I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn’t require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. —Dennis…
Sensory Immersion vs. PainJerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son got a splinter in his hand this weekend. He wasn’t too happy when my wife told him she’d have to remove it with a needle. I suggested that maybe I could try tweezers first. “What are tweezers?” he asked. “Kind of like little pliers,” I said. I…
Dog Canto         Outside… il conformista                walk milkbone                                        roll-over                                        il conformista        Sit! sit!                il conformista        Paw! paw!                il conformista                                roll-over il conformista…        Good doggy.        Good good doggy.                                Fidelius. Brian Stefans —Il Conformista (Poem for a Dog) (Free Space Comix: The Blog) A poem that uses only words that a (particular) dog understands. Found via GrandTextAuto. Similar:AI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine. Even…
The ability of players to interact with games has fundamentally changed them, Lowood said. Computer games, once seen as commercial products or a one-way communication between designer and player, are now seen as a much more open kind of medium that people can contribute to in other ways, he said. “So much of the content…
Most non-arcade games that retain a rabid fan base years after they’ve become technically obsolote fall into one of two categories. They have a obsessively complex world that’s been built up around them (Nethack, say, or tabletop roleplaying games), or they have a simple rule set with much greater depth in the gameplay and strategy…
At Home What do the marketing droids think the audience that comes to see Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” will want to spend money on? What previews will I have to sit through? I stayed home with the kids while my wife went to see an afternoon showing. Soon it will be my…
Let’s assume that you have a brilliant Idea. Let’s say a sitcom about a group of different people living under the same roof. Or a story about a police unit who dedicate their lives to solving crimes. Or maybe some other equally original idea that demonstrates how creative and innovative sort of a person you…
Games Galore Two interesting Slashdot threads… one is “Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press“, a response to the recent NY Times article on the upcoming Princeton conference, and another is discussion of Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century, a beautiful nine-part article on interactive fiction, featuring interviews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew…
We and our colleagues at The Princeton Review have spent many years training students to take the SAT II, and have carefully analyzed the College Board’s essay-grading criteria. To receive a high score a student should write a long essay of three or more paragraphs, with each paragraph containing topic and concluding sentences and at…
“Games are big, big objects,” said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. “The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over.” | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn’t finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book,…
U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige today [Feb. 23] issued the following apology for his remarks about the NEA. “It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA’s Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind’s historic education reforms. I also said, as I have repeatedly, that our…
—Netstore USA (opengroup.com) Buy my book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950… Priced at just $197.70! Outside of the US, that’s $216.60, or about a dollar a page! Order now! Sheesh! At that price, with the royalties I’ve earned so far, I could buy THREE WHOLE COPIES! Oh, wait, they already charged me for the advance copies…
Below the Sinkhole You are about 75 feet into the cave. There is a dim light at the east of the passage. There is a methamphetamine lab here! >EXAMINE LAB Nothing extravagant — about average for this area. You see some cookware, solvents, and acids. Looks like someone has just finished cooking. >_ —There is…
“He had a maturity beyond his age.” — security guard Jason Armstrong —Man dies in 11-storey fall (Ottawa Sun) The quote above is applied to a university student who accidentally hurled himself over a balcony. The student was an engineering major, who apparently wasn’t clear on the concept of momentum, as he charged a balcony railing…
Part of Maloney’s job is to evaluate books on the sleeper list and decide whether they go to the bargain basement sale or get a second chance. “It’s a really hard thing to get rid of a book,” Maloney said. “A big, big consideration for us is just space. Our juvenile fiction shelves are packed…
Two different things seem to have happened at the same place and time, according to the “spin” placed on two different reports from competing local papers. Post-Gazette to seek wage concessions (Tribune-Review, reporting on its competition) The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is gushing red ink, prompting workers to vote today on wage and benefits concessions designed to save…
Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain…. “My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme… But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my…
I can still taste the beer. I say this is a whole new kind of tired not because of the physical effects of my hangover. Believe me, that’s not new at all. What’s new is that I’m tired of this kind of tired. I’m tired of being fuzzy for the first half of each day.…
—Star Trek Action Figure Collection (NubiNubsUniverse.com) The really sad thing: I recognize most of these characters. Okay, the aliens from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” sort of blend into one another, but for the classic series, the episodes have been so firmly imprinted on my brain for decades that I can name most of the characters…
The L.A. Times (‘free’ registration required–thus my extensive quoting) has story about how: the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a “service” and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed…