1. My first semester of full-time teaching is rapidly approaching its end. I’ll be making exams this weekend. It’s been an extremely educational experience for me, whether or not my students can say the same.

2. Is there anyone left in the world who doesn’t know that the Brother’s Grimm’s fairy tales are generally more dark and violent than many of their adaptations? I’m honestly really sick of that trope being stamped on every single discussion of fairy tales and especially their Disney adaptations. Not only because the truth isn’t that simple (most of the original Disney cartoons are not based on the Brothers Grimm, but on the earlier adaptations by Charles Perrault), but also because it is such a tired, overdone trope. Worse than that, it’s a tired trope that nobody seems to realize is tired. Everyone who brings it up talks as if they expect it to be news to their audience when, most likely, if the audience is over twelve years old, they’ve all heard it a hundred times.

3. I’ve learned today that ‘Pronatalism’ (that is, being in favor of reproduction) is a boogeyman in some quarters. The funny thing is that they probably think of themselves as the intellectual elite. The positive side is that time will settle them sooner or later. The negative is that they can still infect others with their madness. Like vampires without the immortality thing.

4. You know, a lot of times I write a few paragraphs, then decide “that opens too many cans of worms: I’ll leave that for another time.”

5. Over Thanksgiving break I ended up buying Heavy Rain (it was on sale for the price of a sandwich, and I’d heard it was good), a gritty, dramatic graphic adventure game in the style of an ‘interactive movie’, where you use quick-time events and dialogue options to move the story along.

Given that the first few big dramatic scenes made me laugh out loud (e.g. the main character’s son suffers perhaps the most contrived death even conceived, where in the time it takes the father to pay a clown for a balloon, the twelve-year-old boy has run off into the crowd at the mall, down the stairs, outside, and across the street so as to give a store window a good staring at), I don’t think I’m going to be impressed by it.

6. Quick-time and motion control-based ‘interactive movies’ like this strike me as sort of like Zemeckis’s motion-capture animation: something that seems brilliant and cutting edge, but isn’t as practical as it sounds. Because having to move the mouse the correct way to drink a glass of milk doesn’t get you immersed in the world, it takes you out of it. Since we all know drinking milk doesn’t require two or three careful steps testing our reflexes and motor skills (at least, not once we get past the age of four or so).

7. Quote of the day:

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggy’ until you can find a rock.”
-Will Rogers.