Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • A Nascent Medium

    I saw this article a couple of days ago; the criticism of Hollywood’s treatment of race in the universally-panned Avatar: The Last Airbender (and throughout history) is well-done and thought-provoking. One comment the author makes in passing got me thinking in an entirely new direction: storytelling in video games. In talking about the recent Prince…

  • Gaming’s Bigger Picture: Correcting Tim Buckey

    I may not be the biggest fan of Tim Buckey’s opinions or comic, but there are so many things wrong in his latest post lambasting the “sense of entitlement” among gamers that I was compelled to respond. I can always rely on Tim to roll out some of the most rampant industry fallacies, so deconstructing…

  • The Shambling Menace

    Okay, I admit it. I have a deep-seated irrational fear of zombies. I know, I know, they’re fictional and scientifically improbable if not impossible—but if they were real, the situation is ghastly. There’s something about the zombie apocalypse that invokes a more holistic fear than your typical doomsday scenario: Even beyond the devouring horde’s exponential…

  • Seeing Past the Banner Ad

    Crosbie Fitch added some good insights in response to my previous post about web advertising, noting that the internet is returning balance to communication, changing effective advertising strategies from monologues to dialogues. In addition to basking in the knowledge that he reads my site, I’d like to riff on his post a bit and look…

  • Ad Blocking Is Here to Stay

    This has been discussed at some length before, but with yet another one of my favorite websites featuring a columnist adding their voice to the fracas, I thought it was worth revisiting. Like Ars Technica before him, Louis Lazaris of Smashing Magazine chastises folks who aren’t keen on including ads in their web browsing experience,…

  • At Long Last, AMCAS Realizes It’s 2010

    Amusingly, the keyword searches that bring the most traffic to my site (what little there is) have to do with the AMCAS application not working in modern browsers, including anything running on OS X. It looks like they’ve finally decided to update the site for the 2011 application cycle, and this time they’ve added an…

  • Using Google Wave for Academic Collaboration

    I have been wanting to get out a paper on some of my undergraduate research and with my impending cross-country move, it’s moved back up the priority queue. In preparing this paper I will be collaborating with my PI as well as the then-senior grad student, now-postdoc who helped me at the time. This seemed…

  • Missing the Mark

    Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the clear thinking with respect to filesharing and intellectual monopoly (imaginary property, if you will) is filtering into more mainstream channels. I was rather pleased to see these two pieces by Joe Konrath and David Gerrold; both say some excellent things before veering off into the content industry’s Bizarro…