Category Archives: personal

Skin in the Game

books, personal 2020.01.20 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

One of the least rewarding parts of my graduate classes in English was having to read reviews of new books of literary criticism. Especially after an undergraduate class I took with a professor who helped shape my own pedagogical approaches, it was hard to read those reviews and not see how the reviewers were using the opportunity that review provided them — hardly a small one — to promote their own careers. At some point in nearly every review I read, the reviewer would invariably…

Blocking the Story

personal, videogames 2020.01.06 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

[This blog contains spoilers for the video game Final Fantasy VII.] Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Intro Leaked (gamespot.com) I didn’t understand the appeal of online “reaction videos” until four and a half years ago, when the long-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake was finally announced at E3 2015. After waiting nearly half my life for a modern remake of my favourite video game ever, this news was almost too much for me to handle, and I didn’t have many people in my life whom I…

2020: Twenty-Four Hours to Go

personal 2019.12.30 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I’ve never been one for making resolutions when the calendar year flips over, or really doing much of anything that night except watch the ball drop on television (which is really just a family tradition I’m continuing here for some reason, even though I don’t live in the Eastern time zone any longer). My birthday has always been a time for self-reflection for me, which may be the closest to those end-of-calendar-year feelings most people experience that I get. Just like with my birthday, though,…

Back to the Old Grind

personal, videogames 2019.12.23 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I went through my Dungeons and Dragons phase at such an early age that I was out of it before most young people start theirs. (This meant that I got to experience the tail end of the “devil worship” moral panic surrounding D&D in the eighties, which probably did more than a little to shape me into the person I’ve become today.) Before I could really understand how to use role-playing games as storytelling devices, though, I got burnt out on them, mostly because everyone…

Bouquet: B, O …

personal, politics, teaching 2019.12.09 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The Rough Draft Diaries with Haley Taylor: “Violins Under the Bed” (wgte.org) There was a popular tweet a few weeks ago about how school spelling bees are traumatic because so many of us can remember when, and how, we got eliminated from them even decades after they happened. I shared my own story from a fifth grade spelling bee almost thirty-five years earlier, when the word I got was “bouquet,” I had the letters lined up in my head the way they should have been,…