The Galactically Hot Women of Star Trek TOS – a photoset on Flickr

I know what you’re thinking, but my story is that I’m gathering information for a research project on gender in science fiction. Yeah, that’s it. Similar:Carolyn Jerz featured on Tap Titans TodayI love watching my daughter perform. Her…AestheticsSmac McCreanor – HydraulicPress Series compilationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWqB6UxE…AestheticsConspiracy (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season One, Episode 25) Parasitic Bug Doppelgängers on…Rewatching Star…

Playing to Learn

Advice from GameCareerGuide.com resembles what I tell my English literature majors about why they are expected to study and benefit from literary works that they might not choose to read for their own pleasure. (The same goes for students in my Video Game Culture and Theory course.) Before you begin down this path there is…

Tech trio seeks market for new game

Anna L. Mallory (Roanoke Times): The game, a takeoff on programs popular before the Internet and Nintendo, blends social-networking and choose-your-own adventure tools. It allows players to not only play games but also create and share their own adventures in user-submitted fictional lands. Mallory also includes some quotes from former Infocom Imp Steve Meretzky on…

After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future’s Brighter Than Ever

In Wired, Jenna Wortham focuses on what blogs typically look like to journalists. Blogs are re-shaping not just news and entertainment, but also publishing, politics and public relations. Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s most famous blogger, is widely credited with putting a human face on the giant company and facilitating an exchange between customer and corporation. Matt…

"Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news."

Filing this MetaFilter thread on movies about journalism. Similar:Sean Spicer: Hero in the War Against JournalismThe Onion reminds us not to normalize Sp…Current_Events‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves In literary circles, the practic…CultureFacebook does not care about truth. Facebook wants to sell your attention to the highest b… Don’t trust your Facebook feed…BusinessTimeline of…

Poetry Stand (Drive-By Poetry)

The American Scholar: One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next…

Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger

For Jorn Barger, who coined the word “weblog” in December of 1997, outbound links are key to the formula that makes a weblog useful to readers: 2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.…

Art, film or game? 'Inanimate Alice' redefines 'publish'

Katie Haegele quotes Chris Joseph: “It seems most people these days equate literature with the novel, which is obviously a relatively recent form, and then judge all other literature by that standard, which is a terrible measure of digital literature,” Joseph said in an e-mail interview. “My feeling is that younger audiences already do accept…

Dear Urban Dictionary…

I’m misquoted on your December press page. What I wrote was When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear). http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink/banning-wikipedia-at-school-go/ But the quote appears as…

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

From the Google Blog, a preview of Google’s mashup of Wikipedia and About.com: The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names…

seagulls have no class…..

Blogged as a reference, for the next time I have to introduce students to semiotics (ytmnd.com). Similar:What to Do With a B.A. in English?Some good tips on what to say about your…AcademiaBias Check! Consult different sources for a fuller picture.BusinessProfessoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.I touched up and board-ified a presentat…AcademiaDonald Trump's chilling escalation of…

Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz

Why does this happen? For some reason, perhaps the oddity of ordering milk from an online bookseller, has attracted a large number of spoof reviews — Lovecraft, Coleridge, romances, haiku. Here’s a bit of Tuscan Whole Milk flash fiction: This milk was so good, I passed out. When I woke up 3 weeks later, apes…

Movable Type Open Source – MovableType.org – Home for the MT Community

movabletype.org As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn’t redistribute those changes. MT has…

Spartans did not throw deformed babies away: researchers – Yahoo! News

Yahoo! | AFP: The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday. Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the…

Google cameras may catch a killer

News.com.au Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week. He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder. “They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week,”…

"w00t" crowned word of year by U.S. dictionary – Yahoo! News

Yahoo | Reuters “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Similar:Pop song lyrics use more negative words ("hate", "sorrow") than 50 years agoThe use of words related to negative emo…EmpathyLooking forward to Part 2 of #PPTPlaytime’s production…

Group files text-blocking complaint with FCC

Karissa sent me this story from Macworld: Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, saying mobile phone providers should not be able to block text messages from political groups and advertisers. […] If the FCC grants the petition, it would open up mobile phone networks to millions of…

Spider Attacks Space Shuttle

Footage from a NASA camera, via CBS: Similar:No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to… Everyone who is reading this article…CybercultureThe Fantasticks (Oct 18-27, Theatre Factory) https://youtu.be/SYp1jQaSwjo …CultureKids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class. Twelfth-grade reading scores are a…Books‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood…

Nobel winner blames cultural decline on "blogging and blugging"

Doris Lessing doesn’t like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica: Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn’t believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. “And…

Hello, Santa? I have some naughty children to report…

After watching the children until about 2pm today, I rousted my wife from the bedroom so she could give them a late lunch. While I was fiddling with my blogging templates and sort of puttering around until it was time to go to campus (I’m volunteering to serve dinner to the students during the big…