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:Ignorance Meets an Invisible DisabilityI’m sure my young, healthy-looking frien…CultureThey called it a "flashlight" because early handheld lights weren't designed to shine stea…A student’s short story featuring a trea…CultureA Christmas Carol (WAOB…

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:In December 2001 I was blogging aboutIn December 2001, I was blogging about …Amusingxkcd: Pathogen ResistanceThis is just an excerpt. Read the whole …AmusingIn November 2001 I was blogging aboutIn November…

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:Wondermark: In Which There Is a TauntingWondermark  AmusingThe Tribune-Review published a nice preview of Dani Girl.My daughter Carolyn, Matthew Hommel, Vin…DramaWhat happens…

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:Oedipus Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) — Brief IntroductionMy first lecture screencasts for my newl…AcademiaWhoops, I Accidentally Used a Photo of Donald Trump in this Blog Post on Richard IIIHum de dum. Not paying any attention to …CultureIf You’re…

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:Liz Fosslien's insightful comic on unhealthy conflict vs. healthy conflict.PersonalFeeling Like an Impostor at 49I reminded my Shakespeare students that …AcademiaMy Son Plays Mozart Too Fasthttps://youtu.be/gXAtRI1NLxs He says “M…AmusingMoonBot (from the family steampunk bedtime RPG 2007-2013) vs. a crate and lamps.https://youtu.be/h2P2Ve-oZ1U AestheticsDatalore (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 12) Data's bro wants to be with…