“Before a videogame can ever be played […] there must be a metagame.” Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Lobuk In my experience with playing games, I realize I was always a player. I allowed myself to be deluded, I thought I was an active actor deciding what step to do next. All lies! Without realizing it, Read More
Last February, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems released the first title in the twenty-seven-year-old Fire Emblem franchise specifically designed for mobile gameplay, and the only installment to operate on a platform other than a Nintendo console—emulation notwithstanding. As a strategy role playing game imbued with gambling elements, Fire Emblem Heroes conforms to an increasingly prevalent free-to-play Read More
Between 2005 and 2008, American-based television network Nickelodeon aired what would become one of the most lauded and commercially successful children’s shows of its time, Avatar: The Last Airbender. At its best, Avatar presents stirring storylines that grapple with the complexities of human relationships in meaningful ways, offering the audience narratives that confront racism (“Book Read More
I can still remember the pang of disappointment that accompanied the email. GirlAttorneys – or, in the du jour stylization of the time, GIRLATTORNEYS – a music blog that I had run with a couple of friends for close to a year, had been permanently shutdown by Blogger for one too many DMCA takedown notices. Read More
Aided by the advent of the internet, knitting has enjoyed a resurgence over the past two decades, particularly among younger generations drawn to the craft as a stress-relieving and potentially eco-friendly pastime. The growing number of knitting blogs and the popularity of the online platform Ravelry allows patterns and objects to circulate on- and off-line with Read More
Unlike most methods of preparing and cooking food, preserving — the practice of canning, pickling, fermenting and drying food — allows for the long-term storage seasonal produce. This temporal dimension specific to preserving has its roots in “historical” practice: these processing methods pre-date the widespread availability of refrigeration technologies, agro-industrial supply chains, and the perpetual Read More
In 2012, readers, media outlets, and literary critics were alarmed, appalled, and perhaps a little intrigued to find that E.L James’s erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey had sold over 100 million copies worldwide and become a New York Times best-seller. Equally shocking to its mainstream audience was news of the novels’ scandalous origins: Fifty Read More
In 2011, the ruling in a U.S. court case, Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, set a precedent in copyright law by protecting the digital archives produced by libraries for preservation purposes under fair dealing. While the European Copyright Directive allows for the mass digitization of orphan works for non-commercial purposes, in Canadian copyright law the Read More
This week, I had the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Erin Wunker (Contract academic faculty at Dalhousie), who I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. As one of the co-founders & managing editor of the blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe, and the chair of Read More
What is it about Instagram that keeps photographers fretting? I’ve studied photography for a while, I like taking photos, and I wish kodak hadn’t abandoned analog photography, because I’m Team Film if we’re picking sides. And I’m pretty into Instagram. Is that contradictory? It feels like a logical progression to me, but since Instagram popped Read More