Crazy Backyard Mushroom

I’m not fully sure when it began to grow, but it has now been a staple curiosity of the backyard ecosystem for several weeks now and has even spawned several unsucessful artistic forays. Behold something straight out of my imagining of Lewis Carroll’s imaginings.

Ah, gotta love it when you get coverage on places other than where you write about yourself. I sent this link out to family, which was nice, because it gave them a sense of both what I’m up to, as well as how the university thinks about how I fit into the department.

Casey O’Donnell is a May graduate of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. His dissertation addressed “Playing the Interactive Video Game Industry: Work, Play, and Game Development in the United States and India.” At Grady, O’Donnell will teach classes and conduct research related to the video game industry. His research interests directly relate to the complex socio-technical intersections and interactions that occur during the design and development of software systems and new media. The Iowa native has been a teaching assistant at both Drake University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has professional experience as a game development and production consultant, software engineer and software developer.

I’m teaching two classes this fall. You can find information about those here. So far, the transition into the department has been good. I’m trying to balance getting the lab here set up, with course preparation, research, publication, and establishing the local GGDA/IGDA Chapter. No whining, simply that it has kept me fairly busy.

I have also been busy trying to get “Developers in the Mist” set up before I get too many essays into the publishing pipeline. I’m going to use this site as an interface between the academic work that I’ve been doing and “real world” responses and information. I’m excited about the prospect of being able to elaborate on those issues that I’ve been tackling in other venues.

I am hoping to start transitioning my previous Blogger/Blogspot Blog over to this site. I kept so many thoughts and notes on that site that I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it just yet.