Category Archives: Life

Life

When choosing between coffee shops to do work in…

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I mostly make a choice based on convenience. Do I need to go to the U-District, to grab some books from my office, for example, or can I just stay in Ballard?

But sometimes I wonder to myself… do I want to be surrounded by White people or by a diverse population? Most of the time I am in the Cafe on the Ave, I am part of the norm since most of the customers are other students and half of them tend to be Asians. Here in Ballard, well.. I guess it feels more like the rest of Seattle. I don’t believe I’ve seen a single Black person step foot in Cafe Verite/Cupcake Royale as a customer.*

I like both environments (and anyone who knows me knows I am attracted to White women) but sometimes I feel like one setting over another, you know?

*Once, a young Black kid stepped in selling candy bars, obviously for some sort of charity. No one gave him the time of day. Most people immediately looked away after seeing him. (Admittedly, he was a horrible salesperson, not even plugging the charity in his sales pitch, but ya got to wonder… was it because he was selling something or because he was Black?) Nice. And this is in a coffee shop that supposedly cares about the community. Makes me wonder if they actually mean lower-class White folk when they say “community.” Or perhaps they just don’t see a connection between everyday life and charity.

Life

People are cute

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I love how this one woman at Cafe Verite/Cupcake Royale in Ballard tightens her lips every time she puts mugs away. It’s like how Michael Jordan sticks his tongue out whenever he tries to make a basket. Lots of people have little quirks about them when they engage in activity that requires concentration, especially when physical dexterity is involved. It’s cute.

I wonder, however, if it is a social thing. Do people do these as a way to signify to others that they are concentrating and that they are slightly self-consciously aware that others are or might be watching? I wonder if they would do these physical cues without others around…

Life

cupcake. tasty!

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cupcakeshop.com

cupcake. tasty!

Check out the cute store a friend maintains!

It’s small but growing so buy stuff!

Life

Resolutions

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1. To start adding photos to my blog entries as much as possible…

Here’s a gratuitous one from http://icanhascheezburger.com/:

I can has cheezburger?

2. to post more about the different things I do/am a part of: Technology for Teachers planning and thinking, my progress in the PhD program, the games I play, how screwed up academia is, the crap that goes on in WoW, and the crap that goes on in everyday life

3. and of course to post funny shit

Life

Top 25 news stories media didn’t cover

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Project Censored Media Democracy in Action

Academia, Life

General exams

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Well, I started a month-long written exam yesterday. I have to write 3 papers answering 3 questions. Basically, 1) list pros and cons of games and games culture, 2) describe what others have said about games and learning so far, and 3) design a study on communication in and around MMOGs.

I think the second question will be the most difficult since it’ll mean I have to refresh my memory with a lot of reading. The first one should be much easier as it’ll be more of a persuasive argument essay. (It’s easier to say something than it is to correctly say what others are saying, I think.) The last one was confusing at first since it sounded like what I did last year with the WoW paper, but I’ll be expanding the research agenda in a few ways, so it is still a good exercise.

After I turn in my essays to my committee (which is made up of 4 profs), I will have an oral defense… probably first thing in the Fall, if not this summer. Then, I will finally be on the last step, writing a dissertation.

All this is complicated by the fact that this year my interests have dramatically shifted to an area I feel ill-prepared to write about just yet. That is, I want to look at how groups of people or individuals in MMOGs or games culture, in general, are being marginalized by a dominant culture (which happens to generally be the same dominant culture in off-screen life).

Before I start writing, I’m brainstorming possible ways to tie the last idea into the essays.

And, of course, I still have other obligations to attend to, including classes (and lots of reading for one of them called Educators as Intellectuals–a book a week) and 3 raid nights a week. 😛

Life

Vegas

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So, I went to Las Vegas this past weekend for a mini-con or gathering of some of my guild members. 🙂

It was great to meet some of them for the first time. We stayed at the Excalibur (which features tons of dragon-themed paraphernalia even though I don’t remember a single dragon in the Arthurian Tales) and, of course, we checked out the Tournament of Kings show which featured armored dudes jousting and fighting each other with swords, maces, flails, and shields. DRAGON! DRAGON! Huzzah!

The rest of the time was spent eating (breakfast buffet at Mandolay Bay was pretty good), gambling (I just watched mostly, but Craps and Roulette looked fun), playing card games (San Juan and Lost Cities), watching a pilot for a TV show called Chuck (about a directionless nerd who is sent an email that imprints on his brain the totality of the CIA’s secrets and actually pretty good in how it parodies at popular culture), going to an arcade (Gameworks, where almost all the shooter games had broken guns), and hanging out at the pool (where it was 3 feet deep everywhere which makes it rather difficult to actually swim and means that the 4 lifeguards were just there to make sure the drunkards didn’t do something made only possible by being drunk).

Anyway, fun all around!

Academia, Life

Spring break in Sunnyvale

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A couple of weeks ago, Robin and I went down to Sunnyvale to visit family and high school friends. We ended up hanging out with Gray and Song Gong quite a bit. We also saw my brother Max and his new fiance Nancy, Chris and Hilary (who are getting married on Mother’s Day), Ian and Laura (already hitched), et. al. Oh, and Song Gong’s awesomest dog evah, Daphne. On Thursday, Gray and I drove over to visit Ted and Denine (got married two days ago!) since I wasn’t going to be able to make it to their wedding, while Robin visited a high school friend of hers Liz who recently got a job she likes much more than her last one (grats!). We also saw Robin’s brother Brian, sis-in-law Kelly, and their daughters Jessica and Natalie who are amazing. Okay, enough with the shout-outs… on to the stuff.

We went to a bunch of restaurants including a really good deep dish pizza place in Palo Alto, Pizz’a Chicago. I’d been there before (and they used to serve yards of hard cider) but for some reason this last time, I thought the pizza was fantastic. On the first Saturday we went to La Costena for their burritos (as featured in Sunset like… a decade ago) which wasn’t as good as we remember (from like… a decade ago). On the second Saturday we went to a Shanghai restaurant with my parents and I had a bunch of dishes I’d never had before. It was also very very good.

I bought three DS games while down there, Phoenix Wright 2, Final Fantasy III, and Hotel Dusk. I’ve been playing FF3 fanatically for the past week…

Song Gong lent us Arrested Development which we watched when we had downtime (almost done with the first season now), and Gray lent us Fullmetal Alchemist which I’ve been watching fanatically while playing FF3 (finished on Friday… not sure I like the 2nd half).

While down there, my parents had me update and do routine maintenance on their computers. Only… it hadn’t been done for like 2 years, so I ended up spending hours downloading Windows updates, getting new virus protection and ad-aware installs in place, troubleshooting various problems (each of 4 computers had a different set of problems!), and installing a web camera for my mom to use Skype with her brother in Rochester.

Oh, and last but not least, Lisa and I co-authored a book chapter, taking turns working on it via email. Heh. It’s called “Play my way: The politics of cooperation in massively multiplayer online games” and will appear in Play and politics. Douglas Thomas, Joshua Fouts and Shawna Kelly are the editors. (I wonder if that’ll bump my WoW paper up on Doug Thomas’ Games and Culture journal’s review list.) A draft version can be found on Lisa’s site.

Photos of our Sunnyvale trip coming soon!

Life

Three cool webtools

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Last year I spent quite a bit of time working with a set of php tools to create a public web page that had feeds from a bunch of different blogs. This year, it’s even easier with WebJam. For example, check out this webjam I created that shows the blogs of all my teacher ed students. Now I just have to encourage them to actually generate some content. 😛

Another cool tool I found recently is Macro.scopia. It generates graphs and other visual representations of data. One could, for example, recreate the VisualThesaurus using it or create an interactive search cloud… Takes a bit getting used to their site, though…

And finally, I must have mentioned this before, but I LOVE Google Reader. Half the reason why I don’t post as much here as I could is because I’m reading news instead.

Life

MusicTonic

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MusicTonic

A web mashup for music images and videos categorized by genre.