Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic]

—Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic] (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…

Not Just Child’s Play

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…

Please, PLEASE stop

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…

Purple Cow Parodies

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:The daughter joined the…

Best Geek Novels Written in English

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 —…

Example Instructor Professional Home Pages

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)

—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:In "World Drama" I'm adding the absurd, optimistic "The Skin of Our Teeth"…

CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted

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…

Story Framing: Four Vital Ingredients

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…

Just Friends

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:The Girl's Obsession with Scottish History ContinuesWife: “What did you do with your bedshee…Aesthetics'Facebook is simply not cool anymore' to teens, study findsTeens also don’t seem to care that Faceb…BusinessGenesis…

In a losing race with the zeitgeist

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…

Meet the Press

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.…

Kindertransport Performance Discussion

I enjoy discussing things in EL250 in general just because I feel like I learn a lot about all of you who are in there. I feel like I know you all a little better after having these kinds of discussions in class. That is really important to me because I enjoy learning about people…

Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be “off his game” at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors. — Locked doors thwart Bush’s bid to duck question (Reuters | MyWay) In Bush’s defense, that was…