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:Latest #blender3d progress on a villain's lair. Added more carpets and cabinetry, and sta… Aesthetics''The Balloon Hoax'' by Edgar Allan PoeWhen steampunk was speculative fiction,…
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:Flannery O'Connor: "I am in a state of shock"There’s often a moment in a lit class wh…BooksInternet Explorer cheated its way to the top, and I won't miss itI started teaching myself HTML in earnes…AcademiaEnglish Is the Language of Science. That Isn't Always a Good ThingEnglish speakers tend to assume that all…AcademiaSnap's share price…
Similar:I just finished "Beyond Eyes" and I think there's something in my eye.My 20yo son, who plays a lot of Star War…AestheticsFrom this station on the bridge, the exposition officer can relay whatever random bit of i…https://youtu.be/_E-3E7Q3LSs Get a lo…AestheticsWood pile stacking animation (Blender 3D)For a medieval project, I wanted a wood …AmusingBenedict XVI (Pontifex)…
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:In November 2001 I was blogging aboutIn November 2001, I was blogging about …Amusing'Fontgate': Microsoft, Wikipedia and the scandal threatening the Pakistani PMI would call this “typefacegate,” but th…CultureGood example of ‘do NOT remove things from photos.’Hat tip to my former student Kiley Fisch…BusinessWhy We Fall for Fake News and How to Bust ItMeasuring…
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:FDR in AnnieI’ve accepted the role of FDR in the upc…CultureThoreau's Cellphone ExperimentWhen I teach “Intro to Literary Study,” …AcademiaThe girl told me to post this with the caption, “The Addams Family Goes to the Big League….PersonalAdded a pilot and cockpit details to my flyby of a #steampunk scout ship. Costume is a pr…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyvR90jm…Aesthetics#PPTPlaytime…
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:A Classicist Goes to Work in Silicon ValleyKristina Chew writes about what her frie…AcademiaiMovie Glitch: Unplug Removable Media before Using iMovieI spent a few hours today working on a v…CybercultureInside the utopian, brick-loving world of LEGO's adult fandomI used to enjoy buying my kids a $4 set …AestheticsIn MLA Style,…
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…