20 Sided Fuzzy Dice Danglers

—20 Sided Fuzzy Dice Danglers (Think Geek) Now those are my kind of fuzzy dice. Similar:Enjoying some sibling nerdtime with Lego The Hobbit.GamesUnplugging for a Few Hours at Spruce Flats BogVisited a bog created when loggers clear…AestheticsiMovie Glitch: Unplug Removable Media before Using iMovieI spent a few hours today working on a v…CybercultureI create five color…

Atari Candleholder

—Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko) Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn’t find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn’t link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.) Similar:In May, 2002, I was blogging about… typefaces in period movies; poets Paul Dirac and…

Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence into this: —Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online) Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a…

Teaching through Text Message; Cell Phones Emerge as Learning Tool

Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree. “I don’t buy it,” Johnson said. “I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor.” Text…

Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting

Police arrested a college student Tuesday suspected of opening fire in an off-campus apartment during a dispute over a video game console, killing one man and wounding two others. —Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting (AP | MyWay (will expire)) Similar:Smith College Protesters Bar Journalists From Covering Sit-In Unless They Support the Caus…Reporters planning to cover the…

The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III

Imagine Gilligan’s Island without the Howells and their paper dollars. Without money, commodities exchange directly: coconuts for fish, fish for bamboo, etc. But even with barter, some commodities are more “marketable” than others. Perhaps one of the castaways might eventually buy one of the Professor’s books, but they will more often purchase Mary Ann’s coconut…

Slouching Toward Something

Why can’t anything fun ever be slouched toward? I mean, what about Slouching Towards Deliciousness, or Slouching Towards Balloon Animals? —Slouching Toward Something (Why Not Sneeze?) Similar:Long Live the LARPers — My daughter plays the antagonist in this award-winning 48 Hour Fi…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku7wzUtO…AestheticsJANE EYRE Steps In and Out of Darkness at PICTJane Eyre is not a two-person show,…

The readiness to deconstruct is all

When we refuse to “budge an inch,” excoriate “rotten apples,” or admonish slackers to “sink or swim,” we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed “artists” who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics.…

atari-and-controllers

—atari-and-controllers (jackrabbit.etsy.com) Via join the dots. Similar:My hard-working media students curated a collection of psychology student editorials & inf…My “Media Aesthetics” students worked wi…AcademiaA Book Itself Is a Little Machine: Emily Short's Interactive FictionWords do some things much better than pi…DesignWhat Is Newsworthy? (10m animated lecture)https://youtu.be/xSKllj9wuSk How do j…CultureAlways Bet on TextGraydon Hoare offers a rousing…

To Do

To Do (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) 5: The number of proposals I’ve sent off in the last 24 hours. (Well, one I had drafted weeks ago, and another consisted of me answering the phone and saying “Yes,” but still…. ) Feels like a pretty good day. To do: Share with colleagues draft of revised senior portfolio for…

LOL Trek

—Stephen Granade —LOL Trek (Live Granades) I was vaguely aware of the lolcats phenomenon, which involves remediating the famous “Hang in there, baby” cat poster as if the cats themselves were writing the captions. Never did I expect it to be unleashed on the beloved Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (which has earned it…