Eats, Shoots & Leaves

What’s your comma IQ? Mine just so happens to be awesome. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Similar:Toasty Warm Bed (designed by drunk AI neural net)AestheticsPanic, confusion aboard sinking cruise chip – CNN.com Nobody’s perfect, but this proofread…Current_EventsHeadlines matter. Were they migrants, people who happened to be at a migrant center, pedes…Do the headlines encourage empathy, or…

4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence

I’m particularly tickled by the MLA reference. 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence | The Onion Similar:Raise It Up! :: Star-Spangled Banner – 1814-2014I usually start my American Lit I course…CultureWhen F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover With a big Hollywood movie now in th…AestheticsGoogle Favors Good…

Pheromone – A hormonal substance secreted by an individual.

Really helpful definition from a “Pinkalicous” children’s theater study guide. That’ll clear everything right up for the kiddos, won’t it? Similar:Introduction to The Skin of Our Teeth (optimistic, absurdist metatheater; Thornton Wilder,…https://youtu.be/1okt8MIVTtsAcademiaWhat Jane [Austen] Saw: 1796 Shakespeare GalleryYou are invited to time travel to two ar…AestheticsI played Pseudolus freshman year in college. Haven't seen the…

Study shows college students think they’re more special than ever…even those that can’t read or write and barely study

A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report). While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far…

Wikipedia hoax about a war that never happened deleted after 5 years

My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age. An article…

BBC Four – Shakespeare Uncovered

I’m slated to teach Shakespeare this fall… blogging this for future reference. Six Shakespearean actors and directors go in search of the greatest dramatist who ever lived by revealing the stories behind and the wonders within some of his greatest plays BBC Four – Shakespeare Uncovered. Similar:Facebook’s Censorship Problem Is What Happens When a Tech…

Neil Gaiman’s Journal

This is great advice for everybody. I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. So…

How To Gain or Lose 30 Minutes of Life Every Day

If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life. Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife. Over time bad habits accelerate your aging, and good habits slow it down… — Scientific American. Similar:When Asking the Question is Part of the News Story (New Example: Clinton Supporters)I ask my journalism…

Lost Treasures of Infocom Review [Mobile App]

Someone’s put a lot of time into ensuring the games play exceptionally well on mobile. The on-screen keyboard is a necessary evil, one that’s ameliorated by a great little auto-complete feature. It’s context-sensitive, so if you want to whip something from your inventory out in a pinch, the game will probably predict it by the…

Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map…

Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map…. Similar:Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained DeathSimulations are powerful tools for under…AestheticsThe belief that if people only were better educated, they'd engage  A few hours after the horrifyi…AcademiaPracticing my Unity3D design skills. Forgot to turn on gravity.https://youtu.be/PkxxiPAmTFg…

Tenth Grade Tech Trends

My high school experience was very analog. I had been word-processing most of my school papers and doing some recreational coding/hacking since I was in middle school (around 1982), but didn’t start using email until I went to college (1986), and then only sparingly until I left the country for grad school. So it was…