London’s Big Ben is leaning, parliament sinking: reports | Reuters
Note headline; here is the only time this Reuters article refers to the “parliament was slipping into the Thames” issue: [Professor John Burland of Imperial College London]Â dismissed concern in the media that parliament was slipping into the Thames, while the commission’s spokesman denied the walls around the palace were suffering from a particularly bad subsidence…
(Don’t Let Her Be) The One That Got Away — Stage Right Greensburg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV_Wo5BsQyA Ensemble number from Stage Right Greensburg’s opening night of an original musical version of The Little Mermaid. (Script adapted from Hans Christian Andersen by Anthony Marino; music by David Mahokey and Greg Keresten; lyrics by Greg Keresten; choreography by Renata Marino; musical director Cindy Baltzer; set design by Mark Kissner; construction by Mark Cole;…
Revisiting ‘Zork’: What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games – Atlantic Mobile
In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it’s always summer — and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan,…
Should We Really Abolish the Term Paper? A Response to the NYT
Students learn to evaluate one another’s thinking and challenge one another–and, far more important, they learn from one another and correct themselves. I cannot think of a better skill to take out into the world. By blogging and responding to one another’s posts, my students aren’t learning how to write for an English professor. They…
Blogs vs. Term Papers
While I’m not quite ready to ditch the traditional term paper, students in most of my classes use blogs for brainstorming, prewriting, reflection, and synthesis; I encourage students to post new media artifacts as part of a “creative criticall presentation” in lit and media classes. For freshman writing, I stick fairly closely to a shared…
Opening Night: New “The Little Mermaid”
At night, instead of getting ready for bed as she was ordered, my ambitious little diva created this costume. (Note fork.)
Why A Teen Who Talks Back May Have A Bright Future
When my daughter was five or six, and she got into trouble along with her older brother, she would overhear me explaining to my son why I would punish him more severely than his sister. Pretty soon, when they both got caught, my daughter would shriek, “You have to punish Peter more than me, because…
Apples Textbooks For 1-percenters Will Leave Most Children Behind | Fox News
Publishers who want to create titles for Apple’s iBooks store must use Apple’s iBooks Author application, which runs on Mac OS X only. Publishers who use Windows or Linux computers in the office need not apply. If you want to create EPUB books, you can get software that runs on any platform. Just as with…
The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I…
Seton Hill University Recognized By Apple
Seton Hill University has been named an Apple Distinguished Program for its success in enhancing and extending teaching and learning with thoughtful and innovative implementations of technology. The Apple Distinguished Program designation is reserved for programs that are recognized centers of educational excellence and leadership. —Seton Hill University – A Leading Catholic Liberal Arts University…
copyranter: New Milwaukee Public Library ads mock facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
copyranter: New Milwaukee Public Library ads mock facebook, YouTube, and Twitter..
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Leaping Off the Page: The Future of Type.
You may also notice the offer, at right, for a special pair of glasses glasses. Order them—or, if you have them already, remove them from their plastic casing and put them on; you will notice that when viewed through these glasses, the doubly printed words appear to leapleap off the screen screen. At first, the effect may be…
The Web Means the End of Forgetting – NYTimes.com
With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook,…
The Horror… The Horror! How Music in Horror Games Effects Player Experience
From one of my students, a blog-based presentation on music in horror games. Regardless, safety in ARG’s may not necessarily diminish the game’s terror-effects. Many horror movies and games are based upon the principles of Freud’s theory of The Uncanny, or what makes something scary (Helene Cixous, a literary critic, gives an advanced yet interesting…
‘Little Mermaid’ brings new music to the Andersen fairy tale – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
The story line is similar to the Disney-movie version of the story about a mermaid who braves the forces of a sea witch to win her prince. Stage Right artistic director Anthony Marino adapted the film script for the stage with original music by David Mahokey of Connellsville, a Point Park University student, and Greg…
What Comes before the Platform: The Refuse of Videogames | Play The Past
It takes a digital humanist to make this kind of argument. I don’t mean to invoke the turf-fencing debate about what the digital humanities means, I mean to honor a question that forces us to remind ourselves that we are the Eloi, the pampered elite whose world of comfort exists only because of the toil…
What do you do with a BA in English? | ZDNet
I don’t know what Kid #1 will do with his BA in English (OK, writing…whatever!). Maybe he’ll write the next great American novel. Maybe he’ll be a marketing rockstar. Maybe he’ll write for ZDNet. Maybe he’ll be the next Sondheim. It doesn’t matter. The more I think about it, the more I wish my doctors…
The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance
Now, it’s worth noting that Brisbane’s question makes perfect sense, considered from the newsroom’s perspective. Romney’s claim that Obama makes speeches “apologising” for America isn’t readily amenable to fact-checking. Instead, Romney relied on what are sometimes called “weasel words”, in which an allegation is alluded to, without being made head-on. (Romney, for instance, never quotes…
Birthplace of a Robot
Not quite as dramatic as the creation of the evil robotess Maria (in the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis), but more educational. Kids and some dads from my son’s FIRST Robotics Competition club discuss strategy. I’m blogging the process; soon I hope to get the kids involved, but for understandable reasons, they are mostly interested…