Tasty drink
Tasty Drink from Precious Roommate. | More...

Lost in San Francisco
Photos from Paradise Lost. | More...

WANT
LOLTheorists get theirs. | More...

System updates
About the blog and the move. At the moment, the best way to see EVERY new post is to follow the Archives page; click on the disco sausage icon in the new navigation bar at the top of the screen. Otherwise you can just follow academic posts (buck-and-wing sausage), more personal/informal essays (flamenco sausage), or ephemera from my Internet curation (breakdancing sausage). | More...

Bicoastal Library Problems
I have the hardest damn time putting any books in that last box. I'm not half the bibliophile some of my friends are proving to be, but I'm always loath to get rid of anything, much less books. What these decisions are about is the nature of my library, which has changed plenty over the years. What am I going to be using my library for in the future? | More...

Bellis is online!
Bellis Music Camp is alive and well and apparently not living at Canyon Meadows anymore but the kids still enjoy it. | More...

Vocabulary
A list of words and historical/cultural figures I learned from reading comics when I was a kid. | More...

Patrick Stewart funds novice international activists
Through Amnesty International. | More...

Rolling Bums in the Spirit of Giuliani
I mean, Harlem's residents don't need their kids spending unwarranted nights in jail. Harlem's residents don't need any more police harrassment, generally. But the buildings west of Frederick Douglass are gentrifying... | More...

Curating YouTube
Kellan said he hadn't really been into YouTube until seeing "my curating of it." Interesting to think of link propagation that way. | More...

Someone has hacked together an Eat Poop You Cat gaming server
and I can't get any work done sitting on this couch. | More...

Self-importance in the Bay Area
The Game Developers Conference was fun and I guess other people are blogging about it, and I ended up in a celebrity column from the San Francisco Examiner online. | More...

My Life, Through The Music of David Byrne
I've been back to making a lot of mix CDs lately. I keep going on about David Byrne, so he ends up in the mix a lot because people want to know what the hell it is I'm talking about. But when I try to figure which songs I would recommend, it's too hard, because I got to thinking, There is a song of him for every year of my life. | More...

Keep Your IP Laws Off My Body
Happy Black History Month? | More...

Grover in Literature
I never heard the writers on Sesame Street refer to Grover as a teacher of postmodern ideas, but maybe they were working under that assumption subconsciously. | More...

Holiday Pix
Pictures from Thanksgiving in Pasadena, subsequent trips to Prescott and LA, and Christmas in Ann Arbor. | More...

The Marketing Of This Group Will Be Legandary
Some 42-year-old's get-rich-quick scheme entailing the Internet, his back catalog of 137 songs he has written since he was 21, and a band of 15 people, or maybe it's ten, who are between the ages of 22 and 24. | More...

YouTube Socks
F00t f3t!sh display on YouTube. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Enter the vaGinger
The cheese fries kind of take a backseat to the corporate dumpster diving and the vaGinger. | More...

NEEEEEAR??? FAAAAAAAAR!!!!
Documentation of similarities between Ulises Mejias's project of nearness and farness and its original inspiration, the "Near and Far" sketch performed by the Muppet Grover on Sesame Street. | More...

Loud Party in the Endgame
Everyone's singing along at the top of their lungs. If the music goes back to being decent, I might go down and demand that if they're going to keep me up they might as well invite me in. I'm not bold enough -- what would the cops think if they found the complainant at the party, and she went back upstairs when things dispersed? I don't want to be the snotty old lady upstairs, but I am. | More...

You, Too, Can Host A School Assembly
Just think... all their booking information is available right there on the Internet. I wonder if any of them need proof you're actually inviting them to a school? | More...

Chillin' With The Bear
in the TC library. | More...

Big Year For Publishing!
My review of Unit Operations is up on the TC Record site. | More...

Certifiable!
I got my letter saying I passed the doctoral exam, and the faculty who read my paper went out of their way to tell me they thought it went quite well. | More...

Statistically improbable phrases in Riddley Walker
The girt dants of the woal thing. Putcha Putcha. | More...

Quick Political Comics
QuickComic: Fiddling while Rome burns. | More...

Firsts: Academic article published
Fibreculture article on DDR. | More...

Visions Productions Debuts Online
Froderin, Madame Zola, and Ditz Bits. | More...

Oh crap a review of my life by Anthony Lane
and magical realism and Cow and Boy. | More...

It Doesn't Take A Nobel Laureate
to KILL THE PIG, SLIT ITS THROAT, SPILL ITS BLOOD | More...

Green Sleeves
A video on sneezing, from Maine. I love my natal state. | More...

Notes on Gender, Sci Fi, Comics
Octavia Butler; artists play around with viewing male superheroes with a sexualizing male gaze. | More...

The Omen: Where Are They Now?
To fall asleep, count sheep. To wake up, count lawyers. | More...

Accepted: To Hampshire
look! I worked in that colon! | More...

And that was only the FIRST panel
Colin Mochrie and Bruce McEldowney: two great tastes what taste great together. | More...

Appearing At
HOPE and BitchFest aftermath. | More...

Not that bus
I was not on the Fung Wah bus which crashed today. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Poodle Fries
Spike's fries are excellent, but this post is Not Safe For Lunch. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Not Safe For Work
Dolphins prefer chaps. We still prefer Round The Clock, but these cheese fries come close. | More...

Grand Theft Moral Purpose: Fear and Lovey-Googly-Eyes in Harper's
The Harper's Magazine back-to-schoolmarmishness issue this year consists of a panel discussion on video games, literacy, and education... and guess who doesn't appear in the discussion at all. Despite this oversight, the article has sparked some very lively blog interlinkage among various people whose opinions I respect. The following is my response to the article, and to comments that appear on Ulises's site. | More...

More Adventures on the Internets
Searching AOL's logs of one user's search terms, and wondering why the hell people approach the Internet this way. | More...

OMG PONIES!
Is it all a dream? | More...

William Shatner Is Creepy
Must... Capitalize... All... Posts... | More...

Ender's Brain: Science Fiction Models of Intelligence
Brilliance in Ender's Game, The Diamond Age, The Stars My Destination, and other texts. | More...

New article up
Serious Games Source publishes my article on Games For Change. | More...

Speaking at the Hacker Conference Friday
Hackers and Academia panel, HOPE 2006, this Friday through Sunday near Madison Square Garden! | More...

Vote Amazing Screw-On Head!
A definite must for all fans of Edward Gorey. | More...

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!
John Dean cites Theodor Adorno on the Daily Show. | More...

I can't sleep
Theremins and pole-dancing. | More...

My baby graduated!
Fabiola is going to college! | More...

Distributed Investigative Research
ePluribus Media will help you make a fact database and check it, too. | More...

Great Minds Think In The Same Space-Time Continuum
The Finnish parody Star Wreck. | More...

Unsubtle Hints
Sort of a birthday list. | More...

Things That People I Know Are Doing
Music, comics, going to help refugees. | More...

All The Reporters' Data
Notes on All The President's Men, from a comfortable armchair in a 21st-century department of communications. | More...

Quartet, A Lullaby
If you had told me I would be able to track down that song from my own living room, that I would with almost no effort take it onto a computer with a screen colored as vividly as a television -- more colorful than the game itself! -- and pull and snip and shape, with the movements of my hands, those same notes... | More...

Cerfimacashun!
These are pretty much the books which have been most important to my thinking to date. | More...

Effectively Deaf
without my cel phone. | More...

Dogwood Season (words)
What's it like not to be that last student? I don't know. Me, I'll walk around campus barefoot the way I used to at Poly in August, when summer classes were done. I'll get to know some classrooms I've never even looked in before. I'll say hi to the maintenance men. The security guards already wave me through even if I don't present my ID. | More...

From The Vaults: Why The Dancing Sausage?
body movin', body movin', body movin', we be body movin' | More...

The Nerd Room
Current working idea: Set up game playing stations around the EGGPLANT Lab where classmates could play games particular to each group of participants I spoke with. This would mean having a sports-gamer space, a casual-gamer space, and a nongamer space, and having the spaces not meet. Perhaps I could still populate the geek gamer space with my own geek items in an attempt to indicate that a LOT of academic work so far has focused on geek games and geek players, to the detriment of an understanding of the other groups. | More...

I take back any implication that Jon Land is going soft
His music is rad, and highly recommended to fans of KCRW's Nocturna or Metropolis. | More...

Pokey The Penguin Has A Posse
and We are It. | More...

So what's Jon Land up to lately, you may be asking yourself?
Two words: Origami quilts. | More...

Why not get them bronzed, while you're at it?
Saving your neonate's umbilical stem cells for later use. | More...

Dogwood Season (pictures)
New albums: GDC/Bay Area and around New York. | More...

The Further Adventures of Simulation
A focused continuation of the Bread and Circuits piece. | More...

Bread and Circuits
The physical conditions of computers and video games don't care how the hell we're shaped, how we feel physically, what we can do aside from sit and look and press buttons. They don't care which odors we find pleasant and unpleasant; a cheese you pick up may be called Stinky Blue Cheese, but you don't smell it. They don't care what our favorite foods are; nothing has any taste. The objects afforded your character in a video game don't support the attention to fine craftsmanship you might enjoy if you collected hand-tooled leather armor from a past era, or the piquant natural irregularities which you might seek out in gemstones. While the leisure objects of meatspace restore to us some of the sensations of which the workplace deprives us, the leisure objects of digital games are as flat, grey, and substanceless as an office cubicle. | More...

Better In Print
Cat and Girl mock my life. | More...

And what rough beast
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO BABY NO BABY NO BABY NO BABY! | More...

Invisible Imaginary Horses: VHR Diary Day 1
Initially frustrated at the numbers-heavy interface and play, I've begun to warm to the game a little. First of all, you can link a picture from any website to represent your horse, rather cleverly mitigating the lack of graphics on the cheap. The major thrill so far is the prodigious breed list. | More...

Free the E3 Two, mama!
Free as in "lite" or free as in "freebie," something flimsy and useless people give you to convince you to give them your money. | More...

No Zantigen Eusa Com
It's all for you, Mom. | More...

Detritus: Notes on Pop Culture, Critical Theory, and Geeking Out
Notes from chats with Seymour Papert, and the project of developing a theory of geekdom and conformity. | More...

I wish there was more I could do
to fight spam than link to Michael S. Cox, that filthy, dirty, lying, cheating spammer. | More...

Miyazaki and Earthsea
Ghibli tackles LeGuin. | More...

Molk!
On Planet X, wooooahahooh, it won't be long now... | More...

From A Land Down Under
That is totally my hand and I am feeding a kangaroo in that picture. | More...

Preliminary Oz Pix
I have not posted mine yet, you see. Have you any idea what my life has been like? Two conferences in a row. Nothing but pizza for lunch this week. | More...

The Opposite of People: Narrative, Interactivity, Performance, Mediation
I just got done indulging myself and taking a little extra time doing my assignment for game design this week, which was an analysis of heralded narrative game Façade. I then went back to look at an earlier analysis of Zork I did, and realized that even though I thought GDC had marked a huge revolution in my thinking, I was saying pretty much the same thing I was saying then. Nota bene, though, that where I was previously concerned only with the limitations put on the player, I've now flipped the script and have started thinking about the limitations on the game producer's side. Here are both analyses: | More...

The Gus Sindex, 2006
Summarizing just how far off the deep end I've gone. | More...

Talking with Broughton
How can a solution coming from such a complicated man be so simple? | More...

Why "Ebonics" Isn't Bad English
Wikipedia entry for African American Vernacular English. | More...

The Greatest Dancer
Combine those moves with the cackling laugh and you have one *wicked* blue-skinned package. | More...

Fries And Propaganda Down Under, Part 2
Rare cheeseless fries at P.J. O'Brien's. | More...

Fries and Propaganda Down Under, Part 1
Unrecorded cafe, King's Cross neighborhood, Sydney, Australia. Joined by local sherpas Mary and Andrew. | More...

Big Dogme On Campus
Criteria for digital-age research | More...

God Loves Nutjobs
Pastor Fred Phelps pickets the funerals of straight people. | More...

Final Appearance
so long, shamans. | More...

New blog
Debut of The Phenomenologist. | More...

Two Moments in Harlem
A small child in a two-piece and a guy with a very runny nose. | More...

Live in Prescott, but not so long it makes you hard; live in Enfield, but not so long it makes you soft
Advice on how to survive Hampshire College. | More...

You know you've been working too hard
on your game design homework when you have a dream that you've been assigned to create a game for class. About comparing your teeth to someone else's teeth. | More...

Flickrastination
Ten ways to have fun with Flickr. Via Webmonkey. | More...

Australia!
for spring break, somewhere between March 9 and March 19. | More...

Media Activism?
I'm beginning to think the mediatedness of any medium -- the fact that you generally aren't there in time or space to adjust the impact the things you're trying to say to change someone's mind -- is problematic for any attempt to make change. | More...

Also: What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Killing Time
Educators claim to want to harness the motivating elements of digital games to teach. But what if certain players are most motivated by submission? How does the fun of submission fit into our pedagogy? | More...

Count me in for the big muddle
Teen People website briefly ran a loving article on white supremacist Olsen Twins look-alike music group Prussian Blue. | More...

What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Faking the Funk: or, Why Some Games Won't Be Educational
This semester I'm taking a class with a developer from Atari, and today he said some things which I couldn't ignore about how an engaging game is made. Many of them go counter to what educators seek to accomplish; some of them even contradict some of Jim Gee's claims. | More...

Artificial Nut Zippers?
Very interesting. It appears Ken Mosher, a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, visited my site and posted a link to his new project in a comment to a very old post of mine. Or perhaps an Agent Of... | More...

Stop Badware
Because Esther Dyson says so. | More...

From The Vaults: Early Mac Woman
Continuing the investigation of my early technological literacy practices, here's some homework from a computing class, I think sometime in middle school. | More...

Knitting Communities Together
Over the holidays, my maternal grandmother, Deedee, re-taught me how to knit. I asked her to teach me because I wanted something better for me to do with my hands in class than picking at my skin, angrily IMming with... | More...

Well!
Right -- I submitted a comic idea to Tiny Sepuku. | More...

Christine has a good eye
Sushiesque; Yakov Smirnov. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: More Adult, but the Lack of Fry Generosity Persists
Old Town Pub, Ballard, Seattle, 1/6/06. Special guests Nat and Robert. | More...

Hate School?
You're in good company. | More...

Parrot-lag
One bit the button off Sarah's jacket. | More...

Towards A Place Of Blogging In A World of Assignments: Preliminary Notes on StudyPlace, Adorno, Robbie's Division Me Project, etc
(how's that for a colon-oscopy?) | More...

Human descent
Morphed pictures of animals. | More...

The Earth is Phat!
Google Earth for Mac. | More...

From The Vaults: Cheaticus Maximus
Instructions on how to maximize your l00t in Kid Icarus. | More...

Fries And Propaganda: Dorky and Awesome
Schultzy's, U District of Seattle, 12/29/05 | More...

The Inexorable March of Technology
I've started a Flickr stream. | More...

It's Christmas in Pasadena
Pasadena looks like Disneyland -- gaudy, overly cheerful stucco buildings with no flavor to them whatsoever, springing up everywhere, four stories tall. I don't know what next year will look like. | More...

Barney vs. Tupac
Just nice to hear him say "f---," you know? | More...

Bouganvillea proposes a topic
Now I have an excuse to play WoW for work, for once. | More...

Republican Crap.
The darker irony of this is that probably some of the cash spent on these items wholesale goes to companies in China. | More...

Warcraft Diary: The Radical Naked Baby Triathlon
If you participate in a protest in-world, does it begin to make you wonder if you could do the same in real life? | More...

Custom Cooptation
Custom ponies as high art, without recognition of the form's pioneers. | More...

The name Anzac?!
Australian Customs has a strange demand. | More...

How do you type with those things?!
The class tensions of nail length would make an interesting paper. | More...

Catching Up on Others's Blogs
Because I am terrified of this presentation I am supposed to do at NRC next week, I am procrastinating hardcore in a way which will not make me feel quite as dirty as playing WoW for hours. I am catching... | More...

Don't know whether to be pleased or appalled
"You see, these comments are a conversation. And contributing to the conversation... may even bring you some valuable traffic from the blog readers themselves." | More...

Boxes
which make my day. | More...

Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day
Oh, I'm ambivalent. Maybe I don't want filk in my life after all. | More...

Reproducing News
Media literacy dissertation having kids edit together professional footage. | More...

My Katamari is Tiny!
Pathetic! | More...

Radio Silence
Anyone trying to call my cel at the moment will not have an easy time of it. | More...

More Anguish
Because it's a fun to, any how. | More...

When a kitten comes to your house
Pictures of Frank Black and Sirius Black, foster kitties. | More...

For A War Stance
War rugs. | More...

We're An Accordion Band
...we're coming to your town, we make annoying sounds... | More...

System update
I've let a lot of messages slide. Bear with me. | More...

Pastafarianism
yea, I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage. | More...

Ideologies
In which I stumble into a nest of conservatives and become very upset. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Bouganvillea's Story/ Is That All There Is?
Bou woke up today in the Den and headed south to seek her first shaman quest. Instead, she found herself on a high finger of rock overlooking a lake. Succumbing to ilinx, everyone's favorite overlooked play style, she flung herself from the rock. Nearly cleared the shore. Didn't. Took 121 points of damage, almost her entire life bar. No matter -- the lake was inviting, with its unplumbed depths and invisible distant strands, so she strolled into the shallows. Where she was bitten in two by something unseen. | More...

Reinventing
I've done this a couple of times since college. Look, I'm an afterschool teacher! Look, I'm a media analyst! Look now -- I'm an activist! I'm a freelance writer! A journalist! A professional video game player! | More...

Detritus: Back to school, etc.
Catching up one month into the semester. | More...

Plotnik? Plimpkin? Punkin?
is getting married. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Reporting Live From the Emergent Plague
"Ya man/I saw some guy run by/POW/He blew up!/Blood brains and snot..." | More...

Further Adventures in Booze Literacy
White chocolate syrup Half and half Seltzer Malibu or other coconut rum Serve over crushed ice. | More...

George Bush Don't Like Black People
The Republicans, in general, don't like poor people. | More...

College Trip to Boston
Fab's first trip to Boston. | More...

A Modest Proposal for Teh Intarnets
Could we develop a separate Internet for the people looking for V!0xx? | More...

Things we did not know about the Leet
It's not listed in the Jargon File... Screw you, Eric S. Raymond! | More...

Advertisers and Geeks
The lie that advertising is about lifestyles when it's actually about profit bothers me, but the lie that there are a few narrowly-defined good ways to live your life bothers me too. | More...

Terrifying New York cockroach stories
Over the past year the roaches in this apartment seem to have developed a sense of drama worthy of a USC film-school graduate. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Presenting the World of Warcraft to Educators
Every time I log on I'm grinding, killing six crocolisks for their eyeballs or twelve rabid thistle bears for their rotting carcasses or twenty-four wailing Highborn for their ephemeral essences. Then I run to the questgiver, only to be given another quest. No questgiver ever says "Great job, why don't you go to Astranaar and enjoy the scenery for a while?" or "I like a gal who can take out sixty fleshrippers at a go. Care to join me for a swim? I know this waterfall that's off the beaten path..." It feels like fuckin' work! I keep expecting them to hand me a pile of textbooks and tell me to write 163 multiple choice questions. | More...

Native American Boarding Schools, 1880-1920
Since the paper I wrote in high school, primary source material on the subject has been put up online. | More...

Once I Was The (Bald) King Of France
This is just a shot across the bow of any atheist Randites out there: next time you try to tell me there's some universal truth out there I'm'a whip out the Latour and try to assure you haven't a leg to stand on. | More...

You can't have it that way!
McD's adventures in buying a better image. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Existential Blues
At some point it became clear that the other members of the guild were actually heading back to "the Tower" -- not the one we'd escaped from, but another one which seemed to basically be home. Even though I wanted to log off this didn't alarm me too much, because going back to this home state or logging off seemed to more or less be the same thing. I did worry, however, that the other guildies had been online for far too long already. | More...

More Maine News
Keeping track of the Keilt-Freyres, even though I don't keep up with them :( | More...

Crap -- Chute in an Accident
Carolyn Chute has suffered a hip fracture in an auto wreck. | More...

Andrews Family Reunion
Remember the one where Grandma barfed? We'll all look back on this someday and laugh. Right now the grass is still dead in that spot. | More...

Making Fiends Birthday Party
Making Fiends, Making Fiends, my friends are always Making Fiends... while I make a mess of my birthday parties. | More...

This is TOO Disgusting.
The Pentagon plans to nuke Iran if there is another attack on American soil. | More...

Home in Pasadena
Expect to hear a little less yearning from me, and a little less frustration with New York; deep down, I know I can't justify it anymore. | More...

Seattle and Vancouver: Details
Pix from the trip. | More...

Warcraft Diary: The World of Scarce Things
Sunglasses, sleeping, and not sleeping IRL. | More...

This Week's Highly Recommended
Big ups to the Extra Action Marching Band and a backhanded slap to the Hungry March Band. | More...

Finland: A Primer
Sauna, rolling in the snow, and Kalevala. | More...

The Aristocrats Joke
The filthiest joke ever told. | More...

Warcraft Diary Entries 3 and 4
Thousands of people logged on to these servers. A lot of them kids, but a good portion vocally annoyed enough with the kids to mark themselves as adults. At some point, everything we do will be deleted or otherwise lost. Think about this generation of humanity, doing this. I can't tell if it's better or worse than life has ever been. It's not as passive as the couch potatoes of the last generation, I don't think. But we make and move and fight and boast and dance in a world which is ephemeral: the question is how much more fragile is it than human culture has ever been? | More...

Warcraft Diary, Week Two
Let me tell you about it: that dust wasn't something my priestess would get to keep. It appeared in little bounded squares in the loot from kobolds, and I was supposed to collect ten and return them to someone who'd sent me on a quest. I don't remember who it was, and in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't going to matter to my play. That dust wasn't useful, or really even pretty or fascinating. In short, collecting the dust was not an intrinsically motivating part of gameplay. | More...

Reading and Writing Locally and Globally
I am trying to reconcile the ideas of folks like Sut Jhally and Robert McChesney, which assumes that audiences are helpless in the face of media hegemony, with the ideas of Henry Jenkins, who finds that audiences repurpose media texts for their own uses. | More...

By popular demand: RSS
In which I make it easier to find me using RSS. | More...

Boob's back; mash-up needed
Let the eagle soar... Tomorrow belongs to me (leer) | More...

Warcraft Diary, Day 1
Part one of my quest for a horse. | More...

I said it first
Cutting funds for Sesame Street is like strangling puppies. | More...

W.o.W., a.k.a. A.B.D.
Kiss your academic career goodbye... | More...

All Points Bulletin
APB the Bacon. | More...

Today's discussion topic
What do you do when there's a lecher in your field? | More...

Not Business As Usual At Hooper's Store
Merrill Lynch donates $5M to Sesame Workshop for the development of financial literacy materials. | More...

Naycher
Pictures from Mom's visit and the hiking trip to Harriman State Park. | More...

Adventures In Disorienteering
The further adventures of New York as it mercilessly destroys those who would drive cars. | More...

Ode to Hampshire Students
Oh, Hampshire students. They go about the world with their ears pricked up. You can see them! They are the rabbits listening for danger and the cats about to poke their noses where they probably oughtn't. | More...

Isaac's New Car; Around New York
Williamsburg, Central Park, Washington Heights, Columbia. | More...

NY Gets the LA Treatment
Retaining wall along the Henry Hudson collapses. (Useless) film (of TV reporters making sh!t up) in eleven minutes! | More...

Eureka! Why I procrastinate!
Tonight, having procrastinated every possible way I know how, but still having finished a presentable draft of a paper due Monday well before I thought I would, and even turned it in to both TA and instructor of the class, I was smote heavily with a blinding flash at 2 a.m. with the sudden realization of why I procrastinate. | More...

Exchange in the hall outside the EGGPLANT Lab
The luxury of going barefoot. | More...

500 Greyhounds At Risk
no, NOT "a bus?" | More...

Detritus: Interlude: Morning is the Long Way Home
Email and Leo Kottke. | More...

EGGPLANT meeting notes, May 2, 2005
Problems with the talk-aloud model; interactions between expertise and motivation; a formal feature breakdown of "challenges." | More...

Haircut
I don't mind your studio hair gel/ I don't mind the crazy way you play your casio... | More...

Arrivederci Espada
It's tiiiiime for uuuuusss to paaaaart... | More...

Everybody East Side West Side Heyyyy-oh Heyyyyy-oh!
Chris Onstad's blog. | More...

Neck Face In The Ivory Tower
Jessica Hochman of Teachers College displays a photo of a Neck Face tag in the course of a panel on grafitti as a form of youth-centered pedagogy. | More...

Ugly, But Functional!
Comments are working again! | More...

A Very Tiny Circus
A few months back I was daydreaming about the horse video game I want to create, and got a little ridiculous -- started thinking about the headshot I'd want if I ever got interviewed about said game. | More...

B!tch, B!tch, B!tch
B!tch publishes me, I promote Lynda Barry, again. | More...

Ol' White Guy News
Welcome to the second in a series of Crusty White Celebrity Guys Teach You How To Dance | More...

Mr. Rogers Was Wrong
How are we to love our postmodern selves, and where is the kids' show which will love us back? | More...

April: Epiphany
I spent a lot of time over January running around Europe and as a result didn't have the kind of time over that break to do the thinking I'd done the year before. I've spent the semester apologizing for not... | More...

Life in New York
Pictures from around New York and Columbia, circa January-March 2005. | More...

AAAAA OMG KLINGON PR0N!
MELOOOOOOTHAAAA! *smash* ooh. | More...

The Hands-On Imperative and Video Games
One last thought for the evening. I started writing a note to a friend who doesn't play video games tonight and once again found myself typing the words "I can't really explain them to you -- you have to play... | More...

Video Games and Violence: Enough already!
Having gone through a series of lectures and classes leading up to the official opening of the video games lab at school this weekend, and having talked to a number of people not of an age to have grown up... | More...

Major cult documents online
P00DLE! | More...

EGGPLANT Lounge Mural -- UPDATED
Pictures from the creation of the video games lab mural, the grand opening, and Tron Prom. | More...

My Trip Across The Pond
Pictures from Paris, London, and Tampere, Finland. | More...

carmen sandiego
rob scott. | More...

I make the papers nationwide!
My meme is all about homelessness today! | More...

T.M.I.
Can we talk about information for just a second, here? Is anyone having the same problem as I am? I came to a point tonight -- it was when I was looking for citations at the root of the debate... | More...

Another Musical Evening
and not just because of the beans. | More...

You, Rabbit! You'll get yours!
A MeFi link to Soviet-era cartoon invites childhood nostalgia. | More...

Nothing New Under The Sun
Someone's already created a MMO horse game. foo. | More...

Open Letter to Game Designers: Don't Make Me Be That Bitch (or, Boobies!)
You can't blame it on people drooling in front of the TV anymore, guys. The medium reinforcing the backward-ass ideas some kids have now is video games. It's you. | More...

U.S.D.O.E. v. Buster the Bunny
The ongoing adventures of a plucky little Republican administration in its attempt to destroy all good in the world. | More...

Oh my god, we're lost
Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67. | More...

Academic Video Insanity
Epistemologically Near and far-out player pianos. | More...

Back In The Saddle
New blog orientation. | More...

Standout Games
Katamari Damacy and Vib Ribbon. | More...

The Next Chris Farley
Dance along! It's as infectious as Yatta! | More...

Clean Your Screen For Free
*squeaky noises* | More...

Meaning in Experimental Contexts
I'm reading an article today by John Bransford and Kathleen Nitsch -- cognitive scientists -- which details the ways in which subjects in linguistic experiments understand sentences they are asked to process, and how this differs from the ways in... | More...

My Courageous Battle With Wheat Gluten
I'm more than a little disheartened; over the course of the day I've sunk into a pretty deep funk. Aside from being vegetarian, I am generally not one to refrain from eating whatever the hell I want. Good food makes me happy; life is depressing enough without having to eat food which drags on the soul. La vie est dure sans confiture, as an elderly French gentleman said to me once. It's why I've always been suspicious of vegans; they suck the joy out of everything. | More...

What I Can Tell You
Yesterday I went looking on my hard drive for some file which I was pretty sure had the word "what" in its title. I didn't find it, but I was rather amused by the list it generated, so I thought I'd share it with you. Here's a list of all the questions the computer thinks I could answer. | More...

A Multiliteracies Manifesto
Elaborations on "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" by the New London Group. | More...

Glory Be To God For Pied Things
I'm in the Matrix and the only other real thing here is my cat! | More...

Hello Mudduh Hello Fadduh Redux
AIM class of '04. B(IM)FF! | More...

house clown
Sarah L | More...

Free To Be Whatever Gender Your Parents Artificially Choose For You
Want A Boy? Want A Girl? Choose your baby's gender. Safe, Effective & Natural. | More...

The Love Song
I read it again today and realized how little of the poem I had understood. In fact, I think its specific meaning escaped me entirely. From the context of an English class where I was struggling to be the best student, I conceived of Prufrock as struggling some overarching goal of artistic self-fulfillment, as I was. I somehow guessed Eliot was tilting at his own poetry. | More...

rear entry!
me and sly | More...

what is a truck
me, dad, and sly | More...

crystal meth
robert | More...

GOP necronomicon
glyph | More...

TV For My Dad
Penn and Teller cry Bullshit! | More...

August
Henry looks like Winston Churchill. | More...

IMpossible
It's funny, to some extent AIM has become a replacement for the notes Robert, Tinh, Lindsay, Catherine and I used to pass in Dr. Sheinkopf's class (sometimes on our TI-81 calculators, in a code we developed!) Big nerds that we were, we'd be talking about what we were reading for class as often as we'd be gossiping about how annoying we thought G-- C------- was. We filled in the discussion gaps where the rest of the class wasn't ready to go. Without passing notes, I might not have been as engaged with the reading. | More...

You Knew It...
mayonnaise sandwiches?!?! | More...

Death, Taxes, and Advertising
Fret no more, dear advertisers -- some a$$holes are hell-bent on reaching that lucrative 18-to-34-year-old demographic as they game, too. | More...

The Dark Side of Structures of Attention
I'd put many of the tricks of the public relations and advertising trades in this category. For example: talking points. You know who's doing a sledgehammer analysis of this particular attention structure? Jon Stewart, that's who. | More...

Kicking Republicans
-36 -40 -42 (grunt) Slimy Tonic fell on the floor! | More...

New! Special puzzling.org tee!
Answer: it's the grey one. | More...

Video Game Literacy
An hour watching a n00b try to jump a brick wall in Smash Brothers elicits a rumination on standards of video game literacy. | More...

batman
fabiola | More...

hooker economics
Neil | More...

Digital Debutante
(insert crystal tiara emoticon here) | More...

What's not to understand? Hey Steve's mouth exploded the universe,
and that blond guy did a tiny, tiny dance. | More...

From The Vaults: Poetry Jar
At some point earlier in my life I had decided this system of writing down and randomly choosing ideas would be my means of staying fresh as a writer, of staying disciplined and busy. I never made use of the jar; systems like that have a way of frightening me off once I devise them. So I'm getting rid of it now, but I thought I'd post the contents. | More...

Ugly Rumors About Hampshire
Grades? At Steve Weisler's request? | More...

Post Scoops Times -- In Alternate Dimension!
The Post reports that Gephardt is named as Kerry's running mate. | More...

Fourth (but actually my third)
Pointillistic wrap-up of my holiday in it's-pronounced-West-Topsam. | More...

New Literacies: A Review
Also, everyone I know who's been on public media in the last few weeks. | More...

No Phone
She was lookin' for a phoooonnne, just a lookin' for a phoooonnne! | More...

DSWJ Character Shirts!
Who's your favorite Sausage? Soft-Shoe ringer tee and Flamenco cami now available! | More...

Detritus: Meme-linky Madness!
I saw my first fireworks the other day, not lit ones, but sodden remains on a beach in Boston where I knew I had been before, on a less beautiful but no less loved day, a ferocious rain coming down on me and my man and making illegible the windows of the car we were in. This time it was a different man, a different ex, a moving van, a brassy day recently polished by a June rain. | More...

names like crawford
martino | More...

Things Are Looking Up
Cheney booed at Yankees game. | More...

Dude, I keep telling you already,
the LA Times is pretty lefty. | More...

high school marriage
Bill Crosbie | More...

Hey Lady! Give My Name Back!
I heard she changed her name from Gilliam, but that could just be a rumor. | More...

Regular-type Web Journal Post
Charlie: The people in that movie were set up to be laughed at. Me: It's not actually the director's intent to have you laughing at that kid specifically because he's never going to have sex. For other reasons, sure, like when he yells at the friend who called him while Denise Crosby was interviewing him. But you were specifically rewinding to laugh about that shot again. You know he's going to have sex someday, so why are you laughing? Charlie: It's not like he was there. Me: Yeah, and if he'd been there, you would have been nice to his face and laughed behind his back. Charlie: I'd like to think I wouldn't. | More...

brain fair
scrabble game in which James was trying to say "brain fart" | More...

softee conspiracy
brooke | More...

severed hand
alyissa | More...

All Things Considered, It Still Tastes Like Mucilage
Fellows! To-morrow I shall be on the wireless descrying a homily on the moral lassitude of frozen-custard vendors! | More...

A Day of Mourning... For the Bomb
Dad sold the Vista Cruiser. We cry now. | More...

Flashback Summer: On Overheard Remarks
"Mood is especially important for children because of the ways in which they view television and overhear remarks... There is no framework of understanding into which their reflections can be placed. It is as if children's education were dominated by the overheard remark... It is not as if they see the adult world as separate and of no interest to them. On the contrary, they show such interest that they struggle hard to make sense of it in their own way..." Cedric Cullingford, Children and Society, quoted in PowerPlay: Toys as Popular Culture | More...

Washington Heights Impex, Ltd.
A list of items being shipped in or out of my apartment this week. | More...

Sadly, there's your solution:
A national day of mourning for Ray Charles. | More...

How He Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Israeli Army Laundry Soap
"All recruits are given a physical "profile" number, the highest being 97 (it is said that the extra 3 points are taken off for circumcision)." | More...

Gus Sindex Mini: A Semester in Pictures
Interpretive dance and getting old. | More...

Things Made Out Of Hands
Return to Trevor Van Meter's site. | More...

Yay! More Cancer!
Life stinks, but air fresheners stink worse. AND they cause cancer. | More...

The Following People I Know Will Be Sent Off To Die
It's anyone ages 18-26, male or female. You know who you are. You know who your brothers, sisters, lovers, sons, daughters, roommates, friends, and co-workers are. | More...

Psalm for Washington Heights
Recent events force a narrow range of conclusions. The lock is off my building's front door again. First it was the latch, then the entire body of the lock, a jagged metal hole in the building's defenses. A brilliant, beckoning signal to anyone who might be casing it. At least the trail of dead roaches is gone from the foyer, after some guy claiming to be an exterminator came through with a sinister-looking canister spraying all the floors and offering glue traps for the rats, who still leap out around my feet when I take my trash down to the bins. | More...

funny thieves
bacon | More...

grope ass
Jen | More...

matching sunglasses
james | More...

Found Documents: Diary Entry From El Capitan/Refugio, May (June?) 1995
Begins with a reference to a Tanqueray ad campaign of that time in which a photo-collage old white male figure said mildly scandalous old-white-male things about a lifestyle vaguely related to alcohol to an unseen secretary. We would have seen... | More...

Vanity Searches
and finds she was a criminal in a movie she'd never heard of. | More...

Can't Keep A Good Dog Down
Neil's latest project: Sparkplug the Dog. | More...

gold undies
itamar | More...

zamboni
itamar | More...

Now You Can Buy Spam, Too!
The Spam Letters hits the press. | More...

Taking Requests
I have a great quantity of iron-on letters lying around. Will not apply them to your forehead. | More...

Things to Wear
L.H.O.O.Q. pants, Dancing Sausage shirts and buttons. | More...

abortion providers mad lib
pia, catherine, jamie, me. | More...

Bagpipes in Washington Square Park
I have been in New York for four years now, but somehow, the procession of purple-robed, mortarboarded adults coming down Washington Place and proceeding through the park on a Wednesday afternoon felt like the weirdest thing I'd seen in the city yet. | More...

Blogger?
The Teachers College version of PacManhattan. | More...

L.H.O.O.Q.
Epater les bourgeois! Avec un pantalon de sueur! | More...

Hup!
Mooserider Jenny, away! | More...

I still don't know if the instructor ever went to the arcade
Death to Your Mother. | More...

Awwwww.
I am now a contributor to Adorablog, the folks what introduced you to Strindberg and Helium. | More...

Anatomy of Finals Week: Writing a paper on reality and television
... and coming nowhere even close to talking about reality television. | More...

The Further Adventures of Herd Mentality
I still worry that the CIA's gonna get their hands on all this data someday. Or advertisers. | More...

En La Esquina
Tonight confirmed one of my hunches about the usual shouting at the station. Tonight it was back to normal: ardently but not angry shouting from a bunch of middle-aged Latino men in working-class dress, throwing hands in the air and smacking at articles in folded newspapers. I paused at the elbow of one of the men. De que estamos hablando en est'esquina? I asked. Politica. Cada noche, politica. | More...

My Sister Rocks!
Oh f*** it, she's so much cooler than you are i can't stand it. | More...

HOPEfully you'll be there...
Is your attendance going to be noted in your FBI file? Absolutely. | More...

We're making progress
Hegemony, Dominance, and Ludic Space | More...

handbag
Dana | More...

De La Vega facing jail time?
A fish out of water. | More...

Detritus: Those Who Fight Further; Distributed Amnesia
People in my department talk about "distributed cognition" -- the process of using your environment and the people in it to think. Sam and I are currently going through distributed amnesia. I mean, I really feel it. Like a Borg I feel it. It doesn't matter that he's the dumb partner in this pairing; with the end of the semester upon us, his memory is just as important to my success as mine is. | More...

Detritus: A little meme spread; definite nostalgia
I think our next joint project should be creating a temporary Xephreniaq museum with artifacts and installations. We should do a gallery opening with fancy wine and cheese and invite people who need to know us better. | More...

fish grotto
Sarah L. | More...

porn is fun
crosbie | More...

Dear Sylvie,
"Eggpants" is for you. | More...

Functional Fixedness
Actually, text-based games often sucked because of the amount of functional fixedness they asked you to overcome. For crying out loud, how was I supposed to know that if I didn't get the bag of peanuts, I was going to lose the Hitchhiker's Guide game when Arthur boarded the Vogon ship? But we certainly learned something: to look for unorthodox uses. | More...

HAMMER SMASH!: A belated breakdown and synthesis of themes from the Princeton video games conference
This is the intro. Please see subsequent articles. | More...

Genres
EverQuest, Minesweeper, and Dance Dance Revolution are all video games. To make sweeping statements like "video games encourage violence" or to ask questions like "are video games really motivational?" in light of this starts to seem clumsy. | More...

Specific design features to consider: Play spaces
Striated and smooth ludic spaces, and concepts still less transparent in name to the everyday player! | More...

A multilayered model
Nick Montfort and Lawrence Konzack suggest multilayered models for understanding video games. | More...

Movie elements in video games
No, her breasts are huge because Pamela Anderson's breasts are huge, not because "video games are evil"! | More...

Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking
Can graphics-based games scaffold expertise as well as text-based ones can? | More...

Identity and motivation to play
What Video Games Have To Teach Us meets the "Tetris defense." | More...

Problem solving, critical thinking, and metacognition
Are they better developed with games or with simulations? | More...

The field; play, work, and playfulness
All work and no play makes Mario something ludic something. | More...

Finally: playing a new video game as "approaching a void"
I will play Peach, and I will still 0wn j00!!!!!1 | More...

Before You Send Me That Forward
check www.snopes.com | More...

The Other Homeschoolers
They've sent seven interns to the White House. And your homeschool? Has sent seven kids to the treetops. Who's likely to make the most change, here? | More...

Who Am I Reading With?: Genres And Audiences: Or, The Sudden Unwanted Appearance Of Colons In My Blog
Came up with an idea today to go back and address an issue of Internet literacy I obsessed over earlier but didn't know how to describe. Some work has been done on children's understanding of genre and intended audience of television shows. In general, kids are pretty sophisticated in their understanding of genres. They are also good at identifying target audiences, as in "this is for kids" and "this is for adults." But what about their understanding of themselves as a community of watchers? | More...

heteronormative bagel
Jamie | More...

No Pants, No Chekhov
Anton Chekhov is alive and well and living in DC. | More...

The Bad Dream of Showing Up Naked
Does I exist if I cease to do my homework? | More...

Today's serendipity
Burakumin and Pipe Dream. | More...

Bar Code Scanning for Consumer Empowerment?
For social justice? | More...

Tapa tai!
"Don't think of this as a black show. Don't write 'Blackety Black Santa In The Ghetto' type of shit." He told me, "Take your Conan quirky stuff and do the exact same thing here, because nobody in black comedy is doing that. Black audiences are being fed the same gangsta horseshit comedy, show after show." -- Chris Rock on Pootie Tang, as reported by Louis CK | More...

Our Princess Is In The Ivory Tower
is what they would have titled the article, if the newspaper-reading audience of the US was even mininally 133t. but it's not. | More...

Geometric walky things!
MaMaMedia, SodaPlay, and friends. | More...

Not Tonight, Dear, I'm On Fire
THOUSANDS DIE FILM AT 11 | More...

Detritus: The Homefront
Butt in the air, hands on the keyboard, chickens in the shed. | More...

Boxing Day? No, Valentine's Day!
Better than the one about Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but not as good as the one about mummies and classical jazz. | More...

Attention cowboy journalists:
HEY KIDS! BRUSH YOUR TEETH AND BOMB THE PENTAGON! | More...

lipstick-red prune
Sarah and Gus | More...

cheap silk shit
Brooke | More...

I like coloring books.
Especially coloring books developed by the CIA! | More...

The Bohemian Index
"What can one say about Tottenville, except that it is less bohemian than the Fresh Kills landfill." | More...

Cinema Chocobo
I just finished analyzing screenshots from Final Fantasy VIII for a class I'm taking. | More...

Photo Finish
If you found a shot of what looks like a chocolate d!ld0 being admired by a My Little Pony, please drop me a line. I'd kind of like it back. | More...

internet titty
Christine | More...

We Are The Crapflood Of The Blogosphere
Argh. | More...

Experts See Patterns, That's What Makes Them Experts
and we see obfuscation! | More...

The Problem Of Skills In Role Playing Games
RPGs offer a number of advantages over other game models, for teaching. They require minimal dexterity, offer the player opportunities for emotional connection to the characters, produce large rewards for minimal input (some might say in the same way that science does), and work within a narrative, offering context for knowledge. But what skills can they teach? | More...

When Teachers Try To Be Cool, What's The Worst That Can Happen?
"One of the important signs of our Lord Jesus' presence is the development of nuclear bombs that have the capability of annihilating all life upon earth many times over... Such bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, and were influential in bringing an end to World War II." | More...

Metacognition Semester: Socio-cognitive Literacy Imbalance!
It seems totally ironic to me that these people who are writing about how people learn are completely unable to put their ideas to practice to effectively communicate the interrelations and importance of those ideas to me in a simple goddamn book. | More...

Metacognition Week: The (Heavily Drinkies) Semiotic Domain of Graduate Students
"Gus, the rest of us aren't addicts." | More...

More grafitti robots
Imagine Ruckus trying this baby out. | More...

Meta-metacognition Week: The Semiotic Domain of Cognitive Science
My understanding of cognitive science, based on my observations of departmental politics at Hampshire, was that it was anathema to social scientists. Happily for me, as I always felt myself straddling the gap between the cog sci professors in Adele Simmons Hall and the social scientists in Franklin Patterson Hall, the stuff that I am reading so far suggests that not only are the two fields cohabiting somewhat peacefully, there is much to be done in exploring their overlap. | More...

Metacognition Week: Computer-Assisted
And then there are my own marks, stars and boxes, hatches and underlines of varying weights for subtle cues, all of which I have perfected over time. To read without these, even if the reading is enriched by links and commentary, is reading handicapped. | More...

hideous things
Jamie | More...

Keep CBS From Censoring MoveOn's Ad
because the Super Bowl is about getting the eyes of millions, not about the heady euphoria of victory and beer. | More...

Unionize Everyone Now!
SAG attempts to organize reality TV. Take THAT, Taft-Hartley Act! | More...

Metacognition Week: Study Strategies
If you're lucky, your professor is aware of current work his field, conceives of the subject in a way that overlaps relatively well with your interests, and isn't suffering from diabetes-induced dementia or wholesale subscription to Stalinism/ neoliberalism/ free-marketry/ fifty-year-old notions of a canon/ Christian fundamentalism/ ersatz Buddhism/ academic backstabbing/ the cult of himself/ [your horrific memory of attempted indoctrination here, sing it with me now]. If you're not lucky, your time gets wasted on lectures and readings which won't contribute to your pursuit of answers. The solutions? The Hamster Technique, and considering yourself a Person Outside of Homework. | More...

Books and Cats: Go Together Like Coffee and Pie
When in Northboro, visit the bewitching Booklet Wallenda! | More...

Metacognition Week: Reading
Earlier this semester, in trying to explain myself and my goals to a professor, I wrote something about books being my friends and instantly knew it was a lie calculated to impress him. The truth is that books used to be my friends. Now I'm scared of them, even hate some of them, and have spent time over the past few years avoiding them. | More...

hall booty
perrin | More...

Biting The Alma Mater That Feeds Me
the local population is 60% Latino, and your student body is what percent again? | More...

Bacon!
is for connoisseurs. | More...

The Last Temptations of the Albatross
New York City will have vengeance. God save your gas-consuming soul. | More...

interpretive dance
glyph | More...

System Update
High sides on twistedmatrix.com! | More...

Fries and Propaganda: F-R-A-U-G-H-T
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go drink Pabst Blue Ribbon... | More...

A Photographic Update On The Past Month
Album from winter break; the Cats of Linoleumhaus 30-month no-dates photos-only calendar. | More...

Jewish Dub And Reggae Are Alive and Well and Kicking Out The Jams in Brooklyn
just in case you missed it. | More...

jews for jesus equals happy hour
Bill Eidtson | More...

panty guru
brooke | More...

german child
Robert | More...

sponges
fuzzy | More...

pus free milk
bacon and me | More...

Support the Nauru Detainees
A 21st century detention camp in the bombed-out remains of the path of colonialism and global capital. | More...

Bus Blog
Bacon and I found this and we were pretty sure it was a blog post. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Return to Diane's
A lake of cheese in the last place Kurt Cobain was seen alive. | More...

Our Best Chance To Make The TeeVee Say "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!"
MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contests -- still time to vote on the funny ones! | More...

Chengwins of Fire
(cue Vangelis theme) | More...

David Byrne on PowerPoint
and, um, he made some jokes about arrows and bullets, they said. | More...

hell or fort lauderdale, clamato
catherine, stranger, james | More...

Why Johnny Can't Post
I've hoped that the multidirectional quality of communication on the Internet would encourage people towards criticism of the worldview fostered by movies, advertising, and television, but is that really going to happen if people aren't able to decode what they find on the Internet? | More...

I am 1337!
I make Archaeology! | More...

Update
A farewell to Albatross? | More...

"Have you ever stopped to think how much better blogs would be if Hollywood scriptwriters got ahold of them?"
"Of course you have... you're not an idiot!" | More...

You know your neighborhood is gentrified when
it has its own blog. | More...

My Jaerb
Link to ugly picture of me and the rest of Charlie's Angels. | More...

Woodcuts make for dramatic porn!
Erotic bookplates at the San Francisco Public Library, also Russian woodcut animation. | More...

Chu-chu rocket -- The cat is scary!
And now, the dance remix! | More...

"Don't hafta. Not tellin'."
Berke Breathed is back in the comics pages. |