McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.

PROUSTZAC Enhances and enriches remembrance of things past. Can lead to increased carbohydrate consumption. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.. Similar:In December 2001 I was blogging aboutIn December 2001, I was blogging about …AmusingTake a moment to appreciate these good COVID-19 statisticsMay 1, my state had the third-highest pe…AwesomeControversial Content in…

Len Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor.

The talented and insightful scholar Matt Kirschenbaum tells a wonderful story. Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in…

I don’t usually post animal videos on my blog…

But when I do, it’s because they are this adorable. Saving this for the next time my daughter is crabby and needs some comfort. Similar:I felt a great disturbance in the Fandom”…as if millions of voices suddenly cr…AestheticsIndustriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime. The girl amusing herself on our 70m …AestheticsPHD Comics: It's in the syllabus …

Gerald Green Incorporates Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’ Into Slam Dunk | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

While competing in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest Saturday, contestant Gerald Green reportedly incorporated characters, dialogue, and set design from 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus into his elaborately choreographed dunk routine. “Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee/Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his…

Adventure Before Adventure Games: A New Look at Crowther and Woods’s Seminal Program

Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here). I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of…

Why Drag It Out?

The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored. For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she told…

“All for the Best” Rehearsal

Here’s a brief clip of a rehearsal of “All for the Best,” from the Stage Right! Greensburg production of Godspell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8Kje6PvHg (I’m in the back on the left, wearing a tie as a headband.) Similar:William Shakespeare’s Star WarsBecause apparently I am not already nerd…AestheticsWhen You've Already Got a Major, But You Love Books (Seton Hill…

Sorry, but I am done hearing about the “Cruise from Hell” story. Done.

Okay, so yeah. One of these describes a very unpleasant, completely ruined vacation. The other sounds like hell. Similar:I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks.She stopped liking, and started commenti…CybercultureRemember That Class Assignment I Hated? The One That Landed Me My Dream Job?ME (a couple years ago): Okay, students….AcademiaIn July 1999, I was…

From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely…

The Need for a Digital “New Journalism”

Journalism without the sourced quotes from eyewitnesses is weak. Opinions with shoehorned-in-because-the-job-description-requires-it quotes is weak journalism. But this is an interesting challenge to the traditional assumptions I have been passing along to my journalism students. I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to…

I Find Myself in Another Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517BhV1j0uU Similar:8k trimsheets baked as efficient building blocks for my #fantasy #steampunk #cgi cruiser. …PersonalShe’s on her way to the @thepublicpgh for two shows today as Margot in Dial M for Murder.She’s on her way to the @thepublicpgh fo…AestheticsOn the way to closing night of "Orphans."PersonalI spent Thanksgiving break building a #trimsheet for steampunk control…