A new standard: drinking like the rest of the world April 14, 2007
Posted by mwj as opinion, politics, twu, writing. 2 comments.Since I’ve kind of gotten into a habit of posting work published elsewhere, I present my final opinion piece (ever?) for Mars’ Hill, the student newspaper at TWU.
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After the Fraser Health Authority decided we had too much arsenic in our water, Trinity Western University was forced to give students as much clean, tasty water as they could handle. I moved off campus this year, so I was kind of miffed that I missed my chance to drink water at TWU that didn’t taste like goose poop.
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Out of the bubble and into the game November 18, 2006
Posted by mwj as business, games, religion, technology, twu. 1 comment so far.This site has been suffering from schizophrenia lately, divided between thoughts on TWU, vague motions towards the religious, a smattering of the political and a healthy dose of video game frenzy. To cut down on the clutter, I have decided to do the following:
- Everything with a particularly religious bent has been redirected to mythmeme, a site I started with some friends to play with the metaphors various religions bat about these days.
- All my bits and pieces on life at Trinity were to appear on the site twubits.com, but since I find myself caring less and less about the political side of my school, I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing much more from me on that topic.
- This site is going to be dedicated to my attempt to make it big in the electronic game industry. Specifically, I’m going to be posting clippings, theories, success stories, failures, lessons learned and more from the gaming world, crossing the spectrum from the casual game market and its players to “serious games” to the big guns like EA and Blizzard. I want to figure out why they succeed, why they fail and how I can get in the game, first on the level of corporate elearning and eventually the broader entertainment world.
To those of you who have followed my commentary on TWU, thank you for reading. Perhaps out of the new mix there will arise a truly independent student press that will not hesitate to hold the administration accountable. Maybe that will be Mars’ Hill, and maybe it will be another project in the blogosphere where it can remain safe from the pharisees. To those of you who have read this blog for gaming news and general thoughts about the future of technology, stay tuned. It’s time to extend beyond TWU, beyond Langley, and into the future of play.
Bring it home, boys, bring it home October 25, 2006
Posted by mwj as art, design, journalism, media, news, twu, writing. 1 comment so far. 
Raymond’s plan for TWU September 20, 2006
Posted by mwj as governance, politics, twu. 9 comments. I went to my first Undergraduate Academic Council yesterday, and heard Dr. Jonathan Raymond’s unveil some of his new ideas for TWU. The highlights? If all goes as planned at the board meeting in October, Student Life as we know it will no longer exist at Trinity. The focus of both the Board and the President’s Cabinet over the next year will be almost entirely on policy, based on the Carver model. And by next Fall we should have a framework from which to focus on academics and become Canada’s premier Christian university.
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TWUSA wants to spend your money September 13, 2006
Posted by mwj as business, money, twu. 4 comments.Every year we hear about the big pile of sludge money that gets shifted over to the subsequent year’s council, unspent and unused. For the past couple of years it has been around $30,000. The reasons for such a large carry-over each year have more to do with underspent budgets and unclaimed CUBE money than broad financial mismanagement, but the fact remains that it’s a whole bunch of money that we’re left with each year.
Quite frankly, we don’t know what to do with this money, and I would like to hear from students to get some ideas. So far I’ve heard the following:
- Buy a sound system and a stage.
- Invest it in multi-year GICs or something “safe” and let it grow.
- Do some landscaping around Douglas to make campus look nicer (between the LC and Robson maybe?)
- Buy a couple flat screen TVs, put them up in Douglas Centre and transform the place into a major hub of information for the university
- Donate a big chunk to the library to help them with purchasing databases and books
- Start a scholarship fund
- Make every TWUSA event or service free to students so that we don’t keep hitting them up for money all the time
Do you have any other ideas?
UPDATE: I just had a new idea. What if we dissolve the association and just send $300,000 a year into an endowment fund. After 5 years we’ll have about $1.6 million, and about one hundred grand a year from the interest to give to students who need it.
Nested authority at TWU September 6, 2006
Posted by mwj as governance, politics, twu, twusa. 3 comments.I met with Dr. Raymond yesterday. I’d booked 45 minutes but his secretary had cut it down to half an hour and he was 10 minutes late, so I had to be understandably pointed in my approach. We were going to have dinner with him as an executive tonight, so I figured we could save the pleasantries ’till then.
How very unspartan September 4, 2006
Posted by mwj as twu. add a comment.Recreation services has been seen by the suits of Trinity Western University as a bastard child for too long. The club teams, intra-dorm sports and general fitness programs provided for the student body have been undermined and devalued in favour of a small group that we have given far too large a slice of the pie. The six Spartan teams at TWU have received an inordinate amount of attention over the past seven years, and it’s time to re-evaluate and recognize the impact that this imbalance has had on the rest of campus. (more…)
Thumbprints at TWU September 1, 2006
Posted by mwj as politics, twu. 3 comments.It’s been too long, but I’m back, and I’m ready to put my fingerprints all over this clay that we call Trinity Western University.
There’s a new president here, and a new style of leadership. No longer are we Wayside School, a horribly flawed architectural project one story wide and a hundred stories high. Jonathan Raymond has come to flatten this institution and give back power to the people who make this place run.
Those people are the staff that break their backs cleaning up after students. Those people are the professors who take a 50% cut in their paycheck and choose students over the lofty towers of academia. And those people are the students themselves who pay more than they should for their education, taking loans and working part-time jobs for an education they have to keep convincing themselves is worth it. (more…)
Circular defenses and church authority June 8, 2006
Posted by mwj as religion, twu. 4 comments.(Authentic religions) too can degenerate into idolatries; especially where the will to power is waiting to corrupt them; and this, alas, is almost invariably the case when the Church becomes endowed with temporal authority.
-Gabriel Marcel, “What is a Free Man?”
Today I stumbled across the Secular Web, and found an interesting piece entitled Advice from an Agnostic Baptist Minister. The authorship is anonymous (as most agnostic baptists would probably like to remain), but it offers some interesting insights into the forces that keep Christian beliefs firmly entrenched in the minds of their believers.
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Games and the culture of silence May 21, 2006
Posted by mwj as games, politics, twu. 2 comments.Dr. Ian Bogost published an excellent article today about the way in which American mainstream press handled the story of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG. The game (and web site) has pretty strong content, with the potential to make some queasy and others offended. However, as Bogost mentioned before, the efforts made by the game’s creator to examine the motives behind the Columbine massacre are “brave, sophisticated, and worthy of praise.”