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:What Miley Cyrus Did Was Disgusting — But Not For the Reasons You Think | Anne TheriaultI still have not seen the “performance” …AcademiaFacebook will Emphasize News Articles; De-emphasize Non-Facebook Meme PhotosFacebook wants you to see…

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

Similar:Happy 13th Birthday CarolynI’ve had the privilege of being this ama…DramaOklahoma Was Never Really O.K. (Frank Rich, Vulture)”Oklahoma! was greeted as jingoistic ent…AestheticsHalf of my students have never read Hamlet. (I told them not to get too attached to any of…We focused just on Act I today — the ope…PersonalThe AI revolution is powered by…

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:Adding a little Middle-Earth drama to a photo shoot.The girl was concerned she wasn’t nerdy …Aesthetics7 web design trends you’ll actually see this year and how to survive themContent is often finalised many months a…CybercultureShatoetry…