Semisensical ramblings by David W. Rick
Please note that this post contains spoilers for season one of HBO’s Watchmen. Further, please note that I will comment only minimally on the racial issues presented by the show. That is not because I don’t consider them important, only that I do not feel that I can meaningfully contribute to that conversation. Those issues […]
I will now be updating this post at a dedicated URL on this site: https://www.davidwrick.com/anti-racist-resources/ In watching the events unfolding since the horrific killing of George Floyd, I find that I have no words of my own that I can contribute to the conversation. Instead, I am looking to amplify the words of people with […]
Some time ago I started writing a blog post in response to this interesting video by Patrick Willems. I got distracted by life and never finished it. Then, last night, I got into a social media exchange with two former colleagues over the quality of certain Star Wars films, and today I stumbled upon the […]
I was editing a manuscript today, and I had a quote that I’d planned to use in it, but in the final draft I could not fit it in. Even so, I felt the quote far too interesting to disregard, so I decided to post it here as a reminder to myself to return to […]
“The continuing appeal of Tolkien’s fantasy, completely unexpected and completely unpredictable though it was, cannot then be seen as a mere freak of popular taste, to be dismissed or ignored by those sufficiently well-educated to know better. It deserves an explanation and a defence, which this book tries to supply. In the process, I argue […]
“Like other forms of media, computer games can work to build up, maintain, or reject what players (among others) believe about a wide range of subjects, from the constitution of truth and goodness to understandings of social mores and global politics. Like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, computer games can work work to maintain the […]
“The second challenge for data interpretation is the lack of real-world analogues for some kinds of virtual events (Salomon 1994). For example, some virtual worlds permit ‘teleporting’ between locations within the environment (Fields and Kafai 2007). When users teleport, they disappear from one virtual location and appear in another without following a contiguous path. While […]
“I believe that the fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief. This expectation is historical, subject to historical change, and is not unique to fantasy. Wayne C. […]
“I hope that teenagers find the real heroic fantasies, like Tolkien’s. I know such fantasies continue to be written. And I hope the publishers and packagers and promoters and sellers of fantasy honor them as such. While fantasy can indeed be mere escapism, wish-fulfillment, indulgence in empty heroics and brainless violence, it isn’t so by […]
“In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them. I read John Milton, Shelley, Keats aloud and then swooned on my narrow bed in the dormitory. In college in the late sixties, I read almost […]