New look, new book, new syllabi
Regular visitors to this site . . . well . . . if such creatures exist, they probably need to get a life. At best, my blogging habits have always followed feast-or-famine cycles. And so regular visits — especially over the past year or so — would not have been a worthy use of most […]
Telling You What You Don’t Want to Hear
Last month, I got to experience — briefly, but enjoyably — my first WorldCon in Glasgow. This opportunity came my way courtesy of a kick-ass panel organized by Rachel van der Merwe, where she, Barbara Postema, and Greg Fuller provided the kick-ass bits, and I provided the short riff on Mrs., Davis I’ve shared below. […]
Another semester, another syllabus…
. . . or two. Fresh editions of “Media, Race, and Identity” and “New Telecommunication Media” (no, I haven’t done anything to get that outmoded title officially changed since last semester). As ever, there are some changes from previous iterations, though most of those are minor. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t quite find […]
The Blue Boys
Once upon a time, people used to make mix CDs. One of those people was a friend of mine, Aaron Caplan, and he started what he called a Burning Circle. It was a simple and delightful concept. 12 people. Each month, one of the 12 would make a mix CD, burn 11 extra copies of […]
Talkin’ bout media literacy
It’s a small thing, to be sure, but perhaps worth sharing anyway. A couple of weeks ago, a reporter for the UMN student newspaper talked with me briefly about media literacy and artificial intelligence . . . and it became part of a podcast episode. Little did I know that the reporter in question had […]
‘Tis the season…
…both for a new academic year getting underway, and for trying to fire up the blogging engine again on a regular basis once more. The former features fresh syllabi for my “Media Outlaws” and “New Telecommunication Media” courses. And the latter really is due for a fresh name. That’s a legacy title, which feels more […]
Cycle starter for hire
For reasons (all good) which are too mundane to explain here, I’ve seen more professional baseball games live in the past week than I normally do in an entire year: three major league tilts between the Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and one minor league contest between the Harrisburg Senators and the Erie Seawolves. […]
A new phase of life
I had been told this moment would come, but I didn’t believe it. Until today. My days as “mad old bald zombie” and “the non-binary deity of spring” appear to be over. Barely an hour ago, as I stood halfway between the berries and the bell peppers in the produce section of my local grocery […]
Make your own holidays
I don’t know if I could articulate clearly what a “normal” way of using Facebook is — if only because there is probably more than just one — but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t match up very well with my own uses of the platform. I don’t spend a lot of time on the […]
Advice for graduate students
I’m a digital pack rat. The odds are good that, if I wrote something of even minimal significance on a computer since the first one I owned back in 1988 (a dual-floppy disk system running MS-DOS with an amber-screen monitor), I still have a copy tucked away in some folder on my hard drive. And […]