As I’ve been looking to both improve my mental health and build my Twitch channel, one of the video games I’ve had my eyes on is Unpacking, a puzzle-style game where you unpack items from boxes to organize various living spaces. I’ve enjoyed puzzle games all my life, and the low-key nature of Unpacking definitely places it in the “cozy game” genre that I’ve been trying to play more of, to help me maximize the benefits of using video games to help me unwind from…
One of the things that made last year so rough on me was the fact that I experienced the first significant burnout of my teaching career. As our spring semester was drawing to a close in mid-May, and I got through the last of my regular class sessions before finals week started, I started feeling the kind of exhaustion that normally doesn’t happen to me until after I’ve finished reviewing all my students’ final papers and submitting grades. That post-semester crash happens to me every…
Remembering Betty White (npr.org) I’ve mentioned before that for all my love of books and libraries when I was younger, a lot of what propelled my autodidact tendencies from an early age came from my fandom of early-1980’s game shows, and how I needed to learn things like basic math to help me understand why people got happy or sad on shows like The Price is Right. My appreciation of daytime television shows of this era can be seen in everything from the look of…
Multiple College Bowl Games Cancelled, Others Impacted as COVID-19 Cases Rise (People via yahoo.com)List of colleges going virtual to start spring semester due to COVID spike (The Bergen Record via yahoo.com) I know that my bosses are currently monitoring the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wisconsin, and it bears repeating that you couldn’t pay me enough money to make the decisions they’re having to make right now about what next semester will look like. If the past couple of years have taught us anything,…
Finals week started this past Wednesday and runs through tomorrow. (I’m not a fan of having it staggered over a weekend like this, but at least it’s better than other arrangements I’ve had to deal with, including one where I was forced to run a final on a Saturday.) As I’m fond of telling my students in the leadup to finals week, we instructors kind of deal with pressure this time of year in an inverse relationship with how students feel; right now things are…