If you watch the news, you’ve probably seen a “look live”. That news-speak term means a reporter who appears to be live in the field, but was taped doing the introduction to their story, or sometimes their throw back to the newsroom or a different type of seemingly live hit, well before the show is…
Freelance photographer Jen McKendrick won’t take pictures of “ugly people” — that is, the high school bullies who were doing what bullies do on Facebook. “If you are ugly on the inside,” says McKendrick, “I’m sorry but I won’t take your photos to make you look pretty on the outside!” A WTAE-TV article explains it thus: McKendrick…
For more on ALL RIGHT, ALL READY and ALL TOGETHER, see Grammar Girl. The slang term “alright” is always slang. Similar:Narrow ParsersCreating n00b-friendly interactive ficti…CybercultureIn December 2000, I was blogging about typeface snobbery, freedom in video game spaces, th…In December 2000, I was blogging about …AestheticsAbout that Cough, Rough, Pony, Bologna MemeDo the spellings of…
Similar:Writing IndexJerz > About > Dennis G. Jerz [ P…AcademiaHow it feels to watch a user test your product for the first time Jonathon Shariat.AmusingTrials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel…Rewatching ST:DS9 Strait-laced time c…AmusingHow 15 minutes I spent with a laptop in 1991 created 2 FT jobs and a promotionIn a section…
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 Myth of the Fake Geek Girl It’s not surprising, then, that being a…CultureIn April 2000, I was blogging about HTML frames, the future of reading, grammar, Kairos, a…In April 2000, I was blogging about… …BooksBroken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It RightI have recently started managing…
Similar:One of the benefits of teaching at a small college, with small classes…In a final reflection video for a freshm…AcademiaThere is a thing in literature, theme X.I’m very happy that several students in …AcademiaWhy our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreamingNeil Gaiman tells us why books matter:Wh…BooksNot sure whether I should be proud or…
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:Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera's Free Online Courses”If we really are trying to teach the wo…AcademiaFirst page of a student’s Texture project.…
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:I went with frisse. German uses esse “to eat” for people…AmusingA Video Game About Changing What Happens In…
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:Carolyn as Dolly Levi (Arts4Homeschoolers / Stage Right)I loved listening to her practice the “M…AestheticsFrozen opens tonight. (All shows have…
The control panel. Similar:I can’t fix this broken world but I guess I did okay using #blender3d to model this wedge-… AestheticsTrying Out the Zaggmate Keyboard/Case for iPadI was at a meeting yesterday in our IT d…DesignStar Trek The Original SeriesAmazing mural. Amazing. …AestheticsGetting to the Point in Academic Writing Don’t spend three pages…