Change The Code, Keep the Text

Today, programmers, web-developers and designers possess countless different ways to display digital words online, much like an artist with a blank canvas. As words float across our computer screens, code may be considered the underlying thought and form of expression that supports online words, preventing the words from physically or metaphorically “disappearing into [cyber]space” (Richards,…

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Link pointing to blog entry about a different self-referential clip, and also a different (more vulgar) self-referential clip.   Similar:On Night, Darkness & the PastWhen we banish the dark, what do we lose…AestheticsA support sloop on deck and in the landing bay. #steampunk #neovictorian #aesthetics #desi…AestheticsWho is the more dramatic — my extroverted tween or…

Words Are Cheap

I am so looking forward to Jason Scott’s Get Lamp. (Family obligations are keeping me from attending the premiere at PAX East.) Talking to Scott, his passion for the subject and for detail are both formidable. Most of our interview was tangents, and I didn’t mind any of them. Discussing Colossal Cave Adventure, he ran…

Citations: Efficient In-text Quotations

When writing a paper in MLA style, prefer brief quotations from your sources, in order to emphasize how the complex connections between the sources support your original argument. In the essay “The Full Title of an Essay Fills Lots of Space” by Maxwell Wordsworth Filler, it talks about how easy it is to bury your own thoughts when…

Crash Blossoms

Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and…

You will consume.

I didn’t watch that movie awards thing, but I understand this ad premiered last night. Here we see the iPad as a tool for monetizing the consumption of the internet. I saw brief flashes of a keyboard, e-mail, a desktop publication program, and a photo album, so the ad does acknowledge the role of user-created…

Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.” Hold…

There – There

I think it was some time in 2003 that There.com e-mailed me to ask me to be a beta-tester, with the promise that I’d have free membership. I remember being interested, and I think I even started the download, but I don’t recall going any further than that. We believe that all of this together…

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers? Similar:The Abandoned (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 6) A genetically engineered baby …Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark scowls as a l…EmpathyWhy Audiences Hate Hard News—And Love Pretending OtherwiseA reminder that polls that ask people to…CultureFont vs Typeface: bold and italics are fonts, but…

PROFESSORMATRONIC

I’ve been collecting and returning almost all my classwork electronically for the past four or five years. Last semester I started thinking about something that was missing from the classroom — the ritual of handing back papers, of looking the student in the eye, of hearing the student say “Thank you!” (I would always shoot…