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Robin Writes

Finding history in food, art, and pop culture

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Dissertation Progress: Week of October 5th

Robin October 9, 2020

I started this week off with a visit to a class on plague. Most of my work time was spent compiling manuscripts into an appendix that no one will ever read. And I’m taking out my mounting anxiety by sewing a coat.

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  • Personal

Working motherhood

Robin October 2, 2020

In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever that means. To a certain subset, it means that she was a working mother.

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  • Barebones Cooking

The great pumpkin pudding experiment

Robin September 25, 2020

Do you ever get a taste in your mind? Like you just imagine a flavor that you’ve never had before and you wonder whether you can make it happen? That’s how pretty much all of my cooking projects come together. Call it my particular form of synesthesia.

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  • Scribi

Dissertation Reading (and reading, and reading)

Robin September 18, 2020

A while back I wrote about my dissertation writing process and its many stages of revisions. Now that I technically have a full draft (albeit one with a bunch of holes and exposed seams), I’ve entered the reading phase.

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  • Scribi

Dissertation Progress: Week of September 7th

Robin September 14, 2020

Last week(s) I did lots of work, and none of it was my dissertation.

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  • Robin Reads the Internet

How do you tell the history of video games?

Robin August 28, 2020

Like most people who’ve seen it, I’m feeling that the new Netflix series on the history of the video game industry is… lackluster. The problem is that it’s a history of the industry. The major points in the story are technological paradigm shifts, legal battles, and corporate marketing strategies. These highlights are filled in with personal stories from people who enjoyed the commercial product as kids, people who are overwhelmingly white or male. But even when the series manages to highlight contributions or experiences from a more diverse group – the Black engineer who developed the cartridge system, the woman who pioneered graphic RPGs, the gay man who made a pride game in the middle of the AIDS crisis – these just feel thin, like drops in the bucket that don’t capture what made video games important. Part of the problem is the storytelling, which seems to assume that its audience is simultaneously middle aged white men who grew up playing games or programming, and young kids who know absolutely nothing about anything. But the bigger problem is one of historical discipline – video games might be an industry, but they are also a cultural phenomenon, and their history has to be a cultural one.

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  • Scribi

Dissertation Progress – Week of August 17th

Robin August 21, 2020

I maybe finished a full draft of my dissertation this week?

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  • Personal

Two years postpartum

Robin August 14, 2020

The most important thing I’ve been told in this early stage of motherhood is “the postpartum period is two years long.”

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  • Barebones Cooking
  • Personal

Comfort Food

Robin August 12, 2020

The first time I heard the phrase “comfort food”, I asked my mom what it meant, and she told me it was food that made people feel good. I thought that was a strange definition, since at the time I didn’t really have any emotional association with food and so that was a pretty foreign concept to me. I also remember thinking that definition wasn’t it because people seemed to mean something specific when they said it. Comfort food, I realized, was used to describe all the foods I had a viscerally negative reaction to – food that you might see in a commercial being slowly dropped into melted butter or drizzled over something. I guess I did have an emotional association with food after all.

Red Lobster GIFs | Tenor
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  • Robin Reads the Internet

When is socially-conscious language just racist euphamism?

Robin August 10, 2020

Recently, I’ve seen a couple different variations on this meme:

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