You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.

There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.

If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.

Go beat the straw man for a while...

There's plenty of academic, philosophical, and artistic critique of video games out there. The field changes so quickly for technological reasons that the articles (when focusing on a particular game or games) suffer from rapid obsolescence. Nevertheless they exist.

Interactive fiction (e.g. text adventures, remember Infocom?) was a hot topic in the academic world in the early 1980s. As the consumption of video games has increased, so has the academic analysis/criticism. I'm not going to provide a bibliography here since Google, Lexis/Nexis, etc. will make it fairly easy.

Your ignorance of something is not proof of its nonexistence.

Reminds me of this comic...

CSI

Censorship tends to be more popular with the neoconservatives than the Democrats. As far a socialism goes, that talking point will never come true. Hell, even flat out first generation socialism would be better than Bushism.

Religion is a bad thing when you get zealots bent on using legislation to force their beliefs on others. The Republicans have been hitching their wagon to that pony since the 80s. It came back to bite them in the ass this time. Instead of talking about issues and coming up with plans to help people, they decided to talk about abortion, gays, and Israel instead. Hopefully they will learn a lesson from this years vote and reevaluate their priorities.

I was under the impression that after Bush won the last election and started thumping is chest and bellowing something about spending the political capital that he earned. Then he ordered the telecom industry to wiretap everyone's phone and then signed of on systematic torture. Does calling the constitution "just a piece of paper" and spitting on human rights not count as "saying goodbye to your rights"? Let's not forget the borrow and spend policies of the Republicans that got us into a war that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorists or weapons of mass destruction. Maybe if we actually were taxed to pay for this war the people who proudly carried Bush's banner would have paused for a few minutes to think things over.