I am deciding to end this series on interesting introductions with video games for a couple of reasons, the most pressing of which is that I wanted an excuse to write about Super Mario 64. Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Super Mario 64 is not the first game I played, nor is it my favorite. But when I look back on some of my favorite opening moments in video games — openings that are...
I first decided to watch Jordan Peele’s Us on a relatively bright morning … on my phone … while I was on an airplane. This is far from the best context to get a good impression of anything, much less a densely loaded horror film like Us. The fact that these opening moments stuck with me despite all of this makes it worth examining for this series on interesting introductions. Here’s a link to the...
Literature is full of great beginnings. There are plenty to choose from — Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged,” Dickens’s contradicting description of the best (and worst) of times, Orwell’s clocks’ striking thirteen, etc. — each with their own merits. But I want to start this series on effective introductions with a line that I will always hold dear — the opening paragraph to J.R.R...
How do you feel about epigraphs? My partner once said she hated them, at least in the context of academic writing. Why not just get straight to what you want to say? Many readers find them pretty easy to skip over (as I’m sure at least a couple of you did when approaching this blog post) and if used incorrectly they can easily become unnecessary filler, pretentious excess, or both...
It seems like academia (or any professional forum, for that matter) encourages us to keep our feelings out of things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crossed out passages of student essays this month for being “off topic” or “too praisy,” for bringing in “irrelevant” value judgments on the film they’re writing about. And that’s fine: we’re trying to teach them the conventions of textual...
For the last two summers, I’ve worked as an instructor for the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Kid College program, which is basically a mix between a summer camp and course series about technology for kids aged 9-14. Most of the classes I taught were about game design, and the most popular courses by far were the ones about Minecraft. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, it might...
I suppose it speaks to my interest in the virtual that I wrote a whole post about spatiality last week without moving an inch. On the surface, that doesn’t seem quite in line with the so-called “spatial turn” I mentioned in my last post: the trend in humanities scholarship towards the importance of place and space to ideas and power. Then again, many of the concepts we associate with the spatial...
I went on a run today—something I mean to do more often than I actually do, it seems—and my feet took me down a familiar route to Oakwood Cemetery. On my way down the looping paths, I saw a crumpled piece of red and white fabric on the side of the trail. It was a tiny, tattered American flag, the type mourners like to put by the gravestones of loved ones who have served. I stopped and picked it...