Wow! 

a video short enough for me to embed it on the blog! That's a first.

Short story for GEOG

     As long as I can remember, there's always been mourning doves outside my window. I could wake up any day of the year and hear their wailing song, nestled in the giant red pines on the side of my family's backyard. Some days, I'd rise to a veritable cacophony of calls, and while trying to fall back asleep, the droning of the mourning doves drilled into my head. Theirs is the only birdsong that I can reliably identify, probably due to those early morning wakeups. Their presence in my life was as reliable as the sunrise, probably because the sunrise is what brought on their singing. For most of my youth, I grew up alongside the mourning doves, and I can only imagine they grew up with me.

    Just as the birds found home in the threes, so did me and my friends. When playing neighborhood games, the largest red pine tree was always our "home base", no matter what game we played. We always met at the pine tree before riding our bikes around town. Afterwards, we would sit in its shade and peel off its bark, thick with sap, or relax in its lower boughs to pass time. At night, the trees became dark giants, towering over the house, casting shadows, and rapping on my window, as if to taunt me in my sleeplessness.

    As time went by, though, it seemed as if life began to leave our backyard. I remember vividly, at 17, laying in the grass and trying to listen to birdsong, and only finding the noise of the street in their place. The mourning dove's calls became more and more infrequent. With their absence, cardinals, blue jays, and robins seemed to follow suit. My mother, deathly afraid of the snake that once huddled beneath our shed, soon found herself venturing out into the deep grass, knowing there was nothing left to find in the yard.

    I remember my brother's reaction upon hearing the red pines would be cut down. "But that's home base!" He exclaimed. Despite his and my protestations, I returned home in the winter of that year to a shadeless and silent yard. The only remnants of the trees were three large stumps in a row, the neatly lined burial mounds of each giant. The decision to kill the trees was made by my father, after a solar panel audit deemed that the trees would need to be removed to ensure the panels were effective. I can't be upset with my dad for wanting solar panels, I wanted them too, but to have to sacrifice the red pine in order to be more "green" was an ironic pill to swallow.

    One frigid morning that January, I went out to the largest of all the stumps, "home base." As I came upon its resting place, I imagined myself peering down at what remained, counting each of its rings, learning everything there was to know about this corpse. It was a shock, then, upon staring into the eye of the stump, that I was made dizzy by the sheer number of rings, a hypnotic pattern that rippled outward and inward. It shot waves through my mind, gripping me and pulling me to the ground, until I was kneeling with my knees straddling the roots of the roiling tree. Even now, in death, the pine still towered over me. I shivered in my folly, shut my eyes, and wailed for it.

    As I laid in bed that night, I found myself staring out the window where the tree used to be. Its ghost seemed to hang there, in the void, no longer taunting me with it's presence, but now with its absence. I thought of all the nights and mornings where I wished for silence, where I wished for peace from the doves and branches, but peace never came to me. 

 

that tracks

 

 

how can bro bring people all these fruit baskets?

He's on a motorcycle

 

the sunlit wetlands

~ ~ went here 2day ~ ~

 

Snowbank

 HELP ME with figuring out a song

 

 Hi guys it's me from the internet. Here's a video version of this blog post if it makes more sense plus I thought it would have more reach:

I'm trying to figure out how to play Training with Weights by awesome band The Calendars. Here is a link to the song for reference. 

My hang-up starts around the ~25 second mark following "I hit the gym, I pump my iron", I just can't figure out what chord is being played there. The rest of the song is mostly a D-A-G thing, which was easy to figure out, and there's the occasional F#m thrown in there which sticks out nicely.

So, if anyone could give the song a listen and try to play along, maybe let me know what they figure out, that would be of great help!

Thank you Dew Myron

 🌹

this blog is for ME!

 blog post instead of doing homework
pasting homework into blog window so that it becomes blog post and completes homework!

 

Source: Chang, AY (2019) ‘Writing the Analysis’. In Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press,. p. 223-279.

 

My Keywords: Analysis, games, essay writing,

Argument: Chang details the process of writing a game analysis, touching on much of what has already been covered, but brings each piece together, identifying the different types of game analyses, how to effectively summarize a game, and how to include pieces of oneself in the writing to strengthen it.

Connections:  I've been waiting the whole time we've been reading Chang's book for a mention of Spec Ops: The Line because I feel like it is such a cornerstone of video game journalism, analysis, and is particularly notable for being a shooter-genre game that tries to convey an anti-war message, something that most shooters couldn't even imagine, so I was delighted to see it crop up here.

Notable Quotes: "In Killing Is Harmless, Keogh writes from the point of view of both a video-game critic and an academic. In a way, this analysis feels like an experiment in writing a personal close reading of the game, trying to figure out the process of what a full-length analysis requires. The book takes the reader from the beginning to the end of the game as an idealized walkthrough—if the reader has not played the game, they get a sense of what it is like; if they have, they can contrast their own experience with Keogh’s interpretation." (p. 271)

your best allies to convey your ideas to your reader and construct a solid work are clear definitions of your terms and specific examples—for this type of analytical writing, the particulars of a game or games can help us develop higher-level concepts and theories that will advance the field of game studies." (p. 273)

Comments: Something I've noticed about all of the "boxes" that Chang inserts into the textbook is how much use I feel like I actually get out of them. Oftentimes with textbooks that contain similar sidebars, I find myself learning to skim over them after a while, as they rarely seem to be as important as the main text, but here in Chang's work, I find them popping out at me, and I'm glad that Chang made the decision to center them on the page rather than offset them to the main text.

Writing Observations: I found this to be the most straightforward chapter in Chang's book yet, which makes sense, seeing as it is doing a lot of summary and circling back upon previously-discussed subjects. Nevertheless, Chang presents each point and guideline with clarity and expertise.