Does anybody care besides me? The App Store Omits a Hyphen

That should be “Twenty-Five More” Similar:Google Pledges $300 Million to Clean Up False NewsThis is a welcome step, but we cannot tr…CultureMy semester with the snowflakesInsightful essay from a US Military vet …AcademiaHow journalists should handle racist words, images and violence in CharlottesvilleI have covered protests where people sho…Current_EventsA young father sold his beloved sports…

Quick Reaction to the Google Books App: No highlighting? No thank you.

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…

Sharing music files: Tactics of a challenge to the industry

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…

Transformation of e-mail is under way

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…

Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans Tour

  Similar:Learning the hard way, by making mistakes and starting over. The fore section of the fanta… AestheticsYellow Journalism Did Not Cause the Spanish-American War (Role of Sensationalized Headlin… When a correspondent sent to Cuba to c…Aesthetics“Let It Go,” Idina Menzel’s Frozen ballad: It sends the wrong message.This author is probably overthinking thi…CultureSynchronous Online Classes:…

Dying on Facebook

“Last week, his cousin announced on his Facebook wall that he was missing and asked everybody to contact her if we’d seen him,” my friend told me. “The next day she wrote that they’d found him, dead. Just like that.” We’re finally getting used to learning about our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives through Facebook. Will…

Vanity Post

My entry in the IMDB, as viewed on my iPod Touch. Similar:Annoyed and Bored by Lazy Anachronisms in The Great Gatsby MovieI just watched the recent Great Gatsby m…AestheticsIs Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the …BooksThis weekend! GeyerPAC.comPersonalThe future is in interactive storytellingAn interesting piece. Easy-to-learn hype…AestheticsJustice (TNG Rewatch, Season 1,…

Uniforms

The second and, sadly, last of Douglas Johnson’s play-a-day experiment. (The three open the box and rummage in it, and pull out shirts with the Starfleet insignia.) DARNELL: Mine’s blue! TOMLINSON: Mine’s yellow! RAYBURN: Mine’s red! (DARNELL and TOMLINSON cough uneasily, and sidestep away from RAYBURN.) RAYBURN: Oh, very good. Top notch observational comedy there,…

Writing with the iPad

Seton Hill English major Theresa Conley describes capturing poetry inspiration with her iPad, and my colleague Laura Patterson describes how she uses the iPad to help students plan their writing. From a collection of clips on the website iPad on the HIll.   Similar:NYPD's Lt. Cattani offers heartfelt apology for "wrong decision" that threw his…

Writing in the Age of Distraction

There is never perfect silence, or happiness. Until my kids have gone to college and are out of the house, I will never get a full weekend of unbroken time to concentrate on writing (or reading, or coding, or whatever). I used to be able to bang out a blog entry or mark a few…

Livetweeting Buck Rogers: Planet of the Slave Girls

Soon I’ll start livetweeting the first episode of the 1970s #BuckRogers series. I livetweeted the series-opening movie a few weeks ago.http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/2010/10/livetweeting_the_1970s_buck_ro_1/ Remote battery died. Crisis! #BuckRogers Planet of the Slave Girls. Clearly they are going for high concept SF. Still, Buster Crabbe and was that Jack Palance? #BuckRogers Nameless, sweaty extra under attack by pirates……

Interactive Fiction Projects

Recently I noticed a cluster of student blogs on interactive fiction. Interactive Fiction: Literature or Not? My Experiences with Interactive Fiction IF Can Be Quite the Process Similar:Emily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap PoetryThere’s never enough time to cover Emily…CultureOh dear, George Lucas! Why the Star Wars universe is going from bad to worseThough I always preferred…