Clik here to view.
“The most intricate, beautiful map you could possibly imagine”
The first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones followed the inaugural novel of George R. R. Martin’s series so minutely that, despite its obvious excellence, I found it a bit redundant: like the early days...
View ArticleChildren at Play
Here are preliminary notes for a brief guest lecture I’m giving tomorrow in Professor Maya Nadarni’s course “Anthropological Perspectives on Childhood and the Family.” The topic is Children at Play....
View ArticleTuesday
Watching Z pull himself eagerly along a shelf of books at our local library — thin tomes, the spine of each marked by a circular sticker whose color indicated the intended reading level — I allowed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisiting the virtual courtyard
Longtime readers of this blog (and I take it on faith that there are one or two of you out there) will know that I am obsessed with the clumsy sublime, Laura Mulvey’s term for the accidental beauty of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The zen of model kits
I speak often and with great satisfaction of my Man Cave, our house’s finished basement where my nerdish technophilia is allowed free reign. My PC tower and its domino-line backdrop of external hard...
View ArticleGood Friday, Bad Sunday
It’s Easter weekend, according to the plastic eggs dangling from tree branches in our neighbor’s yard, and I am once again experiencing the odd non-sensation of my own long-lapsed Catholicism. I would...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
Once again, thanks to my TV & New Media course, it is time to watch Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005), and once again I am reminded what a beautifully intimate experience it is. On...
View ArticleSix weeks
Having sung the praises of Fridays and gloomed about Sundays, am I set on turning Mondays into self-reflexive meditations on method? Evidently so, at least until the spring semester ends and time opens...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fun with your new head
The title of this post is borrowed from a book of short stories by Thomas M. Disch, and it’s doubly appropriate in that an act of borrowing arguably lies at the heart of the latest 3D-printing novelty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Starting the Last of Us
The remarkable opening sequence of The Last of Us was ruined for me — at my request, I hasten to add — and as much as it might be in keeping with the game’s ethos of cowing and disempowering its...
View ArticleGreat Wolf Lodge
Great Wolf Lodge, in the Poconos, has no real wolves and isn’t really a lodge. But it certainly is Great, at least for my wife and me and our two children. We were there for the third time last week, a...
View ArticleFort
There’s nothing like a suddenly lost object to demonstrate the precarity of our systems for keeping order—the flimsiness of the illusion that the spaces we inhabit are at our mercy, rather than the...
View ArticleSeaworthy
Back in January when I sent out my book manuscript, I had the weird sense of waving goodbye to a cruise ship I built myself, standing at the pier while this giant, white, overstuffed artifact bellied...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clone Tank Mod
This is the LEGO Republic Fighter Tank 75182, modded by Zach, basically built out with extra guns and cool stuff. The four racked missiles in the front are new, as are the spotlights/sensors (borrowed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Megs
Two “Megs,” or giant sharks, by Trevor. The first was started at school and finished at home, with an assist from Zachary, who added the dorsal, ventral, and tailfins following a brief debate over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trifid
“Great star-clouds glittered all around them, the swarms of suns that in the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way made brilliant the summer nights of faraway Earth. But beyond all of these loomed a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ice cream truck
Executed rapidly by Trevor in what was almost a lightning sketch. Inspired not by the sight but by the sound of the music, that tinkling ice-cream-truck tune that still, after all these years,...
View ArticleWorldbuilding avant la lettre in Robert A. Heinlein
“The only mainstream writer to whom Heinlein acknowledges a debt is Sinclair Lewis, and it is not for literary style. Lewis laid out extensive backgrounds for his work which did not directly appear in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisiting the virtual courtyard
Longtime readers of this blog (and I take it on faith that there are one or two of you out there) will know that I am obsessed with the clumsy sublime, Laura Mulvey’s term for the accidental beauty of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The zen of model kits
I speak often and with great satisfaction of my Man Cave, our house’s finished basement where my nerdish technophilia is allowed free reign. My PC tower and its domino-line backdrop of external hard...
View Article
