Old Lady Gamer

I can get seven targets now

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:08:27 -0500

I’ve flown the bird like a dozen times and I’ve gotten up to seven targets, so now I see it’s possible. Again, stuff like this just takes me a hundred times longer than it does the young folk. I always despair that I’ll EVER get it, and then, eventually, I do. That’s the magic of videogames. They’re always teaching you to keep trying.

I cannot fly the bird in Skyward Sword

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:38:00 -0500

Okay, I like the game. Slashing with the Wii mote as your sword is really fun. I slash the hell out of the bats and blobby monsters. I kill and/or imprison the bosses. But flying the bird at targets in the sky? Really? The bird veers the wrong way or sags at the last minute. It will not go where I want.

Technology and Teachers

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:21:00 -0400

What’s the difference between liking school and hating it? Often it’s a teacher. When I was in high school, my history teacher, Mr. Staringer, taught us about World War II. I wasn’t interested in World War II. I was interested in Led Zeppelin and my boyfriend, who was also interested in Led Zeppelin.

Mr. Staringer, on the other hand, cared about history and teaching.

How do I know this? Because I know Mr. Staringer must have put himself and his job on the line to teach us the way he did.

It was 1972, and I lived in a town—Richland, Washington—that was built on the edge of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Our dads worked at Hanford. We all knew that the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb came from Hanford. And Richland, a government town filled with the families of nuclear physicists and technicians, still celebrated its role in ending World War II.

Our high school gym had a cartoony mushroom cloud painted on the floor. The mushroom cloud and the team name “The Bombers” confound me now—why would a high school community want to glorify nuclear war in this way? Why would I be complicit in this mindset? At the time, it seemed scrappy and patriotic.

I wasn’t the only one with this attitude—everybody I knew, as far as I knew, had this same shameful attitude. And right in the middle of all this, in a high school history classroom, in front of everybody, Mr. Staringer courageously helped us question the assumption that we should be mindlessly, frivolously delighted with nuclear bombs. He showed us a documentary about the aftermath of Hiroshima, and another about the aftermath of Dachau. Here’s what I remember, nearly forty years later: at both places there were many corpses, and the corpses of our allies looked the same as the corpses of our enemies.

After he showed the films, Mr. Staringer asked the most important questions that face us as human beings. Why do people go to war? What does it mean? Is it justified? There were no clear answers. Only questions and more questions. Only learning and more learning. Even now I remember how those documentaries and discussions about war made me question my assumptions about my town and my nation—in short, how Mr. Staringer made me a more thoughtful and a better citizen.

Nowadays, some of the best teachers are using new media like games to help students learn. The best teachers want to know more about how to do this better. Researchers are busy figuring it out too. But new media and new technologies are only part of the answer.

They’re tools for learning to ask good questions—for learning how to learn.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#20) The End.

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:16:23 -0400

Sailing, sorting, watching, gossiping, floating, living. And now.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#19)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:14:23 -0400

I find that I want to be with my family and they want to be with me, father, mother, sister, brothers, son, daughter. The final surprise.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#18)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:11:00 -0400

If it’s true you can bet the immortalists are trying to figure a way around it. A place to hide, a fold in God’s robe, a safe place to crawl into and wait out the apocalypse. But that’s the best part. In a true multiverse collapse even God would cease to exist. A paradox perhaps, but isn’t that His specialty?

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#17)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:04:00 -0400

The hope of collapse: could it have been a meme planted by the immortalists to keep us from our cowboy extinction? And yet the movement strengthens. We Verbs are flowing life-water down a mountainside. They hear it. The last great snowmelt of the overheated multiverse.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#16)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:28:02 -0400

You know what I miss? Furniture. The kind of sofa or overstuffed chair you could sink into after a hard day raising vegetables in real dirt or washing clothes or planning weddings or making change in a bank. Honest work, honest rest, a rhythm of days.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#15)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:07:13 -0400

Real infants again. Wriggling and blind. Helpless. Puppies and kittens. Reality. Snug and supported by the promise of death. The neat progress of biological evolution and reincarnation. Hope and innocence. Good and evil. The sacred and the profane.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#14)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:05:26 -0400

What is involved in a multiverse collapse? Well, a full reset. That’s what they’re saying. Complete extinguishment. Perhaps, probably, a wholesale starting over. Up from amoebas and all that. But everything, everyone, every trace of what is was wiped out forever. We can hardly contain our joy.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#13)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:00:31 -0400

So there is a God after all. The quality of mercy is unmistakable once you feel it.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#12)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:58:30 -0400

If the multiverse is collapsing, death is once again a fact of life. At least that’s what the experts are filtering now. It’s really too wonderful to hope for. If we worry, what we worry about is getting our hopes up—the disappointment of such a network of souls is overwhelming once it gets going. Too much to bear, but we have to. Had to?

Past tense! Hallelujah!

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#11)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:57:13 -0400

Hallelujah!

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#10)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:52:00 -0400

The word is this: the multiverse is collapsing. It’s given us a new lease on life. Just in time.

Why didn’t we see it coming? Because we are incapable of observing ourselves.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#9)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:07:29 -0400

Yes. Something’s different. One can hardly contain oneself. No one has experienced true surprise for centuries. Let alone shock. Or disgust, shame, horror. Which precludes excitement or adventure. You see the problem.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#8)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:52:00 -0400

I miss Mary. Still. Dr. F. tells me to work through. She’s been gone for centuries. She got out when such acts were commonplace. The other day I asked Dr. F. if he believed in life after death. “Really?” he said. “That question again?” Psychiatrist AI’s are not supposed to lose patience with patients.

Something different in the worlds. Even the AIs are weary.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#7)

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:35:29 -0400

Over in Universe Calyx the dogs are ten feet tall. I go there often to sit in the shade of one and listen to it breathe. Something about unconditional love.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#6)

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:35:00 -0400

Extermination is not a possibility any longer. They outlawed it when it became too popular. The worse nightmare of the immortalists is being left alone with themselves.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#5)

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:34:09 -0400

I was born.

We all start as biological beings. I’m old enough, in fact, to have had a mother. Her name was Iris and she loved me but only for a very few minutes before I was whisked away to be hooked up to the machines. It’s in the record, though. Eyes like a cold river, green and gray. Hands smooth and fragrant with some lotion that no longer exists in the worlds. Her voice was soft and sing-songy. I imagine she could have been a good mother and I have lived my childhood through with her several times.
A chair in a sunny kitchen. A warm cookie. Grass outside. A crow cawing in the sky. I should play that through again.

Avatar Dreams: A Blog Fiction Collage (#4)

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:22:26 -0400

What’s my name? Good question. Sometimes I wish I had been one of the minority who settled on a name and stuck with it. Now it seems more important than it did….sometime, when.