[The following blog contains mentions of bullying.] My gullibility in my earliest years knew no bounds. I don’t even want to think about how often I fell for the old trick of someone holding out something nice to me (like a piece of candy), cajoling me to grab it, and then taking it away at the last second. (My lack of physical coordination probably made me a prime target for that sort of thing.) No matter how often I got tricked, I couldn’t stop myself…
I normally try to get usernames on Internet services based on my real name: @seanshannon on Twitter, sshannon on Facebook, and so on. Part of that is just me being used to having usernames assigned on that basis by colleges and so on, back before people started creating “handles” for themselves with their Hotmail accounts and MySpace pages and so on, and part of it is also me being aware of my need to market my name as a way to extend the reach of…
I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…
[This blog contains spoilers for the video games Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, as well as the television show Newhart.] As the hype for Final Fantasy VII Remake grew in the years following its 2015 announcement, and especially after I was finally able to play the game last month, I’ve had a very intense internal debate regarding how I should discuss my feelings about it. On the one hand, I’m not the video game aficionado I used to be…
Something about the way I play video games changed when Final Fantasy IX came out. To start with, after getting the two previous Final Fantasy games on the days they came out, I waited a couple of years to get Final Fantasy IX because Final Fantasy VIII burned me so badly. (I got Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII on their release days, never got Final Fantasy XI or Final Fantasy XIV because I don’t play online role-playing games, waited to get Final Fantasy…