The code:

I think the code is simple enough and the variables descriptive enough that the code doesn’t really need documentation. The code is unquestionably a hack, but it’s a hack that works and one of the consequences is a feature in the joint. Update»20100524« with bug fixes.

Last night we saw Dave Boyle’s White on Rice, a wonderful comedy that portrays its Japanese characters without fear or assimilation.

In the Q & A, Boyle explained the Japanese actors wrote their own dialoge. I asked if the Japanese actors also wrote their own English dialogue, the delivery of humorous lines was that good. Watanabe has a master’s sense of comedic delivery in American English. Nobody could have been surprised when Watanabe confessed I love American sitcoms.

Oh, and don’t tell my fiance, but I am totally infatuated with Aiko.1

For your delectation, a few tchotchkes:2

When media historians look back at the early twenty-first century and begin documenting the period when digital print overtook paper print, they will dutifully note there once existed single-purpose devices for the display of digital print. The historians will record that early manufacturers not only abstracted the codex book form with the shape of these devices—thin tablets roughly the dimensions of a trade book—but that they also reproduced the limited function of the codex book, restricting these devices to acquiring and presenting digital print. The historians will note that digital print began its eclipse of paper print only after readers had access to a general-purpose device for the collection and manipulation of digital print, a device with a familiar form factor, intuitive controls, and multiple uses.

Amazon, Verizon, Best Buy, and iRex are all bumping elbows for space in an historical footnote.

This warms my (former) educator’s heart.

As someone who started reading illustrated books as a young child and who graduated to a steady and voracious diet of comic books as a pre-teen and early teenager, I can say my own literacy was in part furthered by comics.

But tools like Bitstrips are not comics. The cartoon aesthetics tells young people “this is for you” while Bitstrips’ design templates provide students an easy way to combine different elements into a look that pleases them. By lowering the difficulty of producing aesthetically pleasing designs in the context of comics, Bitstrips invites students to engage in a further acts of creation, most notably the creation of narrative.

I can imagine this software combined with a unit developed from Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale or Joseph Cambell’s The Power of Myth, two texts which explain that narrative can be generated by combining familiar and well-established motifs in a manner similar to the generation of a visual aesthetic by combining coordinated and complementary graphical elements.

Plus, the looks on those kids’ faces justify practically any teaching technique.

Had enough with the fat letters on the main Google search page and you’re using Safari? Then download this zipped CSS file and follow along with the video.