I had only ever seen clips of “Stealing Beauty,” a short by Israeli video artist Guy Ben-Ner that was exhibited at Postmasters Gallery two years ago. But now my internet wanderings have unearthed all eighteen minutes! The film is all at once a family drama (starring the artist’s actual family), a slapstick comedy, and a [...]
Remember the craze for magnetic poetry a few years ago? It seemed like everyone’s refrigerator was covered in tiny words, rearranged by friends drifting in and out of the kitchen. I was never any good at fridge poetry, myself, but if you miss it, there’s isnoop.net’s Magnetic Words, a virtual fridge covered with words just [...]
So after I blogged about Capitol Words, I got curious. Surely Congress’s words aren’t the only ones being tracked!
Sure enough, twistori and Visible Tweets are keeping up-to the moment tabs on what people are twittering about. At Visible Tweets, you can plug in a word — or a phrase, your name, whatever — and any [...]
There seems to be an online community for every conceivable interest these days. Some of the most amusing, in my book, are online havens for grammar nerds. Oh, the squabbling over minutiae! Oh, the factions: prescriptivists battling descriptivists! It’s an anthropology graduate student’s dream come true!
At the same time, it is comforting to know that [...]
Ever since Jenny Venn, the graphic design professor at the University of Wyoming, mentioned that most of her students’ initial interest in graphic design comes from their experience with graphic novels and Japanese anime and manga, I’ve been thinking about the way comics reflect culture. Here are a few nifty sites I encountered as I [...]
We’ve been focusing so much on the visual lately that it seemed a sensory switch was in order. And since R&D has yet to find a way to get Pat the Bunny up onto your monitors, for today’s globally-themed post, I’ll ask you to lend me your ears instead.
Forvo bills itself as the largest pronunciation [...]
Savethewords.org gives words dropped from common usage, and thereby from the dictionary, a second chance at life! Scroll over the screen, and abandoned and neglected words cry out for your attention: “Pick me!” “Yes, yes, me!” (You can disable the yelling, if you find it really annoying.) If you discover a word that deserves to [...]