Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: Academia

On Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Attempting to ease into my rededication to reading the classics, I decided to start out with a slim volume that I vaguely remember reading before, when I was in high school or perhaps junior high: Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 Winesburg, Ohio. As I read through it, I was struck by the truth of the old adage […]

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The NYT and the Globe on “The Public Library Renaissance”

The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog is weighing in on the “public library renaissance”: …If nobody seems to be out buying books, movies, and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead? Apparently: going to the library. The Boston Globe reports that public libraries around the country are posting double-digit percentage increases in […]

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OLPC cutting way back to birth the XO2.

Courtesy of my friend and coworker Andrew comes the news that Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) group is laying off half its staff, slashing salaries and ceasing its support of Sugar, the XO’s open-source OS to focus on finishing development of its second-generation XO laptop, the (presumably-titled) XO2. While I’m definitely troubled to […]

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Antici…

This is a tiny little thing, but I was thinking this morning about how the GAMBIT website uses funny terminology for each of its sections. Back when Philip and I were first designing it, we wanted to name each section after a component of the gaming experience, so “News” became “Updates”, “Careers” became “Join Game”, […]

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Why We Need Comparative Media Studies.

As many of you know, I finished my master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT in the spring of 2007. I liked it so much there that I decided to stay on, first as the Communications DIrector for CMS and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and then as a combination of Communications Director and […]

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NaNoWriMo update: I’m so screwed.

Here’s a tip: if one is considering doing NaNoWriMo, there are a number of dumb things you can do. The first is attempting to do DrawMo at the same time, although that’s really not that big a deal at all, especially for those of us who think in pictures as well as in words. No, […]

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Pondering the Futures of Entertainment for a third time.

I am currently camping out at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium‘s Futures of Entertainment 3 conference, and live-tweeting it at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23foe3. Come follow along!

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Upcoming appearances.

Adding further fuel to the tempestuous insanity that has been this week, I’ve had two somewhat interconnected papers accepted to two more conferences coming up this spring! First is the 2009 American Comparative Literature Association Conference, which takes place at Harvard March 26-29. This overlaps a bit with the tail end of the 2009 Game […]

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Me on Bond.

My campaign to dominate the American media-on-the-media continues in a sound bite I provided for the New York Daily News article called “The Q factor: How the science behind James Bond’s gadgets was reinvented“. For added awesomeness, I even got the last word on the subject – and the subject is fantastical doohickeys.

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MIT after MIT.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I started my Master’s degree at MIT in 2005, finished it in 2007 and then immediately went to work at MIT as the Communications Director for both Comparative Media Studies (the program where I’d earned said master’s) and for the newly-formed Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was completely […]

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