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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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‘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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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