Category Archives: politics

Anything (Someone Else Does) for a Dollar

internet, politics 2022.03.14 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Bandcamp Bought By Fortnite Maker Epic Games (Spin via yahoo.com) I’d been looking forward to this month’s Bandcamp Friday for a while. The fact that Bandcamp has been willing to forgo its usual fees for selling music in order to assist independent musicians, who have been even more likely to suffer serious problems due to the pandemic than musicians with record deals, was a cool enough thing to start with, but I’ve been making an effort this year to give even more to independent artists.…

Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost

politics, videogames 2022.02.21 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Nintendo announces closure of Wii U and 3DS eShop (Yahoo! News) I used to carry mini-notebooks around to jot down ideas in, and I can still distinctly remember making a list of video games I wanted to buy at some point in the nineties. One of those games was Arcana, a dungeon-crawler JRPG for the Super Nintendo along the lines of Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis. I’d rented Arcana a couple of times, and while it didn’t feel like anything particularly special…

Scarier Than Fiction

politics, rhetoric 2022.01.10 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

[The following blog includes a mention of assault.] ‘Don’t Look Up’: Real-world scientists comment on new movie’s climate message (phys.org) Working on new graphics for my Twitch channel this past weekend — finally leaning more into the chill vibes I want to put out (and so desperately need right now) — reminded me a lot of when I did website design work in the 1990’s, and that’s probably a very good thing for my mental health. There will always be a part of me that…

Spectacle

politics, teaching 2021.12.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Why South Dakota teachers’ “Dash for Cash” felt so gross (msnbc.com) For all the “television will rot your brain” rhetoric I heard when I was younger, the opposite seemed to be the case for me. I watched a lot of educational shows back then — Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, 3-2-1 Contact, Mr. Wizard’s World, and others — but even the shows that weren’t explicitly educational still triggered a desire in me to learn more. Back when all the major television networks had game show…

The Prison-to-Prison Pipeline

politics, rhetoric, teaching 2021.09.06 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created by Amateurs (tultican.com) It’s impossible to research the history of minority schooling in America without repeatedly coming face-to-face with how the reality of that schooling was far worse than even the popular misconceptions of it. Despite the “separate but equal” litmus test established in Plessy v. Ferguson in the nineteenth century, what few schools that did exist for African-Americans in the south were often so neglected that they were barely worth having at all. The idea that Brown v.…