Room to Think

I wrote last time about how mixed reality (MR) might be better for everyday augmentation of my crazy life, and virtual reality (VR) would be better for lazy days. After another week of thinking, hearing, speaking, dwelling, learning, absorbing, and immersing, I'm beginning to think I'm obsessed. In my lunch circle, I bring up the subject so often that my friends have dubbed me the "VR girl". I can't help it if I've been doing rapid learning and I'm really excited to share and process what I've learned! Today I want to return to the impressions I had during some of my first VR experiences. The first time I threw myself into VR was in the 6th floor expo hall at PAX Prime this year, playtesting a student game where it seemed like the goal was just exploration--in a very simplistic, child-like, and limited world. This is all in comparison to 2D video games, mind you. I didn't have anything else to compare with. Of course my graphics and physics sta...

A week ago (practically), I suggested you all watch Shawn Achor's TEDtalk on Changing the way we achieve happiness .  I also said I was going to put up a Part 2. Due to an etiquette dinner, a volleyball game, a career fair, a group project, two days of dressing up professionally, and an incredible amount of lazy time laying in bed, I could not effectively finish this post until now.  I sincerely apologize for having a life.  =) But upon refreshing my memory on my last post, it occurred to me that I didn't really do his talk much justice.  Here's a better summary, written at a more sensible hour: Shawn Achor is CEO of Good Think, Inc. where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.  Shawn's work concerning positive psychology questions why there are those positive outliers in his psychological research. For Shawn, that dot off in the upper left-hand corner of your graph is an above-average person, not a measurement error.   ...

I'm blogging from a classroom today ( A classroom, not the classroom), in response to this post that my professor, Brenda, put up on the class blog. The class itself is "Online Writing as Literature", which is how I ought to refer to the course, instead of saying "oh yeah, I've got a class on blogging"  in that drawling sort of voice that implies an eye-roll, or lifting my eyebrows expectantly, as if to say, "you jealous ?" With this class, we're attempting to establish the importance of blogging in a "literature" sense, and I'm not exactly sure what that entails.  Let's see what wiki says .  (That's right, I'm calling up wikipedia during a midterm...you jelly ?) Wiki says: Literature is the art of written works , and is not bound to published sources.   The word "literature" literally means "acquaintance with letters" . The two major classifications are poetry and prose . It is u...

Sorry guys. I know it's not Tuesday.  It's not even Thursday anymore, as far as many of you are concerned. Most of my excuses pertain to the recent PNW snowfall, and an onset of recklessness, laziness, procrastination, and a simple willingness to just be outside. What was I saying about general recklessness? I DID mean to post on Tuesday.  In fact, I watched several TEDtalks that day; videos ranging from a cool statistics program  with a speaker who is like a sports commentator, to a pair of hilarious jugglers , a man who nearly died from healthy living, and a slew of videos about the brain and how it works , and how that will change computing . So...I've been busy.  I just haven't blogged. I gave you a bunch of links to my recent escapades through TEDland, and since I know 99% of you DIDN'T watch my last TED video, I figure I'll just skip to my thoughts and let you explore as you want this week. The reason I watched so many TEDtalks on ...

12:34am I've decided that's it's not best or most productive for me to write later than about this time of the night.  Tuesday night got a little crazy--definitely a little out of hand.  And though when I read through those posts, my only thoughts were: "Wow, I can still write cohesively at 3 in the morning!" and "Wow, I can get incredibly carried away" especially when my fingers can manage to keep up with the strings of thoughts as they pass through the ticker in my head that is in charge of motor control. A wordle of Tedtalk Tuesday--Happiness vs. Satisfaction I apologize. I love words. I love having things to say, and multiple ways of saying them.  But sometimes I feel like I should revel more in the beauty of being succinct. Last quarter I took a workshop class where I was required to write critiques for my classmates' work, and in return, they would critique mine.  It was  Kate Trueblood's senior seminar for fiction writing, s...