

It's Alive! But...
I'm tired. #thesis
Daily Insights
1) Hardship is necessary. One never gets used to it, despite its unbeatable consistency in our lives. 2) Perspective is a hard-fought prize but well-worth the fight. 3) The members of my lab are great thinkers, great people, and if they will accept the appellation, great friends as well who understand me at times better than I think I understand myself. #thesis #personal


Rediscovering old, pertinent documents
In combing through my files, I came across a paper I read early on in my Master's candidacy that I remember not agreeing with very much at all. Ironically enough, I readily agree with many of its points now, and in very meaningful, experience-confirming ways. I have this feeling that sometimes we cannot truly understand certain texts until very late in the game, as is the case tonight. Though the ideas in this paper I have rediscovered are a bit outside the scope of my thesis
What's a thesis?
A thesis is a long document. With me being stuck at the end of it, I found that it was somewhat easy for me to forget why I was even doing this in the first place, how important that might be, and what I am actually aiming for in this document. In short, I actually felt better about the whole thing after re-reading my intro. That sounds somewhat insane, as though I had read something by another author, but well, for some reason, it worked. For now. #thesis
Post-Thesis Guitar Jam: More Than Words
Thanks to the Dovahkiin Xin Yang for taking this video. (Spoiler warning: mistakes) #thesis #gradschoollife #fun
Singing with "Neko-mimi"
#thesis #gradschoollife #fun
So, this is Christmas
On my way to lab this morning I passed by some friends and they reminded me that it was almost Christmas. I forgot about Christmas. But there are two very significant reasons for this: 1) I'm so used to Japan already, and basically Christmas is just another day. When I used to work at the school, Christmas was no holiday and I just got used to that. 2) Thesis alpha draft is due tomorrow! Mind you that in no way means that I will be "done." It simply means that it's time to ha


"That, perhaps, may be my answer."
"...[N]othing is known about him. I was never able to find out what kind of a person he really was. But whenever they talked about him, they always had a slight smile on their faces. That, perhaps, may be my answer." So goes the concluding line of Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. I can't help but thinking that this is a reflection of what it means to look at how story and myth and their effects on people are investigated. As someone more astute than myself had once put it (pa


Digital Mythology
"Considering this phenomenon of narrativization with respect to games, it then becomes important to understand that games as a medium are currently ideally poised to take center stage as the most ubiquitously widespread, appealing, and potent forms of storytelling and narrativization that human society has yet witnessed. We contend that games have the very real potential to become the new classics of the 21st Century. The field of Literature has its classics: the epic poem of
On writing paragraphs
I have just today realized that, as a habit from my undergraduate days when I was able to really solidify my writing style, I must subconsciously favor a certain paragraph size in my own writing. In drafting my thesis, I just caught myself finishing a paragraph, stepping back to check it, then catching that my final thought (which was more of a sentiment than an actual thought) was that "OK, that's a goodly-sized paragraph." The size of a paragraph is not really that importan