INCIDENTAL COMICS: Understanding Poetry. Similar:"seriously, the guy has a point" — on the Charging Bull and Fearless Girl ControversyArt conveys significance; however, much …AestheticsGame Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't ItGreg Costikyan on Play This Thing! A re…AcademiaAdvent of Digital Humanities Will Make English Departments Pointless — New RepublicDon’t overreact to the…
I’ve blogged a bit as part of today’s Day of Digital Humanities. Day of Digital Humanities on Twitter. Similar:Memories of Toronto Yonge Street EncountersI arrived in Toronto in 1992 as a 22yo g…CultureNot Bad for an English MajorI didn’t have much choice when it came t…HomeNerd siblings are awesome siblingsMy 15yo wanted to show me…
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…
What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the “real” world around us represents one effort to control it. | And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online…
Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, told me, “People who take their Ph.D.s into other realms are not necessarily being hired for their content expertise, but for their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments.” These skills, it turns out, are in high demand.…
Wonderfully silly take on old-school point-and-click adventures. I’ve only played through the first few turns but found quite a few good laughs. I’ll be back to play more when I’m done chauffeuring the offspring this evening. A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, is this…
Revenue is not the same thing as profit, but still I was surprised by these findings. The Pew research team attempted a revenue estimate for all the branches of the United States news industry it has covered in past reports. The surprising conclusion: Even though newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by half over the last…
The real concern here is that the little guys—the Pies ‘n’ Thighs, the charitable causes, the artists and merchants trying to scrape by with the help of their Facebook fans—will find that they can’t reach even the users who really do want to see their updates. So far, the data suggest that they’re being spared…
Great article featuring the little girl from the 1981 Lego ad. What’s the problem with girl LEGOs? Why is everyone against pink? ask many parents. I’ll let Rachel Giordano answer that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I…
Similar:Happy Easter 2020 CultureWhat blogging wasI’ve maintained this blog since the spri…CybercultureA #steampunk control panel in context. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #blender3dartAestheticsMore #Blender3D practice. Additional details for a steampunk control panel. Just because.AestheticsIn March 2000, I was blogging about Palm V computers for the Navy, NCAA banning online jou…In March 2000, I was blogging about …AcademiaSupport…
I turned off the extra screen on my desktop computer. At first, the smaller workspace felt punishingly cramped. But after a few days of adjusting to the new set-up, an unusual serenity invaded my normally harried workday. With a single screen that couldn’t accommodate too many simultaneous stimuli, a screen just large enough for a…
They don’t even seem to want to watch Frozen. Instead they are playing Animal Jam. Similar:This winter I changed my weekday alarm tone to chirping birds. This winter I changed my weekday ala…AestheticsTechnology's Impact on Education Technology’s Impact on Education | V…AcademiaCelebration of Writing Fall 2025. Students present their research for their upcoming term …PersonalFound:…
When I got to college, I had already learned complex grammar fairly well thanks to 3 years of High School Latin. At the University of Toronto during grad school, I took a history of the English language course, which helped tremendously when I later took a medieval drama course. It was very clear during that…
Greater parental involvement in school (serving on committees, checking the kids’ homework) does not correlate with greater academic achievement. I wonder how these findings would relate to homeschooling. The theory was that more active and invested mothers and fathers could help close the test-score gap between middle-class and poor students. Yet until the new study,…
NEWS FLASH: If your sources are an off-the-record comment and a thing you chose to do, and you claim that everyone is forced to do the thing you chose to do, then your news item will probably fall apart. “I took a conversation about the preparation for a press briefing and muddied it with my…
“The big danger always confronting CNN — and it’s confronted CNN since CNN went on the air and started doing 24-hour news — is how loud to shout, how much to do this, how much ‘breaking news’ is really breaking news, and how do you convey to your audience this a huge story?” Sesno said…
[C]hildren play to get oxygen, to understand hierarchy, to achieve mastery at a skill, and to socialize. The patterns were simplified into four categories: under the radar, hierarchy, mastery, and social play. —LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents – Quartz. Similar:A serious summer activity.Once classes start again, we will all ha…CultureCollegewide game encourages…