Do we really need Justin Bieber to make this story relevant? They’re steampunks, part of an international movement that’s a mashup of do-it-yourselfers, ahistorical recreationists and science fiction aficionados who are happily reliving a past that never was. The Victorian era was “a wonderful era when people were still being surprised by the world,” says…
Kierkegaard recognized, over 150 years ago, that we live life forward but we understand it backward. He was speaking about our being immersed in time itself: The simple truth that we live our present moments in a sort of confusion continuously being clarified by the retrospective understanding that comes later. Most novelists work to soften…
Despite the lopsided drawing and grey shading around the eyes, these are not the zombies, these are the protagonists of a government-issued graphic novel designed to teach general disaster awareness. Similar:Disruptive Decorations: Kids learned better in a sparesly-decorated CMU labKids learned better in a sparse lab sett…AestheticsPolice respond to Twitter bot sending death threat to…
Imagination is a powerful social tool. The novel provides us with a sustained window into another world, while still exercising the creative faculties that make us co-creators of the worlds we read about. Having said all that, I am aware that there may be some confirmation bias operating, as I here introduce an article that…
Will the celebrity interpretation spark or short-circuit a student’s own interpretive creativity? Were I to use this, I would want to use the video as one of several possible sources of authority, including the student’s own, original, interpretation. ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare allows you…
It’s just this feeling I have when I view the last several dozen images saved to my photostream. Similar:Assembling wall units to bake into a texture atlas. Teacup is a freebie from polyhaven.co… AestheticsCarolyn as Dolly Levi (Arts4Homeschoolers / Stage Right)I loved listening to her practice the “M…AestheticsCEO’s brutalist office, for a Zoom-based production of…
Google, which declined to comment on the gender breakdown of its social network, has a long tradition of using its own products internally before releasing them to the public. Products like Gmail and Google Buzz had lengthy incubation periods inside the company before they were released to the public. But that internal testing process can…
Despite iPod-strong sales, air conditioning remained a luxury for many years. Newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s were still filled with headlines about thousands of deaths and “prostrations” linked to summer heat. It would be decades before most newly built single-family homes in the United States had A.C. — hard to believe today, when Census…
It’s a stretch to say Atari has turned 40, since there isn’t much left but the name, but this is still an interesting read. Companies began collapsing and Atari was soon sold to a man named Jack Tramiel. Over the next decade, Atari made computers, a game console called Jaguar and a handheld game machine…
Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some…
Orla Reynolds Design. Similar:Fired for Making a Game: The Inside Story of I Get This Call Every DayHe knows that if he’d instead posted a s…BusinessChoosing Carolyn's HeadshotWhich of these headshots do you like bes…AestheticsNarrow ParsersCreating n00b-friendly interactive ficti…CybercultureDesert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever CreatedPenn and Teller are involved with this s…Books1,000-pound rosary sends…
I had already spent a couple hours today tweaking the smartphone version of my website, so this study was a welcome affirmation. Young adults – Nearly half of cell internet users ages 18-29 (45%) do most of their online browsing on their phone. Non-whites – Half (51%) of black cell internet users do most of…
Actually a rather dorky story, but I love the final quotes about the dog: “He’s not usually very smart. “He’s really dopey and just likes to chew socks.” —Choking dog saves its own life by dialling 999 Similar:Universities must stop presuming that all students are tech-savvyAlthough considerable resources have bee…AcademiaI came of age playing too…
How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret? The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell,…
Even the things we do for fun – playing sports, joining a band, riding a horse, writing a story – you have made into a competition. You’ve taken our creativity and told us that it matters not because it fulfills us, but because we can sell it to a college and reap the returns on…
Great writing, introducing the backstory while simultaneously focusing on current events. Back then, the faculty called for the resignation of two prominent board members, and many on the campus called for the entire board to resign. Tuesday, crowds applauded when the name of Helen E. Dragas, the rector, or chair, of the board, was called…
Great satire from The Onion. Breaking Story So New Reporter Literally Has No Information Similar:Blender Griffin, Part 2After another couple of hours of work, I…AestheticsCan't upload photos to Facebook from my MacBookI spent 30 minutes trying to upload abou…CybercultureOverheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management…
Writing, however, was a part of the game industry in the beginning. It’s most faithful legacy is now considered niche. Great game writers like Steve Meretzky and Tim Schafer are as memorable as writers in comparable genres; Robert Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft. Today, you have to dig deep into the circles of game…
Ms. Sullivan emerged on the steps of the university’s white-columned rotunda afterward to address a whooping crowd gathered on the central lawn, and quoted something that Thomas Jefferson, designer of the building and founder of the university, wrote upon being elected president: “It is pleasant for those who have just escaped threatened shipwreck to hail…
I’m not kidding when I say I haven’t even thought about planning to watch a TV show since Babylon 5 concluded in 1998. I don’t say this to be an anti-TV snob — we watch broadcast TV and plenty of DVDs, and I got kind of hooked on websites devoted to Lost (even though I…