-
Computer Troubles—Yay!
Tess, my five year-old desktop PC, has been throwing all kinds of conniptions over the past few months. Macheads, I see your fingers poised over the keyboard: If you are interested in purchasing Apple’s overpriced hardware and gifting it to me, I will gladly accept. Otherwise, silence. Classes and my lab rotation are now in progress,…
-
On the West Coast (of Maryland)
Our trip back to Maryland is coming to an end with the wedding of two of our friends. While Rachel’s off doing bridesmaid things, I’m enjoying a beautiful part of Maryland I’ve never really known existed. They even have a few palm trees growing in the gardens, something I would have appreciated a lot more…
-
Lego’s Lost Trademark Case Is a Good Thing
My love of Lego goes back nearly as far as I can remember—Lego sets were some of the first things I saved money to buy, and one of my brother’s early sentences was him asking me to “pay dupo” with him. I’ve spent years on staff at one of the biggest Lego community websites around.…
-
Not-Quite-Homecoming
After living in California for over a month, we’re traveling back to Maryland for our friends’ wedding. It almost feels like coming home, but then it doesn’t, because we’ve had a bit of time to become accustomed to our new place being home. While we’re back, we’re going to be in a madcap dash to…
-
Quitting: Ensuring Everybody That Matters Loses
Game modding communities thrive on the free exchange of knowledge that ranges from the developers adopting a mod-friendly attitude to the hobbyists who share their work and knowledge with comrades. The community thrives on clever innovation, on people picking up a project where others have left off, and on learning by imitation. Yet interestingly, the…
-
Free Culture’s Worst-Case Scenarios
Many of my budding artist friends appreciate their obscurity problem and want to share their work without the encumbrance of copyright. Yet they are worried about others using it for commercial purposes, the same fear that drives people like Cory Doctorow into the arms of Creative Commons licenses. This idea of somebody else, maybe a…
-
Buying Elsewhere Is Not Cheating
Ignorant corporate executive Cory Ledesma thinks buying games used somehow cheats developers (read: his company, THQ), so he doesn’t have any problem with tying a game’s online multiplayer mode to a one-time-use code. This is the kind of ridiculous decision one can expect from the knee-jerk fiscal entitlement mentality everybody making things seems to have…
-
On the Consumption of Content
Now that we have internet access and are pretty much unpacked, I’ve been slowly trying to catch up on the internet. I’ve collected RSS feeds in Google Reader to the point that I can’t get through them all on a regular day, so several weeks of backlog probably means I’m going to give up and…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.
Category: Life
Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.