A Needle in a Haystack

“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 […]

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Lancaster, PA

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 […]

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The Complexity of Interactions: A Community Problem

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, […]

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Games in Film: A Tale of Two Movies

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 […]

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The Science of Big Group Learning

Ask any college student and they will tell you this: Group work sucks. The reason: In a group of four people, the workload generally breaks down like this: 1 person does nothing, who angers… 1 person who controls everything, who annoys… 2 people just trying to survive the process. Put students into groups, and you […]

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In Rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell

“The borderlands — as this region was known — were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years… And when they immigrated to North America, they moved into the American interior, to remote, lawless, rocky, and marginally fertile places like Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World […]

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Clay County: The Last Baker

This is part of the So Far Appalachia book project. If you enjoy what you read, please visit my Kickstarter page (and pass this along to any friends who you think might find this interesting). * * * Robert Lee Baker, Sr, my great-grandfather, was the last man killed in the Clay County War. There are […]

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