In my hometown, someone opened up a porn-and-love-toy shop downtown. Almost instantly the place was being picketed. It’s still being picketed, and the sucker’s been around for a couple of years now. What’s gutwrenchingly sickening is the way the community stubbornly refuses to connect the dots between the disintegration of its city and their refusal to pass operating or improvement levies for their schools or to execute their plans for a new library.
It’s tragic, because I don’t believe these people openly recognize how self-defeating their behavior actually is – I think they simply feel overtaxed at a point where the local economy is still completely depressed. A ton of jobs have been lost in Wooster lately, and there’s no great improvements looming on the horizon. Small-town Ohioans are typically Republicans for this very reason – a dislike of higher taxes and big government. I can understand that when it comes to controversial elements like the National Endowment for the Arts and NPR, which are usually identified with the “citified New England yuppies”, but when it’s so clearly in your own backyard, I find that utterly unconscionable.
In the words of H.L. Mencken, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
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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