The amazing daughter is featured in the ads for this commercial dance event.

The amazing daughter is featured in the ads for this commercial dance event. Similar:A question I find myself thinking all the time.PersonalFriday night. What am I doing? #partylikeaprofAcademiaGinger Christ Superstar!AestheticsCombined, base color, roughness and metallic passes. #Blender3d steampunk control panel. AestheticsWhat About “The Breakfast Club”?I made three movies with John Hughes; wh…CultureEncounter at Farpoint (Season…

Common Sense Media’s AI Initiative

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.

Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza. Similar:NOT a scene from The Miracle Worker.PersonalIntroduction to The Skin of Our Teeth (optimistic, absurdist metatheater; Thornton Wilder,…https://youtu.be/1okt8MIVTtsAcademiaThe boy approved of the WWII historical fiction Dunkirk. CultureSomeone seems to have slipped this over my transom. Thank you, #foodsubstitutefairy whoeve…PersonalMy parents doing their daily brain treasers in a coffee…

Make Video Horizontal Again

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…

New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text

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

Look what I found on my shelf in a closet. #history #archaeology #media Similar:What if I design a #steampunk fantasy cruiser and there aren’t enough chairs? How do I kno… AestheticsWhen your January term starts Dec 18. #partylikeaprofAcademiaYounger friends, can you write or read cursive? I’m curious.CultureStill More FaceTime FunI realize that video-chatting teenagers …MediaCat-sitting.…

How the printing press changed “you”: when reading changed, so did writing

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…

Traces of Scribes

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:Headlines matter. Were they migrants,…

A Colorado town’s newspapers were stolen after a story about rape charges at the police chief’s house

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 snow-covered steps from the parking lot at the appropriately named Seton Hill University. (It’s 101 steps, by the way.)

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:Dogmeat and I may yet win this game. Yes, this was the decisive moment. I…GamesI’ve roughed out earthen embankments for the city walls. I know there was at…

I was ‘raped’ in VR – the effects can ‘mirror’ real sex assaults

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 –…

The Ship #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 2) Sisko defends his claim to salvage a Jem’Haddar warship

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…

Picking a rubric in Canvas should not be so frustrating that it makes me want to blog about it… and yet here we are.

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…

Apocalypse Rising #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 1) Sisko Infiltrates a Klingon Base to Expose an Impostor

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.”…

Jack Rollins-Frosty the Snowman

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:5 Ways to Avoid Being Rude (According to 100-Year-Old Etiquette Rules)If you are a gentleman, never lower the …CultureSo I’m starting a thing. Wish me…

We celebrate the good life of my father, George Joseph Jerz

“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

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:In July, 2002, I was blogging about military close reading, weblogs in journalism, UX evan…In July, 2002, I was blogging…

A Merry Look at Journalism in “The Year Without a Santa Claus”

Similar:''The Balloon Hoax'' by Edgar Allan PoeWhen steampunk was speculative fiction, …AmusingWriting a Cutline (Caption) for the News: Three examples of an often overlooked journalism…In journalism, the “cutline” is the text…AestheticsHiggs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in PhysicsBeautiful, beautiful science writing by …Current_EventsStunning, bleak unemployment chart from the front page of the New…

Original Mickey Mouse Character Enters Public Domain in 2024

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…

Fall 2023 Grades: Submitted!

Similar:My wife reports: “There was one smart aleck walking along the street who exclaimed: “Look,…PersonalPublic, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging PracticesPublic, Private, Political: Social Theor…AcademiaToday I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at the mall.I’m far from perfect, and injustice and …AcademiaMy English major skills crushed the girl…