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…
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……
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:30 years later, Sierra's Laura Bow mysteries are still a treasureWhen I was in college and grad school, a…CultureHow Will Historians of the Future Run MS Word 97?…
Must… mark papers… must resist downloading Blender 2.55. The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.55 Beta. This release is the third official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work. This version is called a “Beta” because it’s now…
I vividly remember the day I got bored with the juvenile section of the library. I had read all the Encyclopedia Brown books, all the Lester Del Rey books (about moon rocket pilots and such), and the entire shelf of astronomy books. Walking around the corner to the adult stacks was a powerful epiphany. (For…
Bottom line: effective group assignments do not require students to collectively author a paper or make a presentation. Writing and presenting are often individual tasks, and charging a group with these tasks, without special guidance on how to perform them, is to set up yourself (and your students) up for frustration and mediocrity. On the…
Literature, as with other creative pursuits, exists as one of the most diverse outlets for human expression available. Movements ebb and flow over time, allowing themselves to both influence and be influenced by the prevailing philosophical and cultural constructs swirling around them. Some obtain prominent – if not permanent – mainstream status and find their…
I’ve been waiting quite a while to be able to blog this campus newspaper story about Jason Scott’s visit to Seton Hill. Unlike today’s traditional videogames, which are jam-packed with high-resolution graphics, text adventure games force players to utilize their imaginations. Also known as interactive fiction, these were the precursors for some of the most…
I’ve taught E. M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” in a few classes. The message is a little heavy-handed, but the world Foster created is eerily familiar a hundred years later. “The Machine Stops” appeared in the November issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Review. At 12,000-plus words, it’s sometimes called a longish short story,…
Posted to Kickstarter at midnight. Not quite 8 hours later, Andrew Plotkin was already halfway there. His pitch has great production values, which I’m sure is part of what has inspired so much confidence. Similar:Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhy…I joined Twitter for…
As a rule, I’m suspicious of any news article that has the world “could” in the headline, but this is certainly interesting stuff. Our existence could be coded in a finite bandwidth, like a live ultra-high-definition 3-D video. And the third dimension we know and love could be no more than a holographic projection of…
Urlesque Similar:A Colorado town's newspapers were stolen after a story about rape charges at the police ch…I’m sure the good-apple cops will fairly…EthicsDelightfully geeky news story about a legal kerfuffle over typefacesI’m very amused at this nerdy news story…AestheticsBig Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math ClassMy math education predated the widesprea…BusinessIs Babylon 5 secretly the…
Researchers at Princeton University employed volunteers to learn made-up information about different types of aliens – and found that those reading harder fonts recalled more when tested 15 minutes later. They argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials. —BBC Similar:Another section of #steampunk control panel,…
While a Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), was instrumental in getting National Public Radio (NPR) to fire Juan Williams, some Muslims are speaking out against succumbing to the censorship of political correctness. —Caroline May, The Daily Caller “But it’s just Facebook gossip,” my students sometimes say — even my journalism students —…
On November 1st, my longtime favorite RSS reader website, Bloglines.com, will be kaput. It’s being put down by its corporate master, Ask.com. You know, that other search engine that no one uses. The one that used to be Ask Jeeves, with that happy little butler…. Flash back a year ago: my good friend over at…
For most of the 20-somethings I know, which is an admittedly small group of graduates from some of the country’s best four-year colleges and universities, life’s third decade offers a disquieting mix of uncertainty and promise. Faced with friends scattering across the globe after graduation, the high stakes and complexity of modern life, a tough…
Pixel art entry from Something Awful. The site includes loads of others (most of which I don’t get). Similar:Ice Cream and Sharks Scene: writing classroom. …AcademiaOne deck below the bridge, the chief engineer coordinates with his technical heads here at…AestheticsWhat Miley Cyrus Did Was Disgusting — But Not For the Reasons You Think |…
My wife baked this cake for my birthday (and my daughter’s half-birthday.) Here’s how the family dressed up for Seton Hill’s haunted house fund-raiser for Make-A-Wish. Similar:All three shows have been sold out for over a month. Opens tomorrow.DramaNASA astronaut: Russians were ‘blindsided’ by reaction to yellow suitsI posted a while back about the yellow…
Amazing. The educators who used school-provided laptops to spy on teenagers — snapping pictures of them while they were sleeping or not fully clothes–are still on the job, and the taxpayers get to pay the legal bills. There’s a science fiction trope where aliens do something their unearthly mindset considers virtuous, but anyone with normal…
