According to Forbes Magazine, Amherst College is the 13th best college or university in the United States.
It is not Amherst College’s most impressive ranking. However, it is not college ranking systems that I want to talk about. Rather, the subject of this column will be Forbes’ presentation of Amherst College.
In particular, I was struck by a link on Forbes’ webpage that brings viewers to a small photography gallery, meant to exhibit Amherst’s essence through a collage of images.
If you’re a fan of video games, specifically PC games, you most likely have played Half Life. If you haven’t, it’s a sci-fi first person shooter released in 1998 by Valve, and one of the most important video games in history. Here’s the short version: you play as Gordon Freeman, a physicist in a high tech protective suit, who survives a freak accident in the Black Mesa research facility that results in extra-dimensional creatures infesting the complex. You then fight your way out with a variety of scavenged weapons.
Although the Las Vegas-based band Imagine Dragons has been around since 2008, they’ve only recently become a part of the world of mainstream music. Imagine Dragons is comprised of four people: front man and songwriter Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne Sermon, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman. The band had actually originally considered a different band name, but chose to name the band “Imagine Dragons” as an anagram of the original idea, which, to this day, they still have not revealed.
Last Thursday, I took a trip to Holyoke, MA with my girlfriend to Mountain Park to see the first tour show of Ben Folds Five, which has recently reunited to record a new album entitled “The Sound of the Life of the Mind,” which came out yesterday. This was especially exciting, as it was the first show that Ben Folds Five had done (save a one-time performance in 2008) since the 90s.
A Short History of Ben Folds Five
The summer of 2012 was a shockingly good few months for rock music, or at least I thought it was when I began compiling which albums stuck with me from this summer. I still stand by that assessment, to a degree, especially when it comes to long-established acts absent until they suddenly decided to kick themselves back into shape after years of painfully drawn-out new-release schedules.
The world as we know it is ending. Earth’s rotations have slowed, and the disastrous implications of what society refers to as “the slowing” begin to become clear. Days grow longer first by minutes, then hours, then days and weeks. The government urges people to adhere to “clock time,” now based only on tradition instead of sunlight. Subtle shifts in gravity and circadian rhythms alter peoples’ health as changes in the atmosphere and weather bring natural disasters and crop crises. This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s “The Age of Miracles.”
Those of us who are truly into video games, who have been gaming consistently since we were small, all recognize and hold dear a certain nostalgia when remembering the games of yore. There was something special to them, and none of us are quite sure whether it was something intrinsic to the spirit of the game, or whether our perceptions had changed since we were six years old. Only now do I realize that nothing is missing from modern gaming, but rather something has been added. And that something is remorse. Mercy.
