This space is reserved for my own writing. Interviews with me about these events can be found on my press page. My writing about my Jeopardy experiences has been moved to here.
I keep an active blog at litchin.wordpress.com. This site started as an archive of the posts made from my literary mailing list (litchin@) and my musical mailing list (mellifluously@). While the lively community of responses are missing from the archive, the musings have not stopped.
Below are pieces that I personally wrote about student government actions or student activism efforts I was involved in. Please see the activism section of my Press page for more context.
Below are some papers from classes that I took at MIT as an undergrad. I was particularly proud of them at the time and save them here for memories’ sake.
I took this class with Professor Eugenie Brinkema, the professor who inspired me to minor in Comparative Media Studies through her stunning teaching of 21L.011 - The Film Experience. For my last undergraduate semester at MIT, I took her seminar about color in film which pushed my analytical skills more than ever before.
After taking 21L.430 / CMS.920 (Narrative and Popular Culture: Children’s Cultural Blockbusters) with Professor Marah Gubar in Spring 2015, I turned my passing interest in Alice in Wonderland into a more scholarly one. I ended up teaching several classes about Alice and children’s literature in general for MIT’s Educational Studies Program, modifying what I had learned from Professor Gubar into a class of my own.
I took this class with Professor TL Taylor. It’s honestly been an honor to work with her and I’ve really enjoyed looking more in-depth in sociological issues around gaming. Although the papers were a bit more surface level than I would have liked, I definitely feel like I have the groundwork for doing more research
I took this class with Professors Mathias Kolle, Nic Fang and the inimitable Barbara Hughey. Although this was not my first choice of class to take, I find myself still referring back to its critical lessons of data presentation, lab notebook-keeping and measurement analysis.
The project I chose for this class was investigating how varying ingredient ratios of a shortbread cookie recipe changed the end cookie result. I chose this project because I wanted to build up my own intuition of how baking works rather than rotely following a recipe. While the cookies were questionable, I learned a lot about food science and even got to present this at the MIT Open House, thanks to Professor Fang.
I took this class with Professor Nick Montfort. It’s been the first time in a while since I’ve done a creative writing class since elementary school and I found the work really cool.
For my final digital project, I made a text adventure to make fun at the central topic of the class: “metalepsis”. The main thing that I learned is that puzzle design is hard. While completable in its current state, it’s extremely opaque at what the right moves should be, so don’t beat yourself up over it too much for not finishing it.
I took this class with Professor Mikael Jakobsson. I really enjoyed this class and managed to write papers that I didn’t feel were overly rushed by my college life. I also really appreciated the opportunity to dig deeply into game studies, which was something I never had a formal grounding in before taking this class.
