Category Archives: academia

Jon's World O' Squirrels

The hell with all those other college guides, Jon’s World O’ Squirrels has a campus squirrel guide. The guide itself seems a little squirrelly since it suggests that George Washington University has only one known squirrel on campus.

There have been times over at GW that I’ve feared for my life, the squirrels are so big and aggressive. One time I saw one literally chase a student into Gelman Library. They have very strict security, the student got in, the squirrel did not.

OK. I’m kidding about the security. The squirrel hit the glass, looked dazed for a minute and then began to menace a street vender. It may have been sick, but it’s hard to tell because they’re all so crazy around there. The squirrel. Not the vender. Oh, I’m just going to stop now.

Popular Culture Conference.

In a post last Fall, we were debating attending the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association in Philadelphia, but we decided not to attend for a variety of reasons, including being a bit over my head designing and teaching my first course as an adjunct.

Since there’s been some residual discussion about whether we’re attending in the comments of that old post, I thought I ought to post an update here.

Graduation! (For me, not my blog)

As I was editing the posts I imported from my previous site (punkprincess.com), very few from 2000 made the trip because of the high level of link rot. 2000 was a busy year. I graduated with a Master of Science degree from the Physics Department for an interdisciplinary degree in cooperation with the School of Communications in Audio Technology and Visual Media in May and won the Visions Film Festival Best Screenplay award for my feature script, Pets. (I also won this award last year for a script titled The Voiceover Kings, which I’ll mention here since few of my 1999 posts are likely to survive the transfer and consolidation to this domain).

CyberCulture

I’ve been talking with faculty in Anthropology and CompSci about developing a course in Digital Culture that I could possibly teach after I finish my Master’s Degree next year. I have to finish Comprehensive exams and complete two major projects between now and then, so I don’t want to get too excited yet….

If you were teaching (or taking) a class in cyberculture, what would you want to cover? Cyberpunk? the Digital Divide? Urban legends? Online fandoms? Gender? Privacy? What else?