Overheard at Quora: “Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?”

Moodle is a free course-management tool that many schools (including mine) use to manage the online components of courses (including computer-graded quizzes, discussion forums, and the submission of online papers). The tool is powerful, but the interface offers a bewildering array of options, so that casual users are often dismayed by how many checkboxes it…

An Evening with a Board Game and Grandma

By the way, I won. Similar:Unity Normal Problems (Importing an object from Blender 2.8b)I had a complex model that I created in …AestheticsThough I have marking and prep and committee work and paperwork to do, I took an hour befo…PersonalMy Kids Loved Narnia but Were Unimpressed by Turkish DelightAmerican kids today would have little id…AmusingAnother…

Yes, I do feel rather awesome right now.

Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocket of freshly-washed pants & found old earbuds. (They work!) Looked down & spotted new earbuds. #win Similar:My parents doing their daily brain treasers in a coffee shop.PersonalSeton Hill University "Technology Advantage"Not just a student laptop program. …AcademiaAs I was preparing to take this screenshot, two more papers came in.I still…

Fun With Charts: Scale Matters

At first glance, this chart makes it look like food stamp usage has gone from almost nothing at some unspecified time in the past, to some huge amount over a span of who-knows-how-long. Only a fraction of the visitors to the site will click on the chart to see the scale, which reveals that the…

Zork: The Great Underground Empire

A blogger has started chronicling a journey through the classic 1980s computer game, Zork. Before King’s Quest and its successors took the realm of adventure gaming into colorful graphics, adventure titles were solely text. Infocom specialized in these during the 80s, including the Zork series, Planetfall, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But Zork,…

Stop Clubbing, Baby Seals

Similar:Write instructions for busy grouches.Updating the graphic for a writing hando…AcademiaWhen you need to record footsteps on a sidewalk, and the carpeted studio has a brick wall.AmusingThe storage shelves of my fantasy steampunk CGI starship will need props with appropriate …  AestheticsMultimodal Composition: Every time a student submits a narrated PowerPoint, a puppy cries.AcademiaUnvaccinated dad…

Tolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance best?

Interesting set of observations exploring the limits of omniscience and the sheer scale involved in watching an entire population. Failures in empathy lead to misinterpretation of anonymous rebellion in plain sight. Tolkien’s most potent and intimidating image of centralized surveillance, the Eye of Sauron atop a tower, taking in the whole world, has resonated with…

It’s Finally Ironic (You’re Welcome, Alanis)

Sample, improved lyrics: “An old man turned 98 /He won the lottery, and died the next day (from a severe paper cut from his lottery ticket).” Similar:Intimations of MortalityPlato, Montaigne, Pascal—those were the …CultureHere I am sketching spaceships like I’m 12 again. I feel like re-reading the novelization …AestheticsEdgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer…

The Pixar Theory

Jon Negroni creates a meta-narrative to connect every Pixar movie, using Boo as the still point in the turning universe. Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies…