The show was awash in quick, smart wisecracks, not to mention cultural references that ran the gamut from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Miles Davis to Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Watching MST3K was like hanging out with a trio of underachieving-genius best friends. At a time when depictions of geekery were limited mostly to Urkel and…
. Similar:Journalists: The "Enemy of the American People"; Also, an "Accountability" PollI seem to be educating future enemies of…Current_EventsForce of Nature (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 9) A Space Thing leads to an en… Rewatching ST:TNG In which a comic te…EthicsMy Latest Classic Tales Online PurchaseJust finished listening to B. J. Harris …Books"This Is…
Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…
Fantastic data visualization. How Americans Die. Similar:Fact check: Trump utters series of false and misleading claims at coronavirus briefingNot fake news. Not the enemy of the Amer…Current_EventsEvery day on my fantasy #neovictorian interplanetary cruiser features glowing green ether … In the backstory for the interactive…AestheticsSplit Infinitives in English: Not Actually Wrong, But UnwiseThe rule against…
My wife and I in Biblical costumes for Children of Eden. (We played Storytellers and had walk-on parts as Seth (third son of Adam and Eve) and his wife.) Oh, and she was a polar bear and I was a giraffe on the ark. Dennis G. Jerz. Similar:In August, 2000 I was blogging about poetry,…
It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
Grail to the Thief stars a thief from the future named Hank Krang, who “recently had a self-aware time machine called the Time Excursion Digital Interface, or TEDI, fall into his lap after a poker game. He has decided to use this technology to go throughout time, stealing priceless artifacts.” His first destination? Arthurian times,…
I am not a fan of Adobe Flash, which is a closed, proprietary system that requires your users to install a specific, resource-intensive player. Don’t build your business on someone else’s property. Long live HTML5. Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums…
“We have about 850 graduates, and we have a professional photographer snapping their picture when they shake my hand and get their diploma,” said Ronald Machtley, the president of Bryant. “I don’t think their mom and dad and grandma want to get a picture of them holding up their cellphone.” —Go Forth and Conquer, but…
Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert who run The Sunday Times investigative Insight team placed an advert in a Bulgarian paper. The reporters from a Bastion of British investigative journalism pretended to be a UK-based couple wanting to circumvent the adoption process and buy a Bulgarian baby. A sharp-eyed Bulgarian reporter saw the advert and was…
Users are now able to create audio and video playlists with WordPress 3.9. They work as a shortcode, just like the image galleries do currently. Uploading audio and video is handled through the usual media uploader, with images and everything else. From there, you have the option to add them to a playlist. —Smashing Magazine.…
The eighties, at least, were drenched in cocaine and neon, slick cars and yacht parties, a real debauched reaction. But nineties white culture was all earnest yearning: the sorrow of Kurt Cobain and handwringing over selling out, crooning boy-bands and innocent pop starlets, the Contract With America and the Starr Report. It was all so…
A first draft gives you something to go on in the future. Because you will rewrite this draft. And you’ll rewrite it again after the first time. So, don’t rush the process. (And I’m talking to myself as much as to you.) At the same time, I think its important to acknowledge that writing “masterful…
Data visualization is one of the most important tools we have to analyze data. But it’s just as easy to mislead as it is to educate using charts and graphs. In this article we’ll take a look at 3 of the most common ways in which visualizations can be misleading. —Heap Data Blog. Similar:‘NPR Voice’…
INCIDENTAL COMICS: Understanding Poetry. Similar:Lecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a DiscussionLecturing is So Much Easier than Leading…AcademiaDevil's Due (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 13) Picard vs. sexy devil ArdraRewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….AmusingNot sure whether I should be proud or embarrassed… As part of a journalism lesson about b…AmusingWhat Miley Cyrus…
I’ve blogged a bit as part of today’s Day of Digital Humanities. Day of Digital Humanities on Twitter. Similar:Take that, grass! Eat rotary analog steel.HomeA Revolutionary Approach to Treating PTSDInhabiting an improvised play designed t…HomeSuch deep roots you have: How Little Red Riding Hood's tale evolvedDid all these stories spring from a comm…HomeFacebook, really? More…
Interesting social science approach to how university faculty spend their time. [O]n a recent trip abroad when an immigration officer asked how I could afford to be away from work for a month. I said simply that we were on winter break and the officer jokingly lamented about going into the wrong profession. I didn’t…
I played the open-source version of Uru with my daughter for a few weeks when she was about six or seven. I enjoyed the opening tutorial game, but after that found little to do and found the learning curve was too steep to keep my daughter interested. She was happy running around and endlessly re-dressing…
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways…
“It’s not a game I made for other people,” he says. “I made it for myself.” That might be the creative creed for a new generation of independent video games and game makers that has sprung up in the past five years or so. Unlike the makers of mainstream blockbuster games — slick packages produced…