Thursday, April 13, 2006

Dissertation Zork

>look
You are on a red leather sofa facing a very large and very tempting flat-screen TV. A sheltie puppy is chewing through your shoelaces. There is a laptop in your lap. You have five Word documents open.

>look at Word documents
They are titled "Chapter 3 The Ubicomp Games", "Chapter 4 The Pervasive Games", "Nintendo Cubes section pergames", "REJECTED WRITING" and "works cited".

> work on dissertation
You spend five minutes browsing Boing Boing.

> work on dissertation
You check the Technorati links to your blog.

> work on dissertation
You go to the kitchen and have your 3rd helping of frozen waffles so far today.

> work on dissertation
You look in your Junk Mail folder in case any important emails were accidentally filtered.

> work on dissertation
You practice the "kisses" trick with your puppy.

> work on dissertation
Kiyash wants to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

> work on dissertation
After a second episode of Battlestar Galactica, you wonder if Kiyash is a Cylon.

> work on dissertation
The director’s commentary on episode four of the Battlestar Galactica DVD is really fascinating.

> WORK ON DISSERTATION
You are out of Battlestar Galactica episodes. You are in your living room with a laptop. It is dark out. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Inspiration.

13 comments:

Jane said...

P.S. In case you're worried, it's not actually this bad anymore now that I have cracked! the! whip! I am being pretty good about churning out at least 5 pages a day.

WriTerGuy said...

Brilliant gametization of WAB - (Work Avoidance Behavior, or in your case and mine, Writing Avoidance Behavior). You are in the early stages. Later, your house gets cleaned.

The Dancing Kids said...

God, I love you!! :D

BTW the way to win at Who The Dog Loves Most is to put a tiny bit of peanut butter on your lips or face.

Oh and if you put it on your hand and say KISSES, they get it right quick.

deflective said...

Damn. It's like I just read a summary of my day. So much work to do but these blogs can't read themselves.

Gratz on finding your groove. Now mine's gotta be around here somewhere.

Brinstar said...

Very similar to writing my Master's thesis several years ago.

Anonymous said...

Man, that totally matches my entire month of March at my job. Unfortunately, now that it is April I'm paying for it in spades. Ugh. Wish I'd cracked the whip a little earlier. Glad to hear you're in a really good, productive space!

Caleb said...

/me is reading this hilarious thing...when he's supposed to be writing long-overdue essays!

>work on Biology essay
You read Jane's blog.

>work on Biology essay
You eat lunch

>crack whip
You leave Jane's blog to actually work!

Patrick said...

I'm down for the Pi poem. I think we should do a sort of theme progression, start with simpler, more concrete imagery the first few hundred spaces, than scale it out to the scope of people's lives and conflicts into the thousands, and proceed to scope out as we get into astronomically higher numbers of decimal place.

Jane said...

That's awesome Patrick-- I love the idea of scaling the subject matter as we go infinitely further into the decimal places... I'm calling on you as a co-conspirator this summer when it's time to launch the project!

Dennis G. Jerz said...

>play interactive fiction game

No, this blog about someone writing her dissertation looks interesting instead.

Thanks for the laugh, and good luck!

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