scareoset

dani's braindump

a place to dump my thoughts

oh gods it's been a whole year already

its september again??? when did that happen? i guess i'm finished with my first year at DANM? that feels weird. (granted, i am missing a 3–6 month chunk of memory due to medical stuff, but that's a can of worms i don't want to open right now.) 

 

so what have i been up to? (that's both a rhetorical question for a smooth segue and a genuine question because i honestly don't know.) first of all, i put together my committee! i mean that's like, required and all. but i did it. this summer i've been working on my thesis proposal and the first draft of my paper so that i can get my Queer and Gothic design principles solidified before i start making a game guided by them. outside of thesis work, i finished ta'ing for the UC Santa Cruz game design capstone course and the COSMOS summer program for high schoolers and learned two things. 1) holy shit my students are so incredibly talented and capable and 2) hey, i kinda like being on the teaching side of things. i'll just keep that in the back of my mind for a while. 

 

right now i'm working on finishing up some of the bigger readings i assigned myself. this summer, i knocked out:

  • In a Queer Time and Place by Jack Halberstam

  • Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed

  • Poetics by Aristotle

  • The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

  • The Vampire Diaries Volume I: The Awakening by L.J. Smith

  • The Vampire Diaries Volume II: The Struggle by L.J. Smith

  • The Vampire Diaries Volume III: The Fury by L.J. Smith

  • The Vampire Diaries Volume IV: Dark Reunion by L.J. Smith

  • The Vampire Diaries: The Return Volume I: Nightfall by L.J. Smith

  • The Vampire Diaries: The Return Volume II: Shadow Souls by L.J. Smith

 

The Vampire Diaries is,,,not great, if i'm being honest. the series if rife with various forms of bigotry and feels more exemplary of heterosexual (mis)readings of vampirism than Meyer's Twilight Saga. i'm not sure that i will be considering using the books as reference for contemporary vampire Gothic literature.

my roadmap for this year is to get my thesis drafted, focusing primarily on outlining my Queer and Gothic design principles (from now on, i'm going to condense that into one title –– Queer Gothic). after that (which should be done before 2022 begins) i will use my Queer Gothic principles to guide the design and creation of a queer vampire visual novel. the rest of my thesis will be a post mortem of both the game and my thesis as well as, potentially, outlining how i could change the design principles in future iterations.

dani wright