansion to the…AwesomePlay-Doh was Originally Wallpaper CleanerThe story of Play-Doh began…
“Be straight like a board!” My father is pressing me flat against the ceiling from my nose to my toes, and I’m squirming with laughter. His hands are so strong. I remember him helping my little fingers spread Limburger cheese — we called it our “buddy cheese.” My father worked as a…
POV: You are coding the automatic doors on your fantasy neovictorian cruiser personal project and you notice the strikeplate in the doorframe does not line up with the door latch. #unity3d #blender3d #revision #qc Similar:Classroom Vignette: MLA StyleStudent (shouldering backpack and headin…Academia'Little Mermaid' brings new music to the Andersen fairy tale – Pittsburgh Tribune-ReviewThe…
Similar:Media Bias Chart version 11 — Journalism sorted by bias (Left / Center / Right), reliabili…The very useful “media bias chart” is on…CultureMcCain's 2008 Concession Speech: Republicans interrupt their candidate's concession speech…That moment during McCain’s concession s…CultureThe daughter experiences her birthday cookie AestheticsThe Child (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 1)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next…
As a grad student in the 1990s, I chose to focus my dissertation on the years 1920-1950, on the theory that works published during that time period would fall out of copyright during the prime of my academic career. I imagined that one of my ongoing scholarly projects would be to publish free, annotated editions…
Similar:Getting ready to run a ChoiceScript workshop for Computers and Writing 2023. #cwcon #cwcon…PersonalMore #blender3d #steampunk goodness. #design #aesthetics #blender3dart AestheticsBlog ten-beat lines of verse, like Shakespeare wrote. Blog ten-beat lines of verse, like Sha…AcademiaStar Trek Beyond was an enjoyable nerdy family outing.PersonalHow professors use their time: faculty time allocationInteresting social science approach to h…AcademiaShe was…
Right now I can move the player around but the NPCs either just stand there or run to a random location and stop. Similar:Just an elegant retro keyboard for a #steampunk #cgi project. Procedural materials mean I …AestheticsStick to facts, but write news your readers will actually want to read. Students who put a lot…