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:when someone say ur joke louder than u and get all the creditAmusingMinneapolis Police Injure, Arrest Journalists Covering ProtestsThroughout the protests over the death o…CultureFascinating details in reports about Trump's…
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.…
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…
From the beginning of any playthrough of the game, the author knows what things happen when, why they happen and what they mean. They even know things that don’t appear in the game at all. By contrast, the player knows only what they’ve seen so far, plus anything they guess or speculate (which may well…
I have a Strunk and White. I like having it. And it’s clarity has helped me. Not because I necessarily followed the advice or even agree with it now, but because at a more formative time in my writing life, it gave me a simple place to depart from. It made me feel like a…
But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university’s ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called “The Conversation of Mankind”?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. —Robert S.…
—2005 IF Comp Results Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games! Similar:Paleo-Future: robotsThis is from the robots category of Pale…AestheticsRob Rogers' firing is a frightening omenPulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Nick A…CultureThose mean fake news people at the Washington Post are at it again, this time…
I’m back! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid…
As Riya learns who’s in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. —Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix (Wired) Similar:Presenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday.…
Once upon a time, in the Triassic Period, there were four hatchlings in a coelophysis nest, down deep in a stone cave, in the desert (wet season). The four hatchlings were Jonathon, Larry, Joseph, and the youngest one was Martha. They were coelophyses. They lived with their mother and father. But being a baby coelophysis…
The driver of the police van starts to pull out, momentarily blocking your view of Ide and the protestors. The two young men behind you come forward for a closer look. “Did Tony just give her the finger?” asks the young man in the sweatshirt. “I don’t blame him,” says the second young man. As…
From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish. Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary. With the advent of news…
—David Jump! (David Denninger) A student of mine posted a clever little video that includes some simple but very cool effects. Not much in the way of narrative or character development, but the whole thing made me smile. See David Jump!. Similar:Goodby big Android… hello little budget iPhone SE 3rd.I just removed from my syllabus template…AcademiaWe…
For decades, the debate was very much focused on UFOs, sightings and abduction stories. Alien visitors turned into a modern myth. In an age when our other beliefs and ideologies were fading away, we could at least believe in UFOs. Most scientists, annoyed as they were, simply chose to ignore it. Then some bright people,…
Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don’t rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?) Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for…