Video Games
- How blogs changed everything This is a post from 2009, but still has a lot of value today. My favorite part is when Rosenberg says, “Blogging allows us to think out loud together.” I love the concept of blogging-as-thinking. Every time I run across it, I go, “Oh YEAH! THAT’s why we do this!”
- Personal Blogging Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me This more recent piece, written in 2015 and updated in 2017, references the earlier one. The author writes:
- The Personal Blog This piece, from 2014, claims that there is a renaissance of personal blogging happening. I like to imagine that’s still the case, or perhaps even moreso now than it was them. (For more on this question, see The blog is dead. long live the blog, The Death of the Blog, Again, Again, and Blogging is most certainly not dead.) This quote resonated with me in particular:
- love a thing, and
- write about it.
🔖🎮 Read
Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978) | Desert Hat deserthat.wordpress.comRead: deserthat.wordpress.com
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» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 3 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.netRead: www.filfre.net
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» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 2 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.netRead: www.filfre.net
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Rafting Down the Columbia River died-of-dysentery.com
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Matt’s Store & Starting the Game died-of-dysentery.com
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Crossing Rivers died-of-dysentery.com
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The Earliest Versions of the Game died-of-dysentery.com
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A Brief History of the Oregon Trail Game died-of-dysentery.com
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The Oregon Trail Memes died-of-dysentery.com
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Designing the Travel Screen for “The Oregon Trail” | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.comRead: medium.com
🔖🎮 The FEMICOM museum is my new favorite thing.
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Designing the Hunting Game for “The Oregon Trail” | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.comRead: medium.com
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How I Managed to Design the Most Successful Educational Computer Game of All Time | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.comRead: medium.com
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» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 1 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.netRead: www.filfre.net
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The Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail,’ As Told By Its Creators vice.comRead: www.vice.com
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1971: The Oregon Trail - 50 Years of Text Games if50.substack.comRead: if50.substack.com
Played Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego? via the Internet Archive with M. this morning & explained that Moscow is no longer the capital of the USSR bc the USSR is not a thing. Get the World Almanac from the Internet Archive if you’re going to play. 🎮
🎮 Currently playing Hades on Nintendo Switch.
Been coveting this for a while, so when W. suggested getting it today, I squeed. Love the art & vibe so far. Button mashing & playing in God Mode.
🎮 I finished playing Final Fantasy VII Remake yesterday. I had fun with the game and I adore Tifa, Aerith, and Jessie, more than I did when I originally played Final Fantasy VII about 20 years ago. Marlene is the best part because she looks kind of like my kid. FFVII is in a weird spot for me because it was the first console game I really played, and I played it at a time when I really needed it, emotionally. I’ve tried replays in the past but never made it through. My understanding of the plot has always been… fragmented? And wasn’t made better by watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. I deliberately halted a replay before going into the remake so I wouldn’t be constantly comparing them, and I’m happy with that decision. Anyway, I was confused by the ending but didn’t dislike it, and once I talked with W. about it, I found that I actually wished they’d gone bigger in the same direction. I’m now doing a playthrough of the original, and after that I may dig into some of the Final Fantasy VII Compilation titles before going back and doing a plus game replay of FFVIIR.
I have bangs for the first time in 30 years and it’s Tifa’s fault. 🎮
🎮 I think Tifa is my fave now? I always liked her, but now I like her best?
🎮 It’s happening.
Weekly Update: 04/11/20
We just finished up week 4 of staying at home. In one sense, I didn’t have much going on before this; grad school and parenting a young child don’t really leave much space for doing things. But I’m realizing now how I do have even less going on, because I’m not even going on playdate outings or whatever.
We started watching Animaniacs with M, just in time to get excited for new episodes coming sometime ever.
Like so many other people, I’m growing weary of doing all of my communicating with people who don’t live with me via Zoom call. I do like being able to see people’s faces; I hate phone calls. But it’s wearying, right?
I found out that I didn’t get a dissertation completion fellowship from my school. That would have covered my tuition, fees, and health insurance, and given me a (very modest) stipend to cover living expenses. Because life, I have missed the deadlines for all similar awards. (Though I only found 4 I was eligible for anyway.) This has prompted a lot of questions for myself about what comes next, specifically in terms of being able to contribute to my family’s financial wellbeing, which is going to need a lot more help because our childcare costs are more than doubling next year. I’m reluctant to take a (eventually) face-to-face full-time job, because I want to be with my kid in the afternoons. He’ll get out of school at 3:15 and I want to be there to pick him up, not put him in aftercare or delegate that to somebody else.
So, what can I do, that will pay me, lets me work from 9 - 3, and is flexible enough to accommodate both dissertating and chronic illness? I’ve landed on freelance editing, which I did for a few months after getting my MSLS. (And maybe a little writing, but it doesn’t pay as well.) My current assistantship contract ends on May 15; I’m open to taking on new work any time after that. If you need an editor, get in touch. I’m hoping the university will be able to work with me to at least fund my tuition and fees, but tuition doesn’t buy groceries or pay preschool teachers, soooooo…
That was kind of the biggest thing that went down this week. I spent a day moping about it and not feeling like doing much else. But I did read some Internet things. Let me share them with you!
I will be soothed, actually
Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times I love Jane Austen. This does a great job of explaining how her works are soothing without denying that life is hard sometimes.
I try to check Tumblr’s Week in Review most weeks, because I want to know what people are fans of. When I saw #cottagecore pop up, I was intrigued. It’s kind of like… hygge with more fairy rings and fawns? And also, from what I’m reading, a queer-friendly aesthetic in a way some other Internet aesthetics aren’t.I wanted an explainer, and the Internet gave me one. And then it gave me two more. This has me pondering Internet aesthetics. I’ll let you know what I’m thinking about those as I develop my thoughts further. (But FYI, two of my favorites are vaporwave and [seapunk]aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Seap….)
Also, I’m fairly certain the appeal of cottagecore/farmcore is related to phenomena like the Joy of Missing Out and the general consumerist move toward coziness more broadly. (I even briefly thought, “Maybe I should crochet big cozy blankets and sell them for exorbitant sums.” None of us are immune to this sort of thinking, I fear…) Also I got a little grouchy reading about grandmillenials, who I guess seem to me to be wee babes rediscovering the New Domesticity and sharing it online as though Gen X didn’t already do that over 15 years ago…
Currently
📖: Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
🎬: ST:TNG in 40 Hours
🦸♀️: The Power of X
🎮: Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2
Weekly Update: 03/27/20
I’m trying a new thing with a weekly round-up on Friday.
This has been the second week of social distancing for us. We order our groceries via Instacart, always tipping 10%. I’m wondering now if we should tip higher. If they go on strike, we will find other ways to get groceries, but as someone who is potentially high risk for COVID-19, it has been such a blessing/privilege to be able to get groceries this way.
This was our first week “back” from M’s earlier-than-expected spring break, which means Zoom calls with babies, toddlers, preschoolers, parents, and teachers at 9:30 am every morning. It’s been such a balm to see all those precious faces, to hear the kids say each other’s names and say hello. M and I also did a call with the family of one of his dearest friends. He wasn’t super interested, so it was mostly me talking to them, but it was still nice to do. (Moms trying to talk to each other while the kids are around, though, isn’t really a thing that can happen.)
I have stolen a few moments here and there to work on both my dissertation research and the research for my assistantship. I’m hopeful that next week I’ll be able to dig into those more.
Very little gets done aside from keeping the kid alive. I have had a couple of glorious baths with sea or Epsom salt in them. Media gets consumed. Sleep happens, though often poorly. We eat, and the food mostly isn’t junk (my Hershey-bar-with-almonds habit notwithstanding) but I wouldn’t say there’s much cooking going on. W makes tacos, or I toss some chicken and potatoes in the Instant Pot.
It’s been beautiful outside. Going out and sitting on the deck, it’s easy to forget what a scary time we’re living in. People walk their dogs on the trail. Kids ride bikes. M and W’s mom play in the yard with a beautiful set of fairies and animals that she got for M.
I am trying to blog daily. I spent a late night using every resource from holisticism that mentions purpose or career to help me think about what’s up with my life. While I don’t think the movement of the heavens controls what we do, I think astrology and human design are valuable tools for interrogating ourselves. If we’re reading a description that is supposed to be of us, we can ask ourselves whether it resonates or not. Mine usually does.
Between those resources and Co-star, I am coming to terms with the fact that while I want to do meaningful and helpful work, my priority in life is more home and family and less career. Not that I don’t want one, but that career doesn’t define me. I’m realizing that spontaneous self-expression is very important to me, as is interrogating identity and how it is constructed. I’m embracing the fact that blogging is the most accessible form of spontaneous self-expression for me, that it’s one I’ve been carrying on in one form or another for almost 20 years, and that it’s a very fine hobby to have as one’s primary hobby. The others wax and wane, but blogging is always here.
This is a nice segue into what I’ve been reading online this week, because as I decided to really embrace kimberlyhirsh.com as a personal blog rather than a professional blog or something aimed at getting me jobs or providing income, I’ve been reading about personal blogging and its value. Here are some of the things I read that stuck with me:
Personal blogging does not require you to become an expert at anything but your life. We’re all experts at our own lives, and sometimes we have experiences that are universal that would bring like-minded people together. We share these experiences on a personal blog in the hopeful attempt to reach out and make other people who are going through the same thing a little less alone.
This helped me think about the purpose of my site/blog. It’s three-fold: first, it serves as a way for people who meet me to get to know me deeply. Whether we meet face-to-face or online, it has value because I try to be myself here. I’m old enough that I’m kind of done pretending to be something I’m not. If people see what I write here and don’t want to work with me or be friends with me, we weren’t going to be a good fit anyway. Second, it serves as a set of reminders to myself. My future self is the primary audience for this blog. Over and over I search its archives for things I’ve written, whether about health or academics or something else entirely. Third, it is a way to help people, to make them feel less alone, or to illuminate processes that may be opaque to them. This is really what this quote is getting at. (You’ll notice the new description, with both Helpfulness and Transparency included in it. That’s what this is about.)
There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.
This is happening more and more, especially with technologies like webmentions supporting it. (Hat-tip to @c, author of that article.)
And this is an especially valuable moment for it, for focusing on this small bit of the digital world over which we have control:
Finally on the personal blog front, Robin Sloan and Colin Walker really get at the reason I’m embracing kimberlyhirsh.com as a fully personal blog (which will necessarily include my work, because it’s part of who I am):
The thing about blogging is, you can just write about the things you love. A “professional” “critic” (scare quotes because who even knows what words mean anymore) has to do something else, something more difficult: manage a kind of unfolding… aesthetic… worldview? Balance one thing against the other? A blogger suffers no such burden. A blogger can simply
In that aforementioned new tagline, “Enthusiasm” is the first word. It’s placement is very deliberate, I assure you.
And one more thing. Because it’s All Muppets All the Time (my DVD set of Season 1 of The Muppet Show just arrived!), I really appreciated this article asking Why Doesn’t Disney+ Have More Muppet Stuff?.
Last but not least, current consumption:
🎵: Labyrinth Original Motion Picture Soundtrack/The Muppets (2011) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
📖: Blue Mind by Wallce J. Nichols
🎬: Picard
🦸♀️: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures
🎮: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Lego Marvel Superheroes, Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2
🎮 Played Monument Valley 2.
I loved it but it went so fast!