Holy moly, this is the cleverest use of web technology for art I’ve seen! Scroll!
Monthly Archives: March 2008
The Witcher
This past week I’ve been playing The Witcher, an RPG by CD Projekt Red using the Aurora Engine (the one Bioware used for Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, etc.). The Witcher is based off a series of short stories and novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski set in a wartorn grim fantasy world. Witchers are a clan of superhumans devoted to destroying monsters and evil. I had heard, however, that there was a lot of moral ambiguity in the game, which made me interested enough to download the demo. From what I saw in the demo, I was impressed enough to buy a copy.
New boardgames!
I just got some new boardgames!
I wanted a pure cooperative game but I thought that Shadows Over Camelot and Lord of the Rings were a bit long. When I heard that this game was pretty quick and good for newbies, I grabbed it!
This is a cool idea and caught my eye when it first game out a few years ago. Basically, think miniature war game without the miniatures. It uses cards that you place and move around on the table instead, using the sides of other cards to measure how far they can move (like Pirates of the Spanish Main). I used to play Warhammer Fantasy Battle back in high school (16 years ago) but ever since have never been able to get a stable enough life to consider getting a huge miniatures collection. Expensive and bulky! Having them in playing-card form is genius! I hope the game is good.
Dungeon Twister and the 3/4 player expansion
I’ve been playing a lot with Ari or Brian H. recently, and this made me think that I need a good two player game, but I also saw that this game had a 3/4 player expansion so it would work with more people, too! I hear it’s like dungeon chess. Reading the rules, I really like how combat is done Cosmic Encounter style except that you don’t have a random hand. It adds a nice guessing game to the combat–”do I play my good card or save it for later?” I hope the game works well and that it isn’t so cerebral as to be unapproachable.
Dungeoneer – Vault of the Fiends
I originally got one pack of Dungeoneer (Tomb of the Lich Lord) a few years ago after I had been playing Carcassonne a bit. Like Carcassonne, Dungeoneer is a tile laying game but around the dungeon delving theme and using playing cards. (I wonder if the use of playing cards only came about due to CCGs like Magic.) I never felt like there was enough variety in the dungeons though. Brian H. got another deck of Tomb which will make the dungeon bigger, but I got Vault of the Fiends hoping it’d make a nice complement to our two Tomb decks.
Digital literacies for teachers
A really, really quick intro…
Yesterday, I (with the help of Yen-Ling) lead a 1.5 hour workshop for the secondary school teachers in training on technology. I went in with the idea that tech for teachers covers both what specific tools would be useful for classroom practice *and* that teachers should understand tech as culture and that kids and adults are living digital lives more and more. Teachers should understand the kinds of new things happening with new media so that they can help get their students to be critical consumers/producers of the new media.
Below is the text from the hand-out I used for the workshop! Among other things, I forgot to cover Wikipedia and what it means for the changing nature of research and distributed knowledge, participatory culture, etc.
So this is where they found my blog…
For the last couple of days my posts about Leehom have been getting a lot of hits and comments.
I think this is where they found them! It’s a discussion board about him. It’s all in Chinese, but when put through a translator (such as Google’s), I see that they’re definitely talking about me and my family reunion post…
For the record, I am older than Leehom. I do not yet have a doctoral degree but am pretty close. My Mandarin is not that great because my parents decided to speak English once I got into kindergarten so that I could compete with the other American kids. I do regret it sometimes.
However, wo kayee ting de dong yi dian dian guo yu, so no whispering about me thinking I don’t understand! :)
One thing about family success… sure my family is talented and successful of a sorts. But what matters is what we do with that responsibility, and I’m not entirely sure we’re doing enough. Of course, I’ve just been reading Lipsitz…
Really bad stuff is happening in society; it sometimes seems completely surreal that I’m trying to think deeply about how to live a responsible life, how to deal with the fear of taking on that responsibility, and not delve into misanthropy and hopelessness, while at the same time getting recognition for something completely out of my everyday realm of existence.