Valentines for Journalists. Similar:Apple Hill Playhouse is closing, leaving theater group seeking new homeConfiguring socially distanced seating a…BusinessCoronavirus: advice from the Middle Ages for how to cope with self-isolationLike many people, I curate my social med…Culturexkcd: Pathogen ResistanceThis is just an excerpt. Read the whole …AmusingThose shoggoths hacked from lungs unspeakable1) Last night, I’m fairly…
[O]n this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops. Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students…
Walter Frederick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died at the age of 90. —Guardian Similar:Progress over 11 years of Blender3D practiceOver the past few years I have created l…AestheticsA rare win for Dad. CultureThe End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRMWhen you plug an audio cable into a smar…BusinessThe Assignment #StarTrek…
Interesting examination of role-playing, illusion, identity, and power in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, one small branch of which was the inspiration for the 1976/7 computer game Colossal Cave Adventure. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist destination for travelers from around the United States and beyond. The cave…
Zach Whalen is turning his dissertation into a blog-web-thing, in the hopes of developing a book-thing. In whatever form it takes, it’s an interesting approach to a textual study of video games. This study asks how the design and configuration of text in videogames contributes to their textuality. I argue that videogames are texts in…
There’s a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection. Using a police state to market technology in 1984: Using a police state to market technology in 2010: Similar:In September, 2000, I was blogging about PICK UP AX, Bellamy's Looking Backward, WB Yeats,…In September 2000, I was blogging…
None of this is a surprise to me, but I’m glad to have statistics to back up my impressions. A very small handful of students whose first introduction to online social networking was the SHU blogosphere, before blogs went really mainstream around 2005, are still blogging here, after they have graduated. In 2003-2005 it was…
I didn’t watch the game, but I did catch the buzz about this ad. Yes, I did tear up. (Wired has details.) Similar:Summer Project: Responsive Web DesignI spent more time than I’d like to admit…AestheticsIn Pittsburgh, science gets playfulImagine: sharing a secret with a friend …Aestheticsink: Inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive narrativeGearing…
It is dangerous to use local weather events (such as a heavy or light winter) to make judgments about global climate. With that caveat, I’m blogging the following because I’ve noted a shift in the online discussion about “global warming,” or the more general “climate change”. This essay does a good job exploring the events…
Coming up… we’ll tell you whether you’ll be impaled by sharp, radioactive icicles hurled by mobs of rampaging robots in your neighborhood. But first, people panicking, filling up three shopping carts of toilet paper and canned food. Hear the techno-pop pulse of our theme music, and know that you’re being conditioned to think of us…
Here’s hoping I left gas in the snow-thrower. Similar:The girl performed musical commercials for a fund-raiser in the Laurel Highlands (and she …The girl performed musical commercials f…CultureDennis Jerz, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Capek's "Fantastic Melodrama" – YouT…”In which the origin of the word “robot”…AestheticsContext for Hayles, My Mother was a Computer (Ch 3…
Fascinating software study of the Doom iPhone port.http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/index.php Similar:CNN Holds Morning Meeting To Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest Of DayKicking around ideas ranging from an upt…AmusingEvery Post-Game Press Conference (Weird Al)https://youtu.be/oXAW2qd65nAAmusingReunion (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 7) Picard Arbitrates Klingon Leaders…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….MediaThe Myth of the MegalithI have…
Our first few readings in my freshman writing course were personal essays, with a clear narrative. We read an academic paper today, and there’s another assigned for Friday. A few students are already reporting feeling a little lost in the detail. I gather this is because they are used to reading textbooks, where all the…
I wish I’d seen this a few weeks ago, before my Video Game Culture and Theory class ended, but it’s still a welcome find. Similar:Even in the U.S., Chinese Students May Have Tiananmen ‘Amnesia’But now that he was at college in Americ…CultureThe Whole Internet Hates MeAmusingWhat's in this old box from the student newspaper office?…
Pee-wee Gets An iPad! from Pee-wee Herman Similar:A tiny bit of rogue news leaked through the ads.Hey, Newsweek, alert your webmaster. I c…BusinessDC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER)Live in the DC area? June 19 I’ll be spe…CultureThe Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)As a grad student at the University of T…CultureHow My Mom Killed…
“One of the deepest questions in this field,” Nass says, “is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring–that is, they’re really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay–or…
I know, I know: Amazon relied on those $9.99 prices to give it a head start in the digital books market. And raising prices to the $12.99 to $14.99 being talked about could certainly slow sales if consumers don’t bite. But here’s the thing: it’s not as if Macmillan is only raising prices for Kindle.…
I usually carry a digital voice recorder with me. In most states it’s legal to record a conversation if all parties consent, although Pennsylvania law requires that all parties to a conversation be notified that a conversation is being recorded. “It is always legal to tape or film a face-to-face interview when your recorder or…
For the one-credit journalism class that I teach every semester, I’m teaching a unit on editorial writing. Students will take a leisurely 10-chapter journey through Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. It’s the first time I’ve taught a whole unit focusing on sentence-level phrasing. The class meets once a week, for just one hour,…
I’ve sometimes pointed out to my students that in my generation, graduating from high school and leaving your peers behind to go to college mostly meant that you were saying goodbye. Since then, I have gotten back in touch with a couple dozen high school friends, and even some elementary school friends (including the smartest…