On Schedules, ScienceOnline, and general catching-up-after-the-holidays.
Email thisHEY HI HELLO.
Been a while right? Like a month? We took a bit of a break.
First thing’s first though, happy 2013!
So yeah, the break thing. About roughly exactly 24 days ago, I sent out a tweet from our tl-dr account saying we were breaking up our Tuesday/Thursday posting schedule. Basically, coming up with creative content on a constant deadline only stays fun for so long, and Diane and Jacob especially needed a little burnout recovery (I’m just here writing every month or so).
James over at Men With Pens does a good job wrapping up exactly why the schedule thing probably isn’t the greatest idea anyway, and our reasoning was more or less the same as his: our readers come when we have interesting things to say, and interesting things require inspiration. Otherwise, maybe we start to scrape the barrel a bit, and that’s bad. Bad for you, bad for us. An all around big barrel of no bueno.
SO there’s that. From now on, we write whenever we damn well feel like it!! Quality > Quantity, only the best for you Khaleesi.
It was an excuse to use a game of thrones meme.
NOW ONTO SERIOUS-ER BUSINESS.
In about under a month, I’ll be heading to North Carolina for the annual ScienceOnline unconference. I’ve talked about this place before, it’s epic, people are friendly, you never know who you might end up listening to weird biological sex jokes with, and cool things happen.
This year I’m co-presenting a session on Games and Science, and how they can totally get along really well together (The session is 8D, Saturday 10:30-11:30 am, Room 7a!). My partner is Cameron Pittman who does some crazy stuff teaching high school students physics using the game Portal 2. = winning. I sincerely recommend checking out some of his videos on his site HERE.
What’s more, my friend Melanie Stegman will debut her 4-year in the making science game: Immune Defense. Here’s the link for the Blitz Talk she’ll be doing! I got to demo the game early at a small play-testing event earlier this year at the Federation of American Scientists headquarters. It’s really spectacular to see a new game come through like this designed to be just as fun as it is educational, you know, as good serious games are supposed to be.
For those of you who will be at ScienceOnline, and plan on coming to the games session, this wiki page will have plenty of background info for you to browse through so you too can jump into the discussion! And, if you need further reading past that, there is plenty here on tl-dr to explore as well. Alternatively, if you just want direct info, tweet me @EriKlaes #scio13.
See some of you soon!
tl-dr
Our last order of business is to say thanks for being supportive through the first year of this blog. Here’s to another great year of gaming tom-foolery and info-science awesomeness 
Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.