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

Filing this MetaFilter thread on movies about journalism. Similar:DHS official whose office compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists and protesters ha…Was it a lizard person who was collectin…Current_EventsTrump and JFK: Masters of New MediaI didn’t use Newsweek’s clickbaity headl…CultureProfessoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.I touched up and board-ified a presentat…AcademiaNINE officials have COVID-19 after 'superspreader' SCOTUS…

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:The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (workshop premiere of a new musical by Greg Kerestan) I really enjoyed seeing the first work…CultureDiana Kimball on "What Scares Us About Programming?"A few months old, but still interesting:…AcademiaOrson Welles Radio Play "War 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:Finished Reading "Deathly Hallows" for the First TimeWhem my kids started reading the books o…BooksMy Shakespeare students are off peer reviewing their term paper rough drafts. I’m…

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:Profit and Loss (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 18) Quark is reunited with, and… Rewatching ST:DS9 A damaged shutt…EthicsPope Francis calls for "news communicated with serenity, precision and completeness"Pope Francis recently addressed Italian …CultureYour first #blender3d retractable #steampunk landing wheels will be your worst. But you ha…Your…

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…

Frotzophone

Adam Parrish: The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player’s path through the game. A Frotzophone “performance” looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you’re also playing music. Here’s a…

Battle of New Orleans

This morning when my nine-year-old son got up, he buried his nose in a book on the War of 1812, and every so often he shared some detail: “Did you know the British liked to shoot together? They would say, ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’” He knew that the Battle of New Orleans was a decisive American…

The Cult of Kindle

ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon’s new e-book reader. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit…

The Right to Read

From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman: In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next…