backdated

I went to Pittsburgh this weekend with my friend Brian to check out PNC Park, home of the Pirates.

PNC Park, Pittsburgh, PA

Continue along »

It’s been a light video game year for me, but things are starting to pick up. Red Dead Redemption arrived the other day, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on the way, and if I get bored Valve just released Steam for Mac. I appreciate the glut. It’s been a tumbleweed sort of year for me up to this point.

Impressions of the year-to-date after the jump.

Continue along »

I wrote a short article about continental drift for ProQuest.

Good video games establish clear, sensible rules and stick to them. When designers arbitrarily deviate from established rules, I get so mad. I’ve been playing through Bioshock this past week and found just such a thing.

Continue along »

Yesterday I went to see the Brewers at the Nationals. Livan Hernandez threw a complete game shutout. This ranks awfully high on the list of things I was not expecting to see when I left my house.

Today I see that Google Street View has expanded into Takoma Park. Terrifying.

My parents took Sarah and me to see the 3D version of How to Train Your Dragon on Friday night. With the exception of Avatar the 3D I’ve subjected myself to recently has been unobtrusive but pointless, so I always swear that I’ll stick to the regular screenings. But I always go back. Do I think I look good in the glasses? (I don’t.) Anyway, we saw How to Train Your Dragon and no one in the film threw a teacup at the screen and for the new 3D films that is almost a win in itself. But the real gems were the flying sequences, which possessed in them a kinetic energy difficult to achieve on a flat screen. So there may yet be a future here.

Last night Sarah and I went to see Joanna Newsom at the 6th and I Historic Synagogue. Whenever I see an interesting-seeming performer I imagine meeting them later in some neutral space, hitting it off, and becoming their cool DC friend. (Having this thought probably negates any possibility of me being anyone’s cool friend.) The other thing I like to imagine while killing time in any sort of high-ceilinged theatrical space: Lightsaber duels.

While I was unemployed last year I read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which I’d read in college as part of a survey course on literature of the Jazz Age. I liked it! Rereading it last year, I spent some time with hypertext versions of The Waste Land on the internet.

I have mixed feelings about the hypertexts. On the one hand, The Waste Land is allusion-dense and impossible to understand without having read everything that has ever been written. On the other hand, the existing hypertexts fall victim to an inviolable law of the internet, which is that the internet makes everything ugly. Links, frames, sidebars, ads for teeth and weight-loss pills. I could go on. In The Waste Land, the hypertexts take a wonderful poem and replace it with a hyperlinked monstrosity, information-dense but aesthetically damaged.

Maybe this only bothers me but bother me it does. It’s a poem, poems are pretty, The Waste Land should be pretty as heck. So last April I started working on a stripped-down hypertext. Then I got a job and had less time to work on insane, time-consuming projects, so I just got around to posting the sort-of-finished product. It includes footnotes, a map, and a list of references with links to full texts, where available. In theory it looks nice on mobile devices; in practice I’ve only tested it on an iPod touch.