I stand before you naked

Oh my. It is with great surprise that I awoke this morning to discover that this little introverted wisp of a blog is Blogger's Blog of Note for the day. I admit feeling overwhelmed and naked as many of you lay eyes on my experimental dissertation blog for the first time.

My other blog Avant Game, where I write for a more public audience about experimental game design and weird, emergent social network phenomena, was a Blog of Note last week, and that was a great experience. I loved meeting all the folk who wandered over from their own dashboards, and clicking back to all of their blogs as well.

But this blog is different. It's very... personal. Until today, the only people reading it, for the most part, were people who knew me.

I've been keeping this blog since I started racing toward an inflexible dissertation filing deadline. I'm a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, where I am earning my degree in performance studies and where I am also a member of the alpha lab for engineering. I am writing about the intersection of digital games culture, ubiquitous computing, and urban social networks. It's a humanities dissertation, but I'm working with a lot of scientific and technical literature as well.

What you should know before you read any further: This blog is the online manifestation of the knot in my stomach that has been tightening over the last 6 months. It is the one moment of each day where I lift my head from my work and attempt to see the world for a few minutes. I am coughing up one sentence that means something to me--and probably means little to anyone else. That's scary. Because I know dissertation writing out of context often appears convoluted, or overly academic, or just plain awful.

This blog has helped me get up every single day, Sundays, holidays, and keep writing, even when it feels like a Sisyphusean task. I am writing roughly from 8 AM to 10 PM every single day. Later when I am facing a chapter deadline. I have filed 240 pages with my committee and will file the final 160 later this month, I hope. Although that will probably entail writing until 1 AM instead of 10 PM.

I have been keeping this blog through pneumonia, two broken ribs, taking a leave of absence from my job as a lead game designer, and more. It has helped.

So be kind as you look at my naked, decontextualized body of dissertation writing. I know these aren't the best sentences you've ever seen. They certainly aren't the best sentences I've ever written. For some of those, check out my published articles and design manifestos.

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P.S. Here's best sentence #70-whatever-I'm-up-to:

All built environments, computer-augmented or not, are symbolically encoded, and therefore possess a virtual aspect.