[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…
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,…
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…
House Democrats Grill Betsy DeVos Over Denying Student Borrower Relief (NPR) Today is the start of Finals Week here, and as has been the case throughout my teaching career, I wound up spending most of the past week trying to coach my students, most of whom are in their first semester of college, through the challenges of this difficult time. Even as someone who enjoyed the academic side of my college experience more than most, I remember all too well the unique stresses that those…
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,…