for the little things you might have missed
While I usually write about culture here—stories, narratives, movies, videogames, the like—I thought I’d do something a bit different today. Namely, I thought I’d share with you my favorite strip from xkcd, a decently well-known webcomic (at least among nerds) that specializes in weird, dry humor and science mixed with sarcasm. However, this one’s a bit different. … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Where Do Birds Go
Ah, Phineas and Ferb, legendary chronicle of the immortal adventures of Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher, it may have only been a year or so since you were yanked from the airwaves, but it feels like so much longer. Now that those halcyon days of eternal summer have passed into the rearview, I find myself longing for your exuberant … Continue reading Moooommmm!!: A Feminist Reading of Phineas and Ferb
It's no secret to anyone who's ever booted up Steam that there are a lot of indie games in the world. I've even heard the suggestion that Valve should curb Greenlight—their crowd-sourced independent access program—at least for a while since it lets through so many subpar projects that it makes sorting the diamonds from the rough seemingly impossible. … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Thomas Was Alone
There's a lot of advice floating around for would-be writers, ranging from the omnipresent (read always, write always) to the niche (write at this time of day, always write this many words per day, etc.), but the two best pieces I've ever received both dealt with what is probably the hardest of all moments to … Continue reading A Tribute, to the Redemptive Science-Fiction of Person of Interest
Beyond Pokémon and Nintendo's other banner franchises, shooters have always been my favorite videogame genre. That's not to say they're all I play—I'll play anything I can get my hands on, and as of late I've played quite a few more indie games than big-budget FPSes—but they've more or less become my comfort zone when it comes to … Continue reading Overwatch: A (Super)hero Shooter with (Super)heroic Heart
I don't consider myself a diehard Beatles fan; I'm probably more just a step or two above the millions of casual listeners who can sing along to Hey Jude and Let it Be and not much else. Like a lot of classic rock bands, I've listened to most of their studio albums at least once, a couple … Continue reading A (Not So Brief) Aside on My Favorite Beatles Song
It's not often that a film will leave me at a loss for words. Mustang, a foreign film co-produced by France, Germany, and Turkey (in which it's set), defied every expectation I'd had for how I'd feel when it ended. I knew it had been well-received, that it had won awards, that it had been nominated for a … Continue reading Mustang: Beautiful Filmmaking in Its Rawest Form
Here's a question you've probably heard before; what makes a game, a game? And for that matter, what makes any piece of art in any fictional medium (to name just a few examples: literature, poetry, film, television, comics, music, visual art, dance), distinctly a piece in that medium? Sure, we can say that literature is written prose, and … Continue reading Firewatch, and the Changing Definition of Video Games
I apologize to my absolutely zero readers for not posting in the past two weeks. I would say I had finals, but this is probably what the intervals will be like. Not that you care, you lovely nonexistent people, you. I also apologize for the fact that probably my first several posts will be video game-related. … Continue reading Race the Sun: How to Write a Game without Writing
Sunset Over Ithaca 