Walter Dean Myers: Author

  He is one of the most prolific authors of our time. Since the late sixties he has written 90 books, 85 of which have been published. His writing has won many awards and garnered him plenty of recognition, some good and some better. This post will take a look at the author of Monster, our class reading, Walter Dean Myers.

   Bio: He was born in West Virginia in 1937 as Walter Milton Myers and somehow ended up in the care of Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem. To this day he has no clue as to why he was given up but he does know that his adopted parents loved him very much.

   Throughout his education he did not do very well academically but played basketball. When he was in high school one of his teachers noticed that Walter liked to write and she told him to always write no matter what happened to him.

   She said, "It's what you do."

A World Gone Virtual

Gaming Hamster is gaming. 

  This week in we are going to talk abut Virtual Worlds, meaning a world/atmosphere that exists in a virtual space as opposed to a physical space. Now, those who know me well will likely be expecting me to talk about videogames because I study/play videogames with great frequency and the subject of Virtual World lends itself so well to a discussion of videogames. Those people will be either disappointing or surprised. I'm not going to talk about videogames today. I'm going to talk about a movie.

  The film industry has made several entries that capitalize and explore the concept of worlds that exist in a different plain of existence, ex. "Inception" or worlds that exist in a computer environment, ex. "The Matrix." Both films are great and to a great job of exploring those various worlds but they have been talked to death and I have nothing new to add to their discussions.



  In the movie I want to talk about today the Virtual World exists in the internet and it wasn't created by robots as a way to subjugate mankind or for any malevolent reason. The world was actually created to bring the planet together. The movie in question is "Summer Wars," an anime, and the Virtual World is OZ, an internet institution that merges the social network and web browsers. Here's a trailer.