Blog

  • When the going gets tough…

    I am not too proud to say it: First-year statistics is kicking my butt. And, occasionally, driving me insane. Seriously. Sometimes I dream in excel spreadsheets. So, for my spring break I’ve decided to commit myself to: the obvious solution I should have thought of long ago.

  • Photosynthesis!

    Last year I did some work for a non-profit called CAST Inc. that develops technology to be used in education. I’m very excited to be able to go give a talk at their offices tomorrow, which only reminded me that I’ve kept forgetting to blog about them since I started this whole thing! One of…

  • Finale of Life is where Love is

    So, today is the finale of my WCN piece Life is where Love is. This was a very special piece for me. Throughout high school, I had been working on a massive cyberpunk “maxi-series” that was somewhat more in the vien of traditional mainstream comics. (and when I say massive, I’m not kidding: In three…

  • Thoughts on a visual e/i-language

    Big breath; prepare for a long post… Most of the time, people think about languages as being “out there in the world” – consisting of a conventional list of words and rules that we all access. This leads to people commenting frequently things like “that’s not a word,” out of the belief that there is…

  • Talk at PCA

    For those in the Boston area (like me), I’ll be speaking at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association National Conference. My talk will be on the “comics theory’ panel on Thursday April 5, 6:30-8pm at the Marriott Copley Place (though it’s indicated that times may change). This talk will be on my recent…

  • Hartmann on Air America

    I’ve recently heard the news that Thom Hartmann, author of my illustrated book We the People: A Call to Take Back America, is replacing Al Franken on Air America Radio. This could mean good news for our book (which at three printings since March of ’04 is doing pretty well already), but it means even…

  • Housecleaning

    What with my winter break coming to a close, I’ve been tending to some general housecleaning issues. I’ve recently updated my selection of “notable” blog posts as well as the ever useful Reference Bibliography. You’ll also find (or perhaps have already found?) that I’ve filled in the tags for all my blog entries, which should…

  • LSA and Reductos

    The last week has been utterly crazy driving up and down California visiting friends. I spent last weekend at the Linguistics Society of America conference, where I randomly ran into my TA from the first linguistics class I ever took back seven years ago at Berkeley. One of the sessions spurned a fairly good brainstorm…

  • Sand Talk

    I’ve frequently mentioned in my writings about sand narratives created by various Australian aboriginal communities. This article from the Transient Languages & Cultures blog at the University of Sydney has a nice summary of some of the work done researching sand drawings, as well as a bit on how researchers record it. In addition to…

  • Mannerism, Imitation, and Iconic Bias

    Dirk (who kindly keeps linking to my posts) provides some thoughts on my last post about imitation by describing “Mannerism” (about halfway down the post). He describes the Renaissance Mannerists (what I’ll call abstractly as “cohort 2”) copied the style of the first wave of Renaissance artists like Leonardo and Michaelangelo that came before them…