So this weekend I went out, picked up a pen knife and a box of envelopes (for filing) and laid into my magazine collection. One thing that should be obvious is that I’m a magazine junkie. Architectural Digest, GQ, Esquire, Men’s Health, Wired, Macworld, Communication Arts, Print, Dwell, Fortune, Inc., Fast Company, Book, Poets and Writers, even Vanity Fair all make regular – if not monthly – appearances. I keep every issue of Communication Arts and Architectural Digest for professional inspiration, but every so often I look at the shelves in my room and think, Dang, time to optimize.
The way I think of it, it’s like defragging a hard drive. There’s all this information you want to keep, but a huge amount of stuff that’s not being stored in an optimal manner and a bunch of lost space as a result. I go in with my knife and start slicing out pages, and what was once a 400+ glossy becomes two dozen pages of content in which I’m actually interested. There’s an amazing feeling to hauling two garbage bags full of advertisements out of your room. Therapeutic, really.
In other weekend news, I went to a farwell sendoff for my friend K.C. on Saturday night, and then my folks dropped by on Sunday, which was really nice. Yes, I’m living outside of Washington, D.C. Yes, my folks live in Ohio. They do these weekend trips all over the place for car shows and antique shows and flower shows and whatnot, and usually if one of these is somewhere between Pennsylvania and the Atlantic, I’m considered “in the neighborhood”. Which is cool – it’s great getting to talk with them, and I’ve been a horrible slacker son and haven’t been keeping up my end of the communications as well as I should. (I’m not Jewish or Catholic, just naturally guilty.) After they left, I played some more Baldur’s Gate with Nick and then chatted on the phone for an hour or so with my old friend Jesica, who’s just moved to New York and is in fierce job-hunting mode. Damn, I miss that girl.
So, yeah. It’s been a decent weekend. I’m still fighting off the blues for a couple of reasons, but I’m getting used to that by now.
What have you folks been up to?
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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