Aside from the Gunpowder Treason and Plot, there were other reasons why this weekend was memorable. Last week was heavy, what with two different major writing projects being turned in, and next week is erratic, what with two of my regular classes not meeting and last week’s two writing projects almost certainly requiring some rewrites. Therefore, I took this weekend for some much-needed downtime. A good chunk of it was spent finally playing Final Fantasy XII, which has to be one of my favorites in the series to date. It’s a near-perfect combination of breathtakingly beautiful visuals, sweet music and a completely compelling story. Anyone who ever asks “Are games art?” needs to play FFXII.
The rest of it was spent hanging out with my girlfriend Laura, which was well overdue. On Saturday we went out to find her a pair of boots and came back with all kinds of stuff, not just her boots but also some clothes, some candles, and, for my own personal hardware collection, an ElGato Hybrid TV tuner for my G5 and a terabyte.
There’s one of those sentences I never thought I’d write. I popped down to the mall this weekend and picked up a terabyte. Yet there it is I’d spent a bunch of precious time a week or two ago cleaning space off my G5 and still needing a bunch more, so I was going to pick up another external drive, but when I got there I ran the numbers and discovered that for the money, pound per pound, the LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB was a pretty good deal. It was still pricey, but all things considered it’s still jaw-dropping to see storage space go from about $20 for a Zip disk to about fifty cents a gigabyte. So now I have plenty of room to record video interviews for my thesis. Excellent.
So, yes all in all a great weekend, and badly needed. The new week looms large on the horizon.
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Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
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