Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Cop-Out Acknowledgment!

I’d like to apologize for the size and quality of the updates I’ve been putting out over the last week.  Amidst the chaos of finals, which involves reviewing and producing a lot of writing unrelated to this site, I haven’t had much time for exploring the final episode of The Walking Dead or any of the new titles sitting in my Steambox.  So I’m writing this to fill space.  Next week, I hope to write something substantive and engaging again, but for now?  It’s just not going to happen.

So here’s a few erratic thoughts I have:

1 – Game theory in the classroom failed miserably, with one exception.  Which kinda makes it worthwhile, but means I won’t be attempting to dive deeper into my application of transparency during the next semester.  I did learn quite a bit, but most it related to the way that communication needs to flow.  Stakes are one part of that, but there’s an interesting trend among 19 year olds to pretend they don’t care about things until they become challenging, and representing stakes transparently can’t really fix that.

Of course, that one success?  Was with a middling student who was, in explicitly dictated terms, very responsible.  In other, non-explicit areas?  Not so much.

Ah well.

2 – X-COM is still pretty good, and Classic has some of the oomph that the original X-COM did, but it’s still more or less a different game with a new ethos behind it.  I’m considering playing Ironman on my next run, but I’m not attached to it.  There’s so much to play, so little time.

3 -  I’m building a new system by gutting my old one, possibly this weekend, probably not.  So I’ll be writing about partially cannibalizing my current system to make a new one.  Case, power supply, and optical drive will be staying.  The rest of the system is going bye-bye.  I can’t touch any of the parts right now, since I’m spending around nine hours a day reviewing student portfolios.  But once grades are finalized, I’ll be wrist deep in parts and discussing how transferring data between internal drives and installing Windows 8 goes.

I imagine something is going to go wrong.  I have that feeling.

Anyhow, sorry for the dip in quality, thanks for bearing with me and, next week?  I look forward to relating some amusing anecdote about being a nerd.  That doesn’t involve poetry or grading papers.