One of the reasons I left the world of daily media is that you so rarely get to tell interesting stories about people. Instead, our little snippets and stories paint an incomplete profiles. To wit, this short vignette of Vin Diesel is entirely unexpected: The question, though, is why is this unexpected? It’s easy to […]
I spent 30 minutes watching this discussion between Kerry Washington and Don Cheadle this morning, and when it ended I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had gone by. In general, I avoid listening to people analyze large conceptual ideas (gender in Hollywood) because too many people fall back on well-worn cliches and show little […]
I came across this map at Business Insider, and I had to share it. Linguists have looked at the speech patterns associated with 22 different words, and mapped dialects in the U.S. This is a wonderful way to illustrate how different we are despite our common heritage.
I’ve grown quite fond of fan films throughout the years, particularly clever shorts. “Reality Forgotten” is one that is more clever than film, and anyone who has ever played D&D will recognize this particular scenario. Author Jack Vance Passed Away Author Jack Vance, who had a profound impact on Dungeons & Dragons, passed away. Here […]
Twelve years ago, I wrote a short 3-part series at Wired.com that focused on the disconnect between Appalachia and emerging technologies, particularly broadband access and high-tech business development. The crux of the issue was that rural counties far away from the national highway system had nearly no access to universal high-speed broadband coverage, which meant […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my friend, Lali, with whom I shared a very intense friendship twenty years ago. We had one of those inexplicable connections that tethered us together for years. As I was traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I wondered if maybe her family was from here since this is Mennonite country […]
The most common question I ask myself while researching: Why? This seems like an easy question, but it’s precisely the easiness of it that causes you to continually return to it. If you can answer a series of repeated whys (along with a few whens) you can construct a meaningful timeline of not just what […]
“If you do it will be, in the writer’s opinion, almost a copy of the German jaeger rifle because these Bakers were making guns from 1717-1754 — the earliest gunsmiths I have found in this area of Pennsylvania.” — Sam Dyke, 1972. “The Baker Family of Gunsmiths in Lancaster, County 1717-1754 The problem with history […]
I arrived in Lancaster just a little after noon today after surviving a drive that took me through the foggy Appalachia mountains, torrential rain down pours, and hours of driving time without mobile cell service. As some severe weather is headed my way, I skipped some of the preliminary research today and instead got my […]
One of the themes we explored in Dungeons + Dreamers was the computer game designers attempt to graft the real-world interactive and communal experience of paper gaming with the virtual world experience. This is a powerful idea because virtual spaces remove geography and time from experience. When you remove those two elements from an experience, […]
A Kickstarter project and film produced and directed by a few compatriots of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley.
Video Games: The Movie I just came across this Kickstarter campaign to help fund the post-production for this documentary on video games: I’ll be donating to the cause on June 1, and you should consider it as well. I never grow tired of hearing designers and developers discuss how they made games. However, I look […]