In 1985, Buckles wrote “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure,’ ” a scholarly look at the early text-based game Adventure and the people who played it. Buckles was hardly a devotee of the game herself, and the topic didn’t have a lot to do with her main area of study at UCSD, which was German…
Scientists recently have found a few rocky planets, including one last year just seven times the size of Earth, but all are very close to their stars and so extremely hot. The planetary discovery announced Wednesday and reported in today’s edition of the journal Nature is the smallest and coldest yet. —Ian Hoffman —‘Earth-like’ planets…
I‘m not saying that textbook companies don’t serve a valuable purpose in the composition community; there‘sa lot of textbooks that I have used in the past that I like a great deal, and I also know, that when I started teaching first year composition many moons ago, I learned a lot from the textbook that…
—Literature Quizzes and Crosswords (WSU) Just a collection of quizzes and crosswords on literary terms, grammar and usage, and figures from American literature. Hamlet’s in there too. Similar:Get Hands-on Writing Experience.AcademiaStopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening – By Donald J TrumpI have a pretty good idea whose woods th…AmusingHas Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? “Professing…
Understanding the Abramoff pictures requires investigating the absurd Washington phenomenon known as the “glory wall.” Also called the “wall of fame,” “me wall,” and “ego wall,” the glory wall is where members of the establishment flaunt their connections by displaying photos of themselves with more famous people. —John Dickerson —”As I Was Saying to the…
Rule 7 seems both funny and serious: a Zen-like joke, abolishing all the rules that precede and follow it, and a statement that‘sabsolutely true, for makers of art and for anyone engaged in learning. Note that Rule 7 doesn’t say that the only thing to do is work. Rather, the only necessary thing is work.…
“We often hear the assertion that rising faculty salaries drive the cost of tuition,” he says, but data over 25 years show that is not the case. “One of the several sources behind rising tuition rates is investment in technology.” Facebook is not the sole source for those woes. However, it is a Janus-faced symbol…
Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups. Talk to the corporate hierarchs and you quickly elicit the thinking behind this pullback: Too many movies have been crammed into…
Whether you consider IF to be retro, minimalist, or a throwback, you introduce the genre to a general audience as a historical lesson – one which answers the anticipated first question ?why does IF looks so old?? But history is only a stone-throw away from nostalgia, and so it is easy for even staunch advocates…
Without deliberately planned, consciously modeled classroom use, it is understandable that students might fall back on their understanding of the blogs as an electronic version of the print-journal, a genre without interactive or collaborative potential. However, we contend blogs can impact the writing classroom effectively, if their integration and function are clearly structured and articulated.…
The board of Pixar Animation Studios, the digital animations company, is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company’s $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney. The all-share deal will make Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, around $3.5bn and the single largest shareholder in Disney. Jobs created Pixar in 1986 when he paid $10m for…
Dear fellow resident of my Pittsburgh area neighborhood, I rejoice in the knowledge that you are apparently pleased with the performance of the football team that serves our geographical area. By all means, feel free to celebrate. Have another beer or something. But please take your black-and-gold-mitten-clad hand off your car horn so I can…
You can have your “19 years-old,” or whatever you are. I love being 33, because I can look back on everything that I’ve done, and smile. I’ve done it all, baby, while you were in diapers, literally. […] You can have your crappy music, stupid scenes, cliques, fashions or whatever.. I’ve sooo outgrown that, like…
It has been twenty years since Christa McAuliffe reached for the stars. Her launch into the sky on the space shuttle, Challenger, literally became what she had previously anticipated as being, “The Ultimate Field Trip.” What truly prophetic words they were. —A Heavenly Legacy (Reeves Library) A good overview of the legacy of Christa McAuliffe. Similar:What…
Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose, California for an order to hand over the requested records. —Google Won’t Hand Over Files (Wired | AP) Similar:Elon Musk has officially killed Twitter. The zombie…
But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a…
The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There’s no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be “refreshed” 60 times…
It is a small firm, which employs 16 people. But there is something that distinguishes Nutzwerk from other companies. Employees can be fired if they are caught complaining in the office. It may sound absurd, but employees have a clause in their contracts which states: “moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden… except when accompanied…
—Randomized Garfield Garfield strips, chopped up and re-assembled randomly. Funnier than the originals. Via memepool. Similar:T.S. Eliot: "when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thought…I remember being fascinated with and cha…CultureUnless Buzzfeed-style Clickbait Replaces all Forms of Human Communication, or Republicans …I love some good meta. I wrote a…
Participants should bring a sketchbook, journal or artist’s book created or in progress, to share online with a larger audience. Participants will learn a range of techniques for creating online books and walk through the process of setting up a free, online illustrated journal, using a digital camera, scanner and free online software. Participants will…