A connection I made earlier

Random thought I had during orchestra. So we’re playing Petite Suite by Debussy right now, and the second movement “Cortège” is in just an awful key for us Bb clarinet players. Frankly, there are a couple spots I just don’t have the flexibility for in my hands (I’m not completely sure if they’re very realistic at all). I ended up finding a transposed version of the part for A clarinet, which puts it into a very nice key. Pretty much everything lays on the instrument really well, and it was pretty much sight-readable at that point. ...

October 22, 2024

LFG - Satisfaction

You may have heard of the term “rage game” before. Examples include Getting Over It, Jump King, I Wanna Be The Guy, and others. There are other games that are really hard, but they generally get put in a separate category from “rage games”, like most of FromSoftware’s catalogue (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and the like) or precision platformers like Super Meat Boy or Celeste. Anyway, the point is that these games are very difficult, and you will most likely die (or fall down) many times before making progress. ...

October 22, 2024

Lessons from Gaming (Introduction)

I love video games! I think we can learn a lot about effective teaching from video games. Being currently in a teaching program, and having made a few small games in the past, I’ve noticed several parallels. After all, games do teach us players: they teach us how to play them, about the world they’re set in, and how they progress their stories and character arcs. Some games are great at this, though we tend to think about this as a game “being intuitive”, or “having good world-building”. ...

October 21, 2024

This Thing On?

Hello, World. That’s what we’re supposed to write first, right? This site is pretty barebones for now; I’m learning all this stuff as I go. This will hopefully be prettier in the future. In the meantime, happy reading!

October 21, 2024