Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Monthly Archives: July 2008


I love that blessed and beautiful feeling when you discover something that’s been missing for all too long. For me, lately, that feeling has been coming in waves with the discovery of an entire collection of my peers that are working in the slipstream / interstitial / contemporary reinvention-of-genre spaces. I blogged about this before […]

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Transmedia narratives are really hot right now, especially if the San Diego Comic-Con is any barometer. DC Comics’ Wildstorm is leading the charge, as the imprint announced Resident Evil and Devil May Cry comics, which may or may not be considered canonical; the Wildstorm Gears of War comic is definitely a transmedia extension; Prototype may […]

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First it was the buy-one-get-one-free sale on Criterion Collection DVDs at DeepDiscount (which concluded as of midnight last night, thank God), but now Apple has launched a $6.99 and $7.99 sale on Classical and Jazz albums. My wallet! My poor, innocent, empty wallet! I mean, seriously – Hilary Hahn! Yo-Yo Ma and Ennio Morricone! Joshua […]

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While a big motivator for our trip to Greece was the desire to actually see Greece and its islands, the real catalyst for the trip was the 5th World Congress of the International Toy Researchers’ Association (ITRA), a group of which I am now a proud member. If you’d told me that such an organization […]

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Maybe it’s because I’m just getting back into it after letting it lie dormant for so long, or maybe it’s because it had been gathering hype for a ridiculous amount of time (approximately 3.5 years) before shipping, or maybe it’s because my imagination almost always outstrips what reality finally serves up on a chipped, faded […]

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Another annoyance fixed: the Archives page is now (mostly) fixed. The Archives had been publishing to the wrong page for the last little while (.html as opposed to .php) but now it’s back in the right place. The only thing still missing is the Search function, but one thing at a time.

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I’m tidying up some loose bits around here, starting with this blog’s RSS feed. It had been inexplicably busted since I migrated to Movable Type 4, but now it’s up and running again. You can find it at feed://feeds.feedburner.com/TipOfTheQuill.

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A few weeks ago, none other than former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins published an essay in The Wall Street Journal called “Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit“, wherein he extolls the virtues of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes cartoons. He outlines their influence on his work, and even includes four poems from his first published collection […]

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Ho. Lee. Cats. Some of you might remember that I TA’ed the Interactive Narrative course in the 2008-2009 academic year for Professor Ed Barrett. This was a huge amount of fun and I enjoyed every moment of it, as I usually do with teaching. It was massively educational, even though I didn’t get paid and […]

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I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on this month’s trip to Greece for weeks now, but things immediately became so hectic upon my return that it’s kept slip-sliding down the to-do list. (Case in point: I’m writing this over my lunch hour, which is falling at 2:30.) Things are good, mind you – […]

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