Under The Dome
Cloud AtlasI highly recommend Dreamhost.
These things come in waves. This serves as a follow up to my essay from last week about the economics of copying and David Lowry. Sam Adams crafted this piece on Slate a couple days ago. Here’s a key paragraph: But is it the dawning of a new day or the end of an era? [… Read More]
Unrelated to classic heckler I.P. Freely. An interesting conversation occurred in my New Media class on Monday. Well, there were many, many interesting conversations because I’m an amazing professor. But there is one I’d like to write about here. We spent some time discussing the new Galaxy chocolate ad featuring Audrey Hepburn acting Hepburnish and [… Read More]
I’ve often lamented to my classes that the Internet has not yet come up with the electrate equivalent of the library shelf. Denizens of the library recognize the collectors’ delight in the surprising find, the book that’s near the one we wanted but not directly related to it. It might be two shelves up, or [… Read More]
What a fun time I had at the 2013 Ray Browne conference on Popular Culture last weekend. Here’s what I saw: Saturday, 9 February 2013 Session 1: Social Media and (Self) Presentation. Panel Moderator: Myc Wiatrowski (Bowling Green State University) Rebecca Butorac (Indiana University): Social Media Caught Socially Unaware: Parody, Performance and Reflexivity in the [… Read More]
A couple quick thoughts regarding email or other asynchronous digital media and conflicts among colleagues. 1. MISSING CUES: We’ve all experienced “over-reading,” in which someone misinterprets, in the worst way they can, the email we’ve sent. This often causes them to over-react back at us and a vicious circle begins. As a reader, it seems [… Read More]
I’ve noticed that Goodreads and Amazon have different rating scales despite sharing a five-star system. To whit, here are the pop ups on the two ratings systems: I notice this discrepancy every time I cross post a review on both systems. I post Goodreads reviews because I like the social element of them, and I [… Read More]
On the always-awesome Judge John Hodgman podcast, his Honor often uses the adjective artisanal to send up the hipster DIY crafty local home-made home-brewed grow local trend that results in all sorts of strange representations of craft as quality. When Alan Turing proposed the test to determine if a machine is intelligent, he suggested that [… Read More]
In the age of the Internet, the obligation not to write something stupid rises dramatically. I’ve decided to call this the Connecticut Problem. (I started writing this post because I thought Lawrence Block had gotten the question of Kipling’s anti-Semitism wrong, but the issue may not be as simply resolved as I’d originally hoped. When [… Read More]
by Ernest Cline, narrated by Wil Wheaton Ready Player One is the geek’s summer adventure novel. Packed full of pop culture miscellany from the 1970s and 1980s, the novel follows the adventures of Wade, an egg hunter, or “Gunter,” searching for the secret treasure that will give him control of the world’s biggest digital asset, [… Read More]
A while ago I was goofing around with Photoshop and zombified myself. Here are a couple versions of the pic: It turns out these are pretty popular — since I cc-licensed them, they’ve been turning up in all sorts of places. Here are a couple links: Photographic Dictionary Zombie Apocalypse Tip: Plan Ahead Need a [… Read More]
The Big Year and The Net I usually don’t put movies I’m re-watching in these double reviews, but I last saw The Net in the theater, in 1995, so it’s almost like seeing a new movie. The Sandra Bullock thriller follows the terrible adventures of Angela Bennett, who becomes the target of a malevolent criminal [… Read More]
Mason posted this video for the fourth of July: I haven’t got any idea what this song is about. I couldn’t keep my mind on the lyrics. Instead, I mentally tripped, over and over and OVER, on the Otis Redding sample they used as the backbeat for the song. The sample is from “Try a [… Read More]
How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators by Clay Shirky Shirky writes in a smart, accessible way about trends in the digital era. I’ve used both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus in my Writing for New Media courses, both to great acclaim. Cognitive Surplus engages with the question of what we do with all this [… Read More]
Of course, knee deep in my current academic project, I look ahead to the next ones. Aside from a couple ideas for books, I’m interested in thinking through ways to experiment with the massively online education course stuff. I’m pretty sure I could get a grant from my school to develop something about this next [… Read More]
A few quick thoughts on now being 35, and thus leaving the market-swaying 18-34 demographic You know that I’ve been a Columbo fan for a long time, but between birthday money and gifts from Jenny, I’m now a superfan, an owner of the whole series and all the television movies. “Just one more thing” indeed. [… Read More]