A brief note to send a heads-up to all y’all looking for good new music. Harry Connick Jr. has a new album out today, called Only You, which is mostly his standard crooning, but veers off in a fantastic direction with the next-to-last track, “Other Hours,” which has a sound almost like Spanish guitar. It’s very cool.
Also, this week I finally picked up These Are the Vistas, the debut album by The Bad Plus, who snagged a bunch of awards last year. It’s easy to see why – the disc has a bunch of really excellent grooves on it, like the oddly-named-but-deeply-cool “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass”. Also, any jazz group that attempts – and pulls off! – a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” deserves some cred.
Finally, I picked up a track called “City Boy” by Keb’ Mo’, which is a deeply moving, sweet and sad soul track. Check it out.
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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