The Curriculum Committee here at Clackamas Community College has given this course its official seal of approval.
ENG299 is dead! Long live ENG217!
Thanks, everyone, for your interest and support here. We adore you completely.
Podcast #10: 8 May
Today we downshifted into Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Survivor. Listen up.
Calling Cthulhu
Just wanted to post a quick thank-you to everyone for making our little Call of Cthulhu RPG experiment in class today an overwhelming success. I especially would like to thank Lydia, John, Dusty and Mike for steering their respective groups’ campaigns. That was a lot of fun.
Feel free to use this thread to post/brag about your game. We’ll have a full group discussion about it first thing on Tuesday.
Podcast #9: 1 May
A thoroughly engaged and excellent conversation about H.P. Lovecraft today. Click here to listen.
Thursday: Do You Cthulhu? We Do.
Podcast #8: 26 April
Round two of game presentations:
Chess (Lydia Bashaw and Dustin Ragsdale)
Life (Alan Shufelt and Michael Grote)
Tetris (Ben Aamot and Connor Healy)
Here’s the podcast.
Lovecraft resources
In preparation for our tangling with H.P. Lovecraft next week, here are some online resources worth your while:
Lovecraft’s Wikipedia entry
Collected Stories
Call of Cthulhu character sheet (PDF)
For next Tuesday’s class (May 1), come prepared having read the assigned stories and the Call of Cthulhu RPG handout. Please also come to class with a completed character sheet; you will need four 6-sided dice to do this. In preparation for next Thursday’s class when we’ll actually be playing the game, please find a set of polyhedral dice:
a 4-sided die
a 6-sided die
an 8-sided die
a 10-sided die
a 12-sided die
a 20-sided die
The metro Portland area is blessed with a good number of independent book and game stores who carry sets of these dice (Things From Another World in Milwaukie is a good place to look; in NE Portland, check out Excalibur or Bridgetown). Anticipate paying no more than $6 for the typical set.
Podcast #7: 24 April
Today we went a few rounds with Samuel Beckett. Sue Mach visited, too. Check it out.
solar-powered DDR
My friend Zoe snapped this picture at Oberlin College over the weekend:
That’s right. Solar-groovin.
Interview with McKenzie Wark
This Spartan Life is pioneering the practice of conducting real-time interviews in gamespaces. Check out their conversation with McKenzie Wark in Episode 4 here, which takes place in a multiplayer session of Halo 2. He talks mostly about GAM3R 7H30RY, out now in a dead-trees edition from Harvard UP, and also in a brand-spankin’-new 2.0 online version. He also gives an eloquent reading from atop a pillar in the Halo-verse, which ends quite dramatically in a barrage of laserfire from the interviewer and camera operators.
more on the blame game
MSNBC has a reasonably-balanced story here on the perceived connections between video games and the Virginia Tech shootings. I post this mostly because one of the sources quoted here echoes a point Connor made in class yesterday about how Charles Whitman’s shooting spree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 predates computer games by at least a good decade.
