So The Movies — set in an unnamed city where they make movies, decorate with palm trees and assign sycophants to celebrities — is a fictionalized simulation of a real place that simulates fiction while fictionalizing the real world. […] Activision and its partner Lionhead Films encourages the uploading and sharing of your creations, so…
Like any red-blooded hacker, Mozart adored mathematics as a child (and gambling as an adult), found word-play irresistible (email would have been perfect for him) and loved setting himself puzzles. His Musical dice game uses dice throws and pre-composed short fragments of music to form compositions created by random numbers; the challenge was writing fragments…
The first thing that occurred to me was the similarity between the bridge on the Enterprise and a small theater. The view screen made an obvious film screen and the seating centered around the command chairs and behind would fit well in the small space I had. I therefore decided to make my theater into…
“I love awakening the passion for drama and storytelling in the children,” Komarek said. “Nothing’s been finalized, but I’m eyeing Aristophanes’ Frogs. I love the dislocation of verse in the play’s stichic passages, and the kids love animals.” —Second-Graders Wow Audience With School Production Of Equus (The Onion (Satire)) Weird. Weird, weird, weird. Similar:Anonymous comment cards…
“Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news,” said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN’s NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show’s ratings closer to front-runner Fox News. Brown said…
Though there is a rich history of pseudonymity in American journalism, there is none of anonymity. It has long been understood that if the publisher of a reputable periodical grants a writer use of a pseudonym, then that publisher knows the writer’s true identity and takes responsibility — legal and otherwise — for that writer’s…
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:English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Student…Funny and clever. Via Excuse the Bananas…AcademiaThe Cabaret Theatre (Latrobe) presents Shakespeare's popular Midsummer Supernatural pranksters! mismatched…
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:Physician:…