Science/Technology

As a lifelong science fiction devotee raised on Ray Bradbury, Star Trek, John Wyndham, Doctor Who, and Douglas Adams, if I wasn’t this podcast’s target audience, no one was. I…

One night, my father wakes to strange voices and crashing sounds. He ventures slowly into the living room where he sees me—his drowsy six-year-old— watching BattleBots in my footie pajamas.…

At the intersection of game mechanics and story we call “narrative design,” it’s clear that producing either entails the other. Narrative design is game design, in that all game mechanics…

1. I made a Neopets account when I was six. Like many other things—candy,shoes that fit,an email account—I was inspired to demand my own after seeing my brother obtain one…

I was nine when the year turned to 2000, but even I rolled my eyes at the Y2K proselytizers, the news programs that told us to stock up on canned…

Pronouncing poetry dead has become so common, it’s basically a literary tradition at this point. Somewhere this very moment, a tired thinkpiece writer is proudly typing the eulogy, eager to…

King Leopold of Belgium also used the anti-slavery excuse to introduce into Congo forced labor and slavery. Besides, all Europeans had derived ideas of racial and cultural superiority between the…

It’s time to walk out into the evening and bus home. But I move slowly, then stop and listen as Marianne talks on the phone. Hearts usually get cut out…

In LA every blonde was accidental, especially me. Especially you. I do something someone else called marketing in Silicon Beach. That’s a cute name for the explosion of big data.…

An essay using words, not pictures, by Phil Eklund, Dec 2014 This is a guest post by Phil Eklund, founder of Sierra Madre Games and designer of the board games…

Welcome back to the Short Film of the Week! As you can probably see, we’re doing something different today. Live action! That’s not to say that we’ll stop doing animated…

This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein Simon & Schuster, September 2014 576 pages – Amazon The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert Henry Holt and Co., February 2014 336 pages…

What did I watch this week? Some great and not so great things! The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies by Peter Jackson The Double by Richard Ayoada It’s…

Something new for the new year. On my site I made a bunch of resolutions, but the important one, with regard to this, has to do with me watching a film…