After I first finished Final Fantasy VII over twenty-five years ago, it didn’t take me long to realize that I would need to play through it again before I could form a complete opinion about its qualities, simply because the game had hit me with so much that my mind was still reeling days after I completed that first playthrough. While I eventually came to the conclusion that Final Fantasy VII was the greatest video game I had played up to that point in my…
AI and Its Effect on the Book Publishing Industry (goodereader.com)Julie Plec and More WGA Members Detail Writers Strike Negotiations, Demand Streamers to Release Ratings: ‘We’re Mad’ (Variety via msn.com) One personal project that always seems to be on the back burner for me is an examination of the fiction written during the Cold War in the Soviet bloc countries. My interest in this started about a decade ago, after Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son won the Pulitzer. For his novel, Johnson did extensive studies…
This past September was one of the worst months of my life. As I’ve detailed before, various circumstances led to me having to move to Platteville the day before I started teaching here, and as if that big move wasn’t enough to exhaust me on its own, I had to walk across campus repeatedly the next day, before I could even teach my first class, just to handle various tasks that I couldn’t get to earlier, leaving me a worn-out mess as I started that…
Grimes Unveils AI Software to Allow Artists to Replicate Her Voice (Complex via yahoo.com) The process by which I went from living in Mom’s house in Toledo at the start of 2017, two months after her passing, to living with Hedder in an apartment in Colorado Springs by the end of the year, is long and bitter, and I probably won’t be able to share that story with anyone but the closest of my friends until several more people pass away. Suffice it to say…
Unwieldy bill would destroy higher education in Ohio | American Historical Association (news.yahoo.com)“‘Don’t just publish another paper. Let’s do something,’ says scholar-advocate Cindy Blackstock (universityaffairs.ca) As spring passes, a handful of elementary schools across America will still devote their last day to outdoor activities for their students, to help them blow off the stress of the past academic year. (Far fewer schools are doing this than was the case when I was younger, with the push to pass all those standardized tests and all that…