“Miller belongs to the generation that was politicised by the failure of capitalism to deliver on its promises, and disillusioned by the failure of Communism to provide a morally viable alternative. Unlike many members of that generation, he did not scuttle into the conservative camp, but tried to rescue the idea of justice from the…
Your worst nightmare has come true. (Or maybe your fondest wish – if you are a sick little puppy.) The dead no longer stay dead. Zombies are taking over the planet. So what do you do? Give up and become a shishkabob for one of the ever growing ranks of the undead? Not on your…
This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins’s concept of the “meme” and Reddy’s critique of the “conduit” metaphor for communication…. The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. —Dennis G. Jerz —(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing…
If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what…
Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it’s a good tired. I just heard that my proposal, “Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review,” has been accepted for the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this coming October. Seton Hill University featured “information literacy” in a faculty seminar at…
Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public‘simagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize…
—Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki) Here’s part of a screen capture, showing the development of the “file manager” icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.) The development…
Good voice acting can’t save a bad game, but talented actors can imbue a game script with genuine emotional freight. Some of the best in-game voice work is not the long bits of dialogue in boring cut-scenes, but tiny, subtle bits of atmosphere. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s quiet, voluptuous moans as she hurled herself…
GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS… GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS. I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN…
The group’s volunteers pose as kids, and when an adult hits on them, they publish the person’s picture, phone numbers and e-mail address on the site so the group’s supporters can hound the person by phone and e-mail. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002, and…
Well. Those Brits do have some different standards. I just can’t see that happening here. At least not any newsroom I’ve worked in. You might find yourself all over Romenesko in the morning. I seem to remember a pretty big stink over the Post-Dispatch’s disappearing Coke can and National Geographic’s magical moving pyramids. It’s not…
[T]he main thing that’s hard to do in IF is build a story where there’s a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they’re all challenging, and there aren’t very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you’re…
It is still dark when I get up, the suitcase carefully packed the day before. I will be away almost a month, the preparations have been exstensive, at work and home. The little plane takes off, and carries me into dawn. —Transit – but going where? (Thinking with My Fingers) A lovely, haunting little travelblog from…
Some experts charge that the $1.4 billion antivirus industry is content with perpetuating a business model that is profitable for the companies, but onerous for the user. —Michelle Delio —Cashing In on Virus Infections (Wired) Similar:The cultural implications of the myth that English majors end up working permanently at St…Would you like facts with that?…
A new poll suggests fears that “The Passion of the Christ” would trigger anti-Semitism were unwarranted…. A leader of Jews for Jesus considers “The Passion of the Christ” a Godsend for Jewish evangelism…. The Vatican said Pope John Paul II has met with Jim Caviezel, the actor who portrays Jesus in “The Passion of the…
These were the men who broke out of Nazi Germany’s supposedly escape-proof camp Stalag Luft III on a moonless night in March 1944, creating one of World War II’s most enduring legends and inspiring a classic war film. The Great Escape itself was 60 years ago but Squadron Leader Jimmy James, one of the 76…
The Great Figure I’m about to teach Death of a Salesman in my “Intro to LIterary Studies” class. It’s part of a unit on literary criticism, so after we discuss such topics as “Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?” and the formal experimentalism called for in the stage directions, I’m hoping to ask my students…
Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game’s main character, Rio, will understand anything that’s relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren’t. Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but…
“The Windmills of Your Mind” is too crazy to be anything but a piece of its crazy time, and it is almost airily psychotic: “Is the jingle in your pocket/Or is the jingle in your head?” A question like that made a lot of sense in 1968. —Mind the Windmills (http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com) Boynton has collected a few…
A new object has been discovered in the Solar System; it’s nearly as large as Pluto, but 13 billion kilometres away. Tentatively named Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the Sea, it’s approximately 1,700 km in diameter, which makes it the largest Solar System object found since Pluto was located in 1930. —Astronomers Find a Second…