Tag Archives: English

Pong and Moses: What Authors and Video Games Have in Common

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A few days ago Katy and I were talking, and I started gushing about how amazing Starcraft is… like usual. Knowing she’s an English major, I put it in literary terms in how old the game is: “Starcraft is like Dickens era.”

This got me thinking about the possible expansion of this idea. Is it possible to juxtapose gaming milestones to literary achievements? What a silly question, of course it’s possible. What follows is my own timeline. I know I missed some, focused too much on others, and classified still more totally incorrectly. Feel free to chime in with your own input, and remember I have a very thick skin for criticism.

Pong and Moses: The beginning. What do they have in common: The start of religions. Moses would start a religion that would later go on vast crusades, killing countless others, and allowing billions to not only go to church, but to believe in a higher power. Pong started a craze that would allow others to recreate the crusades in bloody detail, and for thousands of nerds to attend vast LAN parties playing their gospel “Counter Strike.” The higher power? Nintendo. Continue reading →

Nerdiness unleashed

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So as many people may know, I’m an English major and I get a sick twisted pleasure out of words. Because of this, I subscribe to the Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day (something I was introduced to waaaaaaaay back in middle school). Others may have noticed that my name is not spelled in the traditional “-ie” way many of my peers do so I get really excited when I find my name in popular culture somewhere unexpected or somebody knows how to spell my name properly. With that note, I give you today’s word of the day and the example sentence.

haptic • \HAP-tik\ • adjective
*1 : relating to or based on the sense of touch 2 : characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch
Example sentence:
Katy could tell one kind of yarn from another purely by haptic clues.

Let it be known that “-ie”s should look out. We WILL take over the world.