The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left…
In addition to iPads and MacBooks, every freshman who arrives at Seton Hill this fall will get a copy of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. I taught this book last term in my American Lit class. Here are two of the best student projects on The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games: 2 Sides of…
Similar:The Mom From The Cat in the Hat Finally SpeaksAs a toddler, my son once methodically s…AmusingSeattle Times ‘Outraged’ FBI Created Fake Web Page, News Story To Catch SuspectThe FBI fabricated a story to look like …Cyberculture"It's called an amphora," the artist says.AestheticsFirst Stanford code poetry slam reveals the literary side of…
Similar:Dark Page (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 7) Lwaxana suffers from a hidden trau…Rewatching ST:TNG Troi’s mother visit…Amusing"All for the Best" RehearsalHere’s a brief clip of a rehearsal of “A…AmusingIce Cream and Sharks Scene: writing classroom. …AcademiaHeadlines: Why editors matter in journalism.Headlines are important. (Send an editor…AmusingUnscheduled Disasters in Journalism: Learn to DealIn…
According to a somewhat dry AFP article (posted on a URL that will probably expire soon), “The researchers estimated that in 2008 Australian adults aged 25 and older spent 9.8 billion hours in front of the small screen, and that this time was associated with 286,000 years of life that ended prematurely. | Every single hour…
Our iPads will one day be stacked on a pallet, like these old PCs. They’ll be retro curiosities, having done their jobs — empowering us to build even better tools. Similar:Captain, the Fake News Detectors are Offline! Slate has a good article about Willi…CybercultureMemory of Wrestler Yukon Eric”The year is around 1952, the dead of…
The business of journalism is changing. The approaching anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks is an occasion to reflect on how we received news in the days when newspapers updated their web pages once a day, and Google did not constantly monitor newspaper home pages looking for fresh stories. For journalists thinking about the future,…
A popular handout from my site, Short Stories: 10 Tips for Creative Writers, includes a phrase uncommon enough that Googling for it (“practiced scream therapy“) leads me to short story exercises that develop an example into more detailed studies, or pages that remix the content of my site in order to make a similar point.…
There is a lot to like about Google+, and getting to 25 million users so quickly certainly seems promising for the Google social network. But, it doesn’t bode well if the excitement is already fading. Google needs to not only create a capable social network, but it needs to make that social network compelling enough…
This rhetorical power derives from the “-ification” rather than from the “game”. -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points. Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets…
I was doing a lot of impulse buying during the $9.99 days, but since then, on occasions when I’ve seen the ebook offered at a higher price than a paperback, I have just turned to interlibrary load instead. “Terrified” by Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and discounted e-book pricing, five major publishers allegedly acted together to increase…
David Mahokey of Dunbar, a senior at Point Park University, and Greg Kerestan of Greensburg, a senior at Seton Hill University, wrote the 20-song score and script, respectively, for ″In Control,″ a musical that focuses in part on Mahokey’s real-life battle with bone cancer. Two free performances of ″In Control,″ directed by Anthony Marino, artistic…
Which is cooler? That my 13yo son was just sitting at the kitchen table singing lyrics to MC Frontalot’s “It Is Pitch Dark,” or that my 9yo daughter was chiming in with corrections? It Is Pitch Dark Similar:Conspiracy (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season One, Episode 25) Parasitic Bug Doppelgängers on…Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…MediaUgh. Unmarked…
The heartbreaking thing is that this fall, over 10,000 bookstore employees across America will be out of work. The way the publishing industry is going, many of those people won’t be able to find jobs that are even tangentially related to books anymore; they’ll go on to work in movie theaters and grocery stores and…
The layout of this display at the Carnegie Science Center almost makes it look like the Maria duplicate in Metropolis came before Karel Capek’s play RUR (which was written in 1920, first performed in 1921). Similar:Looking in on the officers' wardroom (conference and dining) one deck above the main … I thought of the interior…
The control panel. Similar:Log Off, You Losers! Electronic Flatulence Must Cease!”Put your hands in your laps. Close your…AcademiaAnother 10sq cm of a beautiful #steampunk control panel for a personal #neovictorian #blen…AestheticsA Successful Failure: The TI-99/4A Turns 40My family had one of these when I was 12…AwesomeUkraine’s Three-to-One AdvantageThe author notes that he can’t confirm w…CultureThe…
Images from an extended tour of a cold war submarine. (We liked the tour we took last year so much, my son and I came back.) [portfolio_slideshow size=medium trans=scrollHorz ] Similar:Candyland is a masterpiece of game design (John Brieger unpacks the specific cultural cont… AestheticsIt started with a ride down an escalator and ended with…
My daughter, as the wizard, with her talented castmates, in our local theater school’s preteen summer camp musical. Similar:In September, 2002, I was blogging about science writing, satire, ebonics, Google News, ow…In September, 2002, I was blogging about…CybercultureCelebration of Writing Fall 2018PersonalHappy to see a familiar face in a slide during today’s Academic Affairs Workshop.…
As for Starbucks, the decision to pull the plug is reportedly up to individual stores thought to be only in New York. —Many New York City Starbucks Locations About To Put An End To Squatters « CBS New York. Awkward phrasing… Who is doing the reporting if this fact is “reportedly” so? Who is doing…
In 2008, when her scientific publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, became the first in China to use CrossCheck text analysis software to spot plagiarism, Zhang was pleased to be a trailblazer. But when the first set of results came in, she was upset and horrified. “In almost two years, we find about 31 percent…