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:"Jewish priests do this. It's where Leonard Nimoy got the Vulcan sign," says the geekling,…CultureBetween static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to …When I started my blog in 1999 (by addin…CybercultureHow My…

Radio News Delivery: How to Sound Like a Radio Broadcaster

Listen to a short news broadcast, such as the NPR Hourly News Summary. These stories will typically include audio clips from newsmakers, and perhaps the noise of crowds or nature. But we’re just focusing on the sound of the radio journalist’s voice. Don’t try to sound like “an announcer.”  Forget the barking style of voice that radio announcers always…

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

Similar:Final grades are due tomorrow. My Fall 2020 is almost over. I survived.Final grades are due tomorrow. My only u…AcademiaHow to Reduce Racial Bias in Grading (Use Objective Rubrics)To gauge the potential impact of a stand…AcademiaTesting out my new greenscreenFriendly advice… If you are practicing…AestheticsCOVID-19 Becoming Less DeadlyBits and pieces from a news article that…Current_EventsLetter…

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:No space for over-30s as relaunched MySpace erases its pastKeep a local backup of anything importan…BusinessIntimations of MortalityPlato, Montaigne, Pascal—those were the …CultureThe girl around the house casually dressed "as a Jacobite."AmusingFact check: Biden ad…