This has been a challenging month, both for writing and for personal goals. My family is faced with some big decisions, not the least of which is whether I have to put my dissertation on hold again to focus on some money-making projects. It is also an exciting time, with TEDx Bloomington, watching Five Year Mission at the Bloomington Geek Dinner, and preparation for a SociaLens ARG.
Despite a rough week of (non-)writing during Spring Break, I managed to get almost back on track. I currently owe one blog post to myself to keep on my 1000 articles in 1000 days goal. Among the highlights in March:
- Dissertation Research Play: “Lunch With Other” outlined what I planed to do for primary research to advance my Ph.D. Sadly, that was the last major advance I was able to make on my doctoral work, as life got in the way.
- 20 Years of Fantasy Baseball gave me a respite from my projects as I live-blogged another fake baseball draft.
- 1986 looks at what was happening 25 years ago and how it really isn’t much different than today
- And Then There Were Four… talks about an important developmental milestone: when there are no major league baseball players older than I am.
- Ma~ Turns Two celebrates my daughter’s second birthday, while lamenting the lack of a digital footprint for her.
It proved a real struggle to find both time and content to write about. I feel I have a good handle on processing what is coming into my world, but not necessarily enough to write deeply about synthesizing things. I have a lot of political-based papers and articles to think about in the coming months, whether or not I am able to continue with my dissertation work.
My net writing is in the black, of course, thanks to some contributions to GeekDad:
- Big History at Big TED—David Christian’s curriculum for teaching the history of the universe
- Active Videogames Count as Legitimate Exercise—research out of BYU showed that some of the exergames can produce equivalent physical exertion as more traditional exercise. It got a GeekDad rewind on the weekend, but the comments were a little harsh, though.
- Science May Start Tracking the Yeti—I’d love to write more of these things. This tidbit came over the pipeline at PhysOrg, which is a great resource for academic work, as reported to mainstream media. That’s what gave it enough legitimacy to write up. Also: it’s fun to say “Yeti”
April has started out strong, thanks to a couple contributions to their GeekDog parody for April Fool’s Day. My goal is four more posts this month.
I will have considerable writing to do for my SociaLens and TEDx projects. Not only do I have to help craft an ARG, moderating and to some extent building the technology to support the community conversation, but I am the webmaster and blogger for the “Wisdom of Play” site for the May events related to TEDx.
