Retro Sabotage – True Self

Retro Sabotage remixes Pac-Man.  Lots more where that came from. Via MetaFilter. Similar:I should be writing my "Fake News" paper for this weekend's "Computers and Writing." Inste…Could the absurd examples of bizarre pub…AcademiaToilet paper isn't selling out because the supply chain is collapsing, or because people a…According to an article in Medium, toile…BusinessThe Trouble With…

Star Trek – Video Episodes on CBS.com

CBS makes up for canceling Star Trek almost 40 years ago, by publishing the full video of every episode on their website. (Sigh. Yet another cool thing I won’t have time for.) Similar:Quantity leads to quality – Austin KleonAnecdote: [A] ceramics teacher announced…AestheticsYellow Journalism Did Not Cause the Spanish-American War (Role of Sensationalized Headlin… When…

Aardvarchaeology : Ruins of Childhood

Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses. These sites and their formation processes reflect children’s psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might…

Short Story of the Day

American Literature.com The Short Story of the Day features works by Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. An archive of all the stories featured to date can be found here. Similar:'Island of the Blue…

Up Right Down # 1

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What’s yours? (Via) THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over…

Paths to Publication

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I’m just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to…

Seton Hill University – Google Maps

I just noticed that Google Maps has added Greensburg to its street view service. How long has this been available?  Here’s a look up Seton Hill’s lovely sycamore-lined driveway.View Larger Map Similar:The Case for Slow Journalism: When to Unplug from the Endless News CycleOften when I see people in my social med…CybercultureBoston marathon bombing: All…

Emergent Puzzle Solutions

Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc.  For instance, you can beat down a door…

St. Valentine's Day Gifts

From the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online: “Poems to be memorized and spoken to your sweetheart.” They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see…

The Science of Fairy Tales

A somewhat silly, but still amusing piece from Live Science: Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story. If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would…

Danes nab suspects in cartoonist plot

From the AP: Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago. Similar:Infographics: the PowerPoint of the 2010sI used to say that PowerPoint slideshows…CybercultureGathering background objects to create…