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So my previous post came out of what had become more or less a vacuum. This is the post where I apologize for the long gap in posting and promise to post more often.

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What I'm losing with Google Reader

I'm going to keep this short. When I logged into Google Reader today I received the now somewhat familiar message from Google that they're shutting down a service. The first thing I did was jump to the internet (via Google search typically enough) to find out what the deal was. Why was Google shutting down Reader? The answer was typical...

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Walker is my governor

So it seems that the people of Wisconsin have spoken. Scott Walker is still my governor. It's not the ideal outcome in many ways. It leaves me deeply worried about the future of Wisconsin's natural resources for one, and the progressive tradition of the state for two. There's also the fact that regardless of the outcome of this race, my state is now deeply divided and will take decades to heal. more after the jump...

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The textbook problem

If you're a reader of my blog, there's a good chance that you're already familiar with the textbook problem. While there are a wide variety of factors that make this problem intractable, I was thinking that it would be incredibly helpful to have a really high quality free alternative set of textbooks for all standard K-12 courses. I'm not talking about a standardized curriculum here. In fact, a well structured series of core textbooks would be built as flexible tools that would allow teachers to customize instruction and support it with their own additional content.

In addition I'm not talking about policy here. School districts could choose to use whatever books they wanted to. The point would simply be to create a high quality free and open (print on demand) textbook series that would at least give those districts looking for great textbooks an affordable option. At that point, if it actually starts to give the publishing giants a run for their money, they'll have to adapt to the real market rather than suffering under the onerous weight of Texas (and to a lesser degree California) politics.

There are obviously vested interests that would never want to see something like this happen. On the other hand, the publishing giants have started to adapt. As they pivot towards a data centric service model, free textbooks become less of a threat. Regardless of the stance of the textbook industry, the question remains, what's the best source to fund a project like this? A federal agency? A philanthropic organization? A kickstarter? Hmmm.

Mass Effect 3, the bad and the ugly (spoiler heavy)

There's a lot of good in Mass Effect 3. In fact, as others have argued I'd say the game is really roughly 98% good. In addition, unlike some folks out there I don't think that the ending of ME3 ruined the whole Mass Effect series. I do believe that it casts an indellible shadow across it that slightly diminishes it as a whole, but there's a big difference between that and saying that it's ruined as I honestly I don't think it even ruined the rest of the game. I mean heck, I'm still playing the multiplayer and plan on replaying the rest when I have the time so that surely counts for something. That said, I'm not going to write much about the good in Mass Effect 3 in this post, because honestly I don't have too much to say about it that hasn't been covered in the more glowing reviews. Instead I'm going to focus primarily on the parts of Mass Effect 3 that I consider to be badly designed or badly written, as well as those elements that I consider to be ugly game design in that they may be effectively designed but they still do a disservice to Mass Effect players.

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