I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning today, teaching myself something called “normal baking” in the computer modeling program Blender. I did it because I had nothing else pressing to do, I was too wound up to sleep, and too tired to do anything really productive. I wouldn’t say it was boring,…
Restricting access to content doesn’t work. Someone else’s content will get filtered and curated instead of yours. Scarcity is not a viable business model on the Internet. —Fred Wilson, AVC Similar:In praise of the sci-fi corridorCorridors in science-fiction movies. I l…AestheticsPracticing my Unity3D design skills. Forgot to turn on gravity.https://youtu.be/PkxxiPAmTFg I’m brus…AmusingMy 13yo homeschooler had…
The very last roll of Kodachrome film will be delivered today in Parsons, Kansas. Kodak has slowly phased out the materials needed to make and develop the film. Only a single operation in the world — Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons — had continued to develop Kodachrome. First introduced in 1935, the death of the film…
“We love to hear what kids think of our books, and this is a great way to see what they’re reacting to,” said Suzanne Murphy, vice president and publisher at Disney Book Group, one of two dozen publishing houses that send advance copies to the young Bethesda readers. The Bethesda group is one of 16…
For more than a century, writers have made the fabled pilgrimage to New York, offering their stories to publishing houses and dreaming of bound editions on bookstore shelves. Publishers had the power of the purse and the press. They doled out advances to writers they deemed worthy and paid the cost of printing, binding and…
0 Similar:Scratchy "Cloak of Darkness" on Scratch”Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on…AestheticsProto iPads and Paper Coexist in Classic Star TrekRewatching the classic Trek episode “The…CybercultureMy Student Calls Out a Mental Health Stigma in a Biased Headline — But Here's Why We Shou…This morning a journalism student told m…CultureWriting a Cutline (Caption) for the News:…
Similar:“The Cowherd Who Became a Poet,” by James Baldwin. (Read by Dennis Jerz)Inspiration can come to those with the h…BooksIn "World Drama" I'm adding the absurd, optimistic "The Skin of Our Teeth" (dropping bleak… In light of current events, I’m droppi…AcademiaDay of Dennis Jerz » Today, a Hand-written Letter about a Stack of Books Trumped…
As my 12-year-old son gets ready to surpass my six-foot height any day (his lip needs a third shave, but he’s apparently in no rush to graduate away from calling me “Daddy”) and as my 8-year-old navigates a peer community that includes mean girls and true friends, gallant young gentlemen (thank you, little boy who…
Hidden? Sure, but certainly not accidental. I didn’t notice it when I was a kid, but it sure jumped out at me when I watched the Schoolhouse Rock videos with my kids. And even small details are pro-girl. The nameless character who shows up in a mini-skirt and platforms in “Interjections!” is unbelievably excited not…
What’s a well-written, gripping, yet breezy novel (something that will engage students who would otherwise be distracted by late April weather)? A colleague has chosen The Virgin Suicides. What about The Secret Life of Bees? The Hunger Games? Little Brother? (Yes, I know Cory Doctorow is Canadian) I’ll likely need to trim some of these…
Beginning journalism students often need some practice giving the best lines to their sources. Here are the first two paragraphs in a story about missing tailgates. It’s just a routine story, but the writing makes it inviting and personal. Luke Himler said employees at Hollywood Cars near Greensburg were moving vehicles on the lot Saturday…
I have been reading a lot more in the past few years, in part due to the text-to-speech capabilities of my Kindle, in part due to the convenience of having a collection of Emily Dickinson poetry or a Sherlock Holmes anthology on my iPod Touch when I find myself in a line somewhere, and in…
Similar:R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Artistic Prosperity TrailerWe rehearsed and recorded a Zoom recordi…ArtKorean News Station Pokes Fun at KTVU with Fake American Pilot Names After Southwest Airli…This is certainly a joke, but it’s funni…AmusingStar Trek TOS Main Theme but it never gets to the Main ThemeArrgh! This is sooo stressful! (Some gre…MediaI MacGyvered myself…
Fascinating discussion of the evolution (and violation) of the emerging blogosphere convention for citing links, in the late 90s. A few years ago, I was exploring what happened to the canonical first blogs, a short list of frequently updated web pages that Jesse James Garret identified as weblogs, and I mentioned in passing that I…
Similar:The black chair is down to 18¢ per ounce? Shut up and take my money, Amazon!PersonalOn set as Betsy and Philip Schulyer in an historical film.PersonalWe found a mushroom fairy ring in our yardIt won’t make the afternoon of mowing mo…AestheticsPictures from opening night of @pictclassictheatre Jane Eyre. (Show runs through the rest …PersonalToo…
Informative story of an entrepreneurial self-published author. We all dream that the publishers will do this work for us, but they won’t. So, budding novelists recovering from NaNoWriMo, take a break from sharpening up those HTML and blogging skills, and learn from John Sundman: So this is how it goes. I travel to the conference,…
That should be “Twenty-Five More” Similar:Filmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their “smoking gun”Who owns the copyright to the “Happy Bir…BusinessAnother visit to downtown Pittsburgh with my history-loving son.CultureYounger Americans and Public LibrariesMillennials are quite similar to their e…BooksThe Game (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 6) Cadet Crusher vs Fun Risian GadgetRewatching ST:TNG Cadet…
If you like highlighing, you can pass on Google Books. The press coverage I’ve seen is mostly about how Google’s new ebook store will likely threatens Amazon, but Google’s reader software is just meh. All politics about Google’s digitization of library archives aside, I love the ready access to full-page scans from out-of-copyright titles. The…
Fascinating exploration of the relationship between official responses to torture and official responses to file-sharing, and possibly a useful way to introduce a big-picture concept (the issue of justice and its relationship to power) to students who have a strong opinions about the importance of their own file-sharing activities. [P]owerful perpetrators commonly use many or…
E-mail may not totally disappear, but experts say in five to 10 years, it may look far different than it does today. “Within five years, we think the questions about social networking versus e-mail will be largely moot, as the two elements will have been fused together,” said the report by Gartner analysts Matt Cain…