Works in Progress: PreDenta Round 2

I've got a few longer posts percolating, but for now, let's do a quick catch-up, bullet-point style.

• It's a weird week. I've got my top set of wisdom teeth coming out tomorrow, and that consideration has basically shaped how I've planned my last few days. I don't want to start any thought-intensive project now that I'll have to put on hold while my pain recedes. So I'm working double time to bring every side-project to a logical temporary stopping point.
• Also, my jaw hasn't entirely healed from the first batch of teeth removal, which happened two weeks ago today. I can chew, but I can't open my mouth as wide as I normally can. As a result, I don't so much eat my food as mash it into my mouth.  No public consumption of anything larger than a french fry until we're at full recovery.
• Not related to tooth stuff at all: I've decided to switch over from Refworks to Zotero. For those not inclined towards the digital academics, both of them are systems for organizing references. Once you're writing a paper with dozens of references, you need a way to keep them organized. The funny thing, I rarely used Refworks to build bibliographic elements. Rather, it was largely a storage and collating device for my notes. On that level, I feel like Zotero is a better fit, as it emphasizes the "folder" nature of data much more. I could elaborate, but if you don't know exactly what I'm talking about instantly with that last sentence, the explanation would be very detailed, very boring, and probably not worth your time.
• We've got some big stuff in the pipeline at the game studies site I operate at, First Person Scholar.  We've got our regular weekly post, of course, (updated every Wednesday!) but there's a few special features coming that I can only refer to obliquely for now. Stay tuned. Every Wednesday.
• On the subject of burying the lead, a piece I wrote just got published on another critical games blog, Medium Difficulty.  It's one of the few things I managed to get done while recovering from wisdom teeth round 1 (and in fact the experience of recovery lead pretty directly to the topic) and I'm fairly proud of the result. I really appreciated the chance to operate in a different venue; I got to speak on something that's a little more personal than FPS generally does, but without skimping (I hope) on the critical side of things. It's nice to let my verbal skills take rein and perform every now and then. (And nothing says verbal skills like mixing a metaphor.)
• It's really nice out right now. I wish I wasn't doing all the work preparation, so I could enjoy it a bit more.

That's it for now. Expect a post-extraction tooth post-mortem in due time.