The Carletonian

There are two demons that haunt me at Carleton; their names are Procrastination and Bullshit. Procrastination is what torments me when I go to bed at 4 in the morning realizing that if I hadn’t spent all that time texting and looking at gifs on tumblr, I’d have gotten my reading done on time – after all, what’s the use of doing the reading if you’re too tired to say anything about it in class?

This week in Washington DC, we met with Senator Al Franken.  As you might expect, it was a really short visit.  He’s a busy guy.  Our visit went like this.  We showed up to his office.  We were brought in to a conference room.  Al hustled in, aides at his heels.  Fifteen minutes later, Al hustled out, off to meet Minnesota’s military kid of the year.

The streets of Austin were empty, dark and unfamiliar to us. I was seated in the passenger seat next to my friend, who was driving, and we were in the middle of a very intense conversation on the nature of love. We were waiting to pick another friend up from a concert, and had about an hour to kill. We had decided to just drive around in our friend’s shaky vintage car.

Entering my third spring term, I thought I pretty much knew what to expect. Sunshine, pretending not to have any schoolwork, and outdoor adventures awaited me, and I couldn’t wait for the term to begin. Among the things I looked forward to was finalizing my housing plans for next year.

Game design in academia is a thing.  It’s not going away anytime soon, if Carnegie Mellon, Rochester Institute, NYU, USC, or MIT are to be believed.  However, I often have the problem of spending such a long time defending exactly why game design belongs at this college (or really any college that I never actually explain what a game design major, or what game design courses would look like. So that’s what I’m going to do.

The Magic Bullet comes with cups that attach directly to the blade, along with a number of other little gadgets like rims, lids, varying types of blades, shaker tops, and so on. They’re not exaggerating when they call it magic.

One of the ideas that has become increasingly important in the second half of the 20th century and especially now in the 21st century, is the idea that systems have a rhetoric.  Just like books, TV shows, and movies, systems are making arguments as they are used.

What we are completely unaware of is how we are going to change, what sort of new idea we will be exposed to that will change the course of the day, change us in subtle ways. Our minds take careful notes of the subtleties as we converse, or as we glance at the inky shadows playing as we walk.

We all seem to be too busy with the fulfillment of basic pleasures to consider life and livelihood as a concept. This is absolutely tragic. Religious experiences formulate how we see the world and shape our beliefs about ourselves and our surroundings. The less people have them, the less people have a basis for comprehending their situation. It is that simple.

Just as my American worldview is shaped by a certain a set of ideas, the Director’s worldview is shaped by a conflicting set of ideas.  Because I believe one thing and he believes another, we are adversaries on the world stage.

There are a lot of words like "deconstruction" in the humanities at Carleton: authenticity, patriarchy, pastiche. All these words are in the air – they float from room to room in Laird and Leighton like dandelion wisps. Almost all of them have complex, theoretical definitions, and almost all of them are consistently misused in the service of a kind of obsessed one-upmanship.

If I were really part of a grand tradition of flocking to cultural centers to learn from great scholars, I would go to New York or San Francisco, not Rome- and it wouldn't even matter nowadays, because globalization and the internet have spread cultural prestige so completely across the first world that talking about 'centers of knowledge' is essentially absurd.