Disney to buy Marvel in $4bn deal

Is your Spidey-sense tingling? Disney will take over ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters, such as Spider-Man and the X-Men.–BBC Similar:Facebook Updates its Fight Against Fake NewsThe only reason Facebook is paying atten…Business#MyNYPD Hashtag Promptly HijackedSomeone is regretting this PR move. …Current_EventsDog and TP WallAmusingListening to Weird Al's "Word Crimes." Awesome. My teaching method does not…

Birdhouse: Existential Philosophy, Biology, Aesthetics, and Re-enactment of a Literary Entombment

Similar:BlewsMicrosoft researchers discuss Blews, whi…Cyberculturefrom “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo EmersonThe poets made all the words, and theref…AestheticsThe State Of Media EmploymentThis is why I require my “new media jour…BusinessLatest #blender3d progress on a villain's lair. Added more carpets and cabinetry, and sta… AestheticsI'm not showing you my email inbox, or my laundry pile, or…

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

OMG! The prez is in ur internet, killin ur freedomz! The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the…

Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries. That right was never…

Student writing is getting worse- or wait, it's getting better!

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause. Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his…

Idea to Implementation

I’ve been sitting on a particular interactive fiction work-in-progress for ten years. Ten years! Every so often I dust it off and add a little more, but I still haven’t finished the chore of converting it from Inform 6 to Inform 7.  And while hiding from this project, I went and released a different project…

Auto-Tune the News #7

People on the road can turn an LOL into a great big O-M-G. — Katie Couric, advocating a “designated texter.” Similar:New Voices For The Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets An UpgradeWonderful, inspiring article that uses t…CultureAI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine. Even the most rebellious poets follow …CultureMy Latest Classic…