In honor of the essays by James Paul Gee and Scott McCloud that students in my Technologies and the Future of Writing course are reading for tomorrow: two great animations that ask us to consider the nature of digital texts, symbols, and the spaces in which both are presented. The first, Animator vs Animation,…
While watching the Giants OT victory over the Bengals today I saw this new Microsoft ad: Video: Pride The ad is a direct response to Mac’s outstanding I’m a Mac, I’m a PC campaign, which effectively makes the argument that PC users are the dorks and Mac users are the cool kids (full disclosure:…
The October 2008 issue of Harper’s (subscription required) has a hilarious excerpt from Chris Offutt’s “The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms” (.pdf) which was published a year ago in the Seneca Review. A few goodies: MEMOIR: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue…
This past Sunday the New York Times Magazine had a story by Mattathias Schwartz called “The Trolls Among Us” (or, of you look at the title of the HTML document and not the story, “Malwebolence: The World of Web Trolling”). The story details the exploits of a group of men and women who, it…