Results of the 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition

Results of the 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Similar:Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging PracticesPublic, Private, Political: Social Theor…AcademiaYour first #blender3d retractable #steampunk landing wheels will be your worst. But you ha…Your first #blender3d retractable #steam…AestheticsDebunking the newspapers are dying ideaDon’t count on viral social media posts …CultureI was briefly excited that Turnitin.com's new…

Lessons from “It’s a Wonderful Life”

My talented wife has written a set of lesson plans for It’s a Wonderful Life, the immediate occasion being our local professional theatre company’s production of the musical version. (See Stage Right Greensburg calendar.) Based on Philip van Doren Stern’s story “The Greatest Gift” (1943), Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life celebrates the…

Great spoof of the “zoom in and enhance” plot device; from Red Dwarf

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Confessions of a Tweeter

I finally committed “Twittercide” about a month ago. Some of my followers begged me to reconsider, and the flood of affection and good wishes felt a little like the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But I knew it was time to return to mine. Do I still have the occasional urge to tweet? Do…

Online video viewers watching longer on tablets | Digital Media – CNET News

For each minute of video watched on a desktop, tablet users watched for one minute 17 seconds, an average of 28 percent longer than desktop viewing. Video completion rates on tablets were also 30 percent higher than non-tablet mobile devices. While online viewers were more likely to turn to laptops or desktops to watch short…

‘Atlas Shrugged’ film producers replacing 100,000 DVD’s after mischaracterizing Ayn Rand’s novel | The Ticket – Yahoo! News

As the producers noted in an apology announcement, Rand’s work extols “a society driven by rational self-interest.” On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…’” via ‘Atlas Shrugged’ film producers replacing 100,000 DVD’s after mischaracterizing Ayn…

Did the national Emergency Alert System mistakenly play Lady Gaga?

“It’s 2012 and our emergency alert system still sounds like a Speak and Spell and looks like an Atari 2600,” wrote one among a range of instant reactions broadcast on Twitter. The tweet was apparently a response to the 1960s-style black and white lettering of the television message. — Did the national Emergency Alert System mistakenly…

Seek Personal Conflict, not Just a Situational Crisis: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Writing Tip

Winning the big game, surviving an illness or a scary car crash, working your way through grief… these are all common topics for personal essays. But in fiction, these kinds of actions are most meaningful when they happen as part of the background to a story that focuses on the inner life of the protagonist.…

Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Flash became a dominant desktop platform by allowing developers to code interactive games, create animated advertisements and deliver video to any browser that had the plugin installed, without having to take into account the particulars of any given browser. However, with the development of Javascript, CSS, and HTML5, which has native support for video, many…

Seton Hill tackles Shakespeares The Tempest

I have the delightful privilege of teaching The Tempest in a literature class, to a student who’s performing in it through the theater department. “I was ecstatic to play Ferdinand,” says Andrew Meholick, a junior from Reynoldsville majoring in theater performance. “He is a true romantic who is willing to do anything just to lay…

The (Manic Pixie) Dreamgirl to “Ease the Revolutionary Mind” » Cyborgology

Whereas a mere couple decades ago, one could simply point a finger at the mass media and their powerful cultural producers as the source of most offensive stereotypes about minority groups, Web 2.0 technology and the #Occupy movement shows us how stereotypes can be perpetuated, embellished, nay, even constructed at the grassroots level, by men…

Pursuing a Piracy Claim Against Apple – US Business – CNBC

Does anyone still think journalists aren’t creative writers? Take a look at this brilliantly concise character sketch: The rumpled scholar sat discussing the dispute on a recent afternoon in his high-ceilinged living room, which was crowded with books and his paintings. A parrot named Ike provided the occasional squawk, and sunlight streamed over the 400…

Turnitin.com UI Woes: One-click, No-confirmation Deletion of QuickMark Sets

In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily. Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting…

Integrating Quotations in Research Papers: Citing Sources Effectively

Touched up this handout on integrating quotations: If your college instructor wants you to cite every fact or opinion you find in an outside source, how do you make room for your own opinion? Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you…

Covering Crime and Justice

For my journalism class, I have already created some fake press releases and other documents and created a scenario that simulates how a student reporter might cover an incident involving a member of the campus. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that there’s been a real-world incident. I’ve been freshening up what I…

AP issues staff guidelines on retweets, no ‘personal opinions’ allowed or implied | Poynter.

Associated Press The Associated Press has added a new entry on retweeting to its social media guidelines. Staffers are reminded to keep their opinions to themselves. Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. Disclaimers — like “retweets do…

Will Amazon’s Lending Library Help or Hurt Novelists and Book Publishers? – Forbes

Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…

WordPress updates iOS App

Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated. Similar:How Will Historians of the Future Run MS Word 97? How Can We Save It for Them?Just as early filmmakers couldn’t have p…CybercultureHow Social Media Silences DebateThe Internet, it seems, is contributing …CultureCrowther's Adventure: Tough Memes to Squash…

Writing Tips for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

One of the most popular pages on my site — a single page that earns about 20% of my hits — started out as a class assignment for a technical writing student whose project for a real-world client ran into a snag. In Fall 2002, I showed my student Kathy Kennedy a model of a…

Courage Wolf: Write “Could Of” or “Would Of.” I Dare You.

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