Culture

Turning the Tables

April 5th, 2017

Photos courtesy of Steve Maul of Little Big Wars

Across Fargo-Moorhead, an invisible conflict plays out. Wars between great armies, both familiar and fantastic, are waged across well-worn battlefields. Noble knights and cunning mages plunder the depths of the world’s hidden places for untold treasures. Strategists and conjurers pit their monstrous servants against one another in a bid for supremacy.

These fearsome clashes between warlords and adventurers take place, not where…

Woodlands and High Plains Powwow

March 31st, 2017

Photo by Dreamcatcher Photography by Amber Mattson

Starting a new month is exciting and we’re also getting closer to spring. To make it a great start with a meaningful moment in 2017, Woodlands and High Plains Powwow (WHPP) will be held on April 1.

WHPP selected this year’s theme as “Mni Wiconi (Water is Life): Standing Together.” This theme, the Lakota phrase Mni Wiconi, is chosen by students to show their support and unity for the water protectors who aim to preserve and protect…

Holonis: the social connective tissue we didn’t know we needed

March 31st, 2017

Walking among shiny booths filled with gizmos and robots, drones and VR headsets galore, we wander aimlessly. It’s SXSW’s tech expo and it’s almost too much for even the biggest nerd.

As we bounce from an autonomous videobot to a 3D video screen, we see free smoothies and dig in. “Raul Gomez,” I hear from behind me. Standing at the side of the booth is Matt Wein, former Fargoan, web developer, promoter and one-time sales associate for HPR.

After we exchanged all the small world…

The best of South by Southwest

March 29th, 2017

By Sabrina Hornung and Raul Gomez

sabrina@hpr1.com, raul@hpr1.com

Games and bars, buses and celebrities

A few weeks ago, the High Plains Reader left the Midwest to explore South by Southwest. We navigated the music-filled streets and delved into the realms of interactive, music, and red carpet film events. We even met some friends along the way, who introduced us to a bit of local flavor. Enough about us -- Here are our greatest SXSW hits!

HBO Escape Room - Escape rooms like Fargo’s own…

The Searchers

March 29th, 2017

Searching on the Internet has become so commonplace today that I have forgotten what computing life was like without it. The amount of online information available to us is staggering.

Now we have a different problem. How do we get our heads around the few paragraphs out there that we need for a book report, a research paper, or just plain curiosity? What method do we use to sort through the millions of web sites on the Internet to find ”How many green M & M’s are there in an 8…

Green Card Youth Voices launches award-winning book

March 29th, 2017

Hagen-green card voices- book - photo by C.S. Hagen

From the White House to the North Dakota State Legislature to Fargo, anti-immigrant sentiments have sparked protest and further polarized the nation, since President Trump took office.

And while the war against immigrants continues to claim front-page news, thirty-one Fargo High School immigrants and former refugees took center stage Tuesday during the Building Bridges conference.

They shared harrowing stories of daring escapes from Middle Eastern and African war zones, and life in the…

A send-off for Darcy Corbitt

March 29th, 2017

At the end of this summer, we’ll be losing one of the best trans activists this state ever saw: a sassy, fierce, and passionate lady by the name of Darcy Corbitt. She wasn’t afraid to say what needed to be said, hold people accountable, or work tirelessly to make the world a better place. I had the honor of asking her a few questions about her time here.

High Plains Reader: What was your call to activism and what motivates you to keep fighting?

Darcy Corbitt: My call to activism began…

48th ANNUAL UND WRITERS CONFERENCE, “CITIZEN”

March 15th, 2017

The 48th Annual UND Writers Conference, “Citizen,” will take place March 22-24, 2017, at the Memorial Union on UND’s campus in Grand Forks. The Conference will feature authors/artists who contemplate what it means to be a “Citizen” of the Red River Valley, North Dakota, the US, and the world in our current situation. The invited authors consider US life from a wide range geographic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. Through conversations about their work, the UND…

Is bigger really better?

March 15th, 2017

For those of you with your minds in the gutter, I am talking about computer keyboards. This is, after all, a Geeky Technology column.

The most common kind of keyboard is referred to as a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard after the keys on the top row of letters. It was invented by C. L. Scholes in the 1860s, when he was working out the best places to put the keys on a manual typewriter.

Computer keyboards are very problematic. The early keyboards were all the same size, the same shape, and the same…

The Sandra Larson incident

March 15th, 2017

During the dark hours of a very early morning in late August of 1975, Sandra Larson found herself completely bewildered in the back seat of her own vehicle after an encounter she and her daughter, as well as her boyfriend at the time, had experienced. To this day, there still isn’t a real explanation of the events the three experienced almost forty-two years ago.

They had been traveling very early one morning, around 4am, down the stretch of road along I-94 toward Bismarck when, at…