Since this will be my last drama wildcard, I wanted to say goodbye & good luck to everyone in our class. It has been a fantastic semester and I had a great time. I came into this class thinking I had nothing more to learn (damn senioritis), but I was wrong. I not only developed…
On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I’m one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I’m now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut?loves shopping and everything?and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look…
Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they’ll become even more relevant as their popularity grows. “We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes,” said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. “We would be…
—Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic]Â (Tribune-Review [Online]) Dear Santa, For Christmas, what I need most of all is a good copyeditor. Love, Pittsburgh Live.co Okay, okay… To err is human. I shouldn’t be so harsh on whoever typed the headline. It’s gloating blog entries like this that annoy professioal professional journalists and make…
All of the professors interviewed agreed that the Civ3 gods created a universe in which war goes a long way. The gods, of course, are the game designers who determine the algorithms by which history, in the game, will progress. So in order for the game to accurately portray the inputs that spit out world…
Don’t write the sentence “There has been very little research done on games” in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don’t care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies…
In Bovine majesty she stands, Her purple tail she swings, The amethyst cow, To my heart somehow, Perfect joy she brings. —Purple Cow Parodies (Purple Cow) What if Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, William Wordsworth, or Rudyard Kipling saw Gelett Burgess’s elusive Purple Cow? Parodies by Susan and David Hollander. Similar:Shall I Encode Thee…
In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC’s coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister. Lauer and Couric didn’t mention the mishap. […] Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the…
So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey’s rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes. 1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy —…
Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz’s students. This is one of the student’s first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog. September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG! I…
Each of the following uses a weblog or content management system to manage the site and/or really breaks traditional conventions in other ways, changing the way that the teacher establishes their professional ethos in comparison to the more traditional forms seen above. —Example Instructor Professional Home Pages (Introductory Composition at Purdue: Technical Mentoring) Just doing a…
—MLA citation style: quick guide (PDF) (Cal State University, San Marcos LIbrary) A handy two-page reference sheet. I was pleasantly surprised to see what example this guide uses for how to cite a website. Perhaps there’s a text-adventure fan on the CSUSM staff. Similar:The magic of words opens a whole new world of funEmily Short’s work…
Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question. […] So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article…
Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question. […] So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article…
Framing a story is like building a house. Just as you determine how many rooms the house should have, you focus on the main idea of your story and what you want to say. A poorly framed story is vague and pointless, and your writing suffers. Good adjectives cannot make up for a bad story…
Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe. About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable…
Awopbopaloobop, alopbamboom! —Roger Ebert —Just Friends (Roger Ebert.com) Ebert can’t seem to stay on the subject of reviewing the movie Just Friends. Pretty funny. (Via MetaFilter.) Similar:How Not to Hate Shakespeare The problem isn’t Shakespeare—it’s h…CulturePagers, Pay Phones, and Dialup: How We Communicated on 9/11For much of the day, those aboard Air Fo…CultureMy semester with the…
It’s become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall. […] What’s really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of…
All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but…
The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili. This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there‘scertainly enough of that to go around.…