I’m posting this because I know I can’t be the only one who gets these.
Last night I went out to run some errands and then stopped off at the Barnes and Noble on Rockville Pike. My goal was to research the current state of the short story and the general-interest magazine, so I gathered up an armload of magazines and headed for a chair. I spent a couple of hours there, flipping through those magazines, listening to crap music piped overhead and trying to filter out the droning-on of a children’s sports book author who was giving a loud lecture to an array of noisy little weasels a few rows over.
I think it was some combination of this aural assault, the fact that most of the stuff I found was unreadable crap, and my own frustration with my recent creative output (or lack thereof) that triggered it, but I had a real, honest-to-God panic attack. Back in high school, I knew a girl who had panic attacks fairly regularly and I always secretly blew it off as a drama thing, but if what she suffered were anything like these, I owe her an apology. This was nausea, claustrophobia… Not cool. I bailed out of the store and had to go sit in the car for a good ten minutes to get my head to stop swirling.
Anybody else had experiences like this? Anybody have any suggestions as to how to prevent this kind of nonsense from happening?
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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