I’m teaching a class called “Written Professional Communication” at the University of Pittsburgh. Amongst other things it’s about… well, communicating professionally in writing. Currently we’re working on “responding to complaints”. In order to generate some complaint s to respond to I instructed my students to write a complaint letter as though they lived in the fictional universe of their choosing:
Ok… So I walked through the room while Stephanie was watching the news and a commercial for Dupixent was on. Basically it’s a bunch of kids being embarrassed by their eczema and happy that there’s a treatment that helps so they’re not embarassed at the pool, a ballet recital or a concert. Conceptually, I get…
(as the title says, herein be spoilers… you know… and dragons… though given the show, way less dragons than you might expect) So I’m having weird thoughts about the reaction I’m seeing online to last night’s Game of Thrones (s08e02). First of all, I want to point out that I really liked the episode. Some…
As has been the standard for my summer of adjunct online teaching I’ve basically spent every waking moment this weekend grading papers. Wheee!!! So it’s possible that there’s been some erosion of my already tentative grasp on sanity. You know… it’s possible. So anyway, I was taking a break from grading to eat lunch with…
All you damn kids, get off my lawn!!! The thing I love about the internet: Anyone can say anything. Millions of voices, all having the potential to reach worldwide. My tiny stupid little blog has had readers from literally every continent. Including Antarctica. I can rant about comic books or movies or politics and rather…
Millie Bobby Brown in W Magazine A few months ago, I wrote an article about “alternative facts” that was largely me complaining about Trump/Trump voters, and I said one problem is that liberal minded people (like myself) like to think that we own facts. That is, there’s sort of an idea…
As I said in my review of The Mountain Between Us, which I knew no-one was really going to care about except for me, I saw the big movie everyone cared about yesterday too and of course I’m going to review it as well. So lets talk about My Little Pony. Oh, that’s not the movie that…
Fair Warning: Beyond here be SPOILERS. And Dragons… you have been warned. So there’s some Game of Thrones things happening in the last few episodes that have gotten me really thinking. Specifically things that relate to the relationship between fan favorite characters Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. I think it’s been interesting to watch them…
Once again, I’ve decided to show off how fun my job is by posting some of my dissertation thoughts for comment and feedback from others. Fun, fun, fun! And like if you don’t think basically helping me with my homework is fun, you’re wrong. Because today’s topic is something that you’ve been dying to talk…
Ok… That’s it. I give up. I admit it. Donald Trump is smarter than I am. He’s smarter than you are. He’s smarter than all of us. It’s not that I don’t disagree with him on policy (which I do). It’s not that I think he says stupid and/or offensive stuff pretty often (he does). It’s not that…
So this week I watched the entire series of Westworld. It had beed recommended to me a few times, but I had been too busy to try it out. Now I’m caught up. I enjoyed it. The season finale was…. ennnh… good and bad points. There was one thing that bothered me about it a…
Who wants to talk about something non election related? How about some good old fashioned gay talk? I actually specifically chose to not post about the election at all yesterday. At least not on my own blog. Some people wrote and asked me my opinions and I commented some other places, but I just kinda wasn’t…
I am a black man, born in the 1970s, who grew up as such a comic book nerd that I decided to go out and get a Ph.D in it. Today, Luke Cage has his own TV series. I just got home from work, so I have not watched a single episode yet. More so…
So, with my most recent book I’m reading, I’m getting into a domain of comic book (well, in this case more properly geek culture in general) study that I don’t really know as much about, at least not formally. Fan culture. Specifically, so called “fanon” and “fanfic” communities. I’ve come to really like just posting…
So obviously something horrible happened with the mass shooting in Dallas yesterday. And as I predicted when in my last post, that pretty much meant that my renewed faith in humanity could shrivel up and die. If Micah Johnson proved anything he proved that racist killings are not limited to white people and not limited…