Das Cyber Media Haus

in case anyone's interested:

2005-12-09T03:22:00.000-08:00

wrap-up

2005-12-09T02:57:00.000-08:00

So it's the end of the semester, and odds are it is the end of this blog. Before signing off, I want to reflect on my experience of keeping a blog:

1. It was really hard.
I maintain a website as well, and just for things like this in general it is REALLY hard for me to keep on top of updates. I especially had trouble coming up with the non-reading response entries. I feel that this is because I don't tend to update just because it's something I should do. When I made those posts, I wanted to make them about something I was really fascinated by. Quotas are hard for me to deal with and I don't think I'm very good at just picking a topic out of the air to write about.

2. Guilt!
I found myself feeling sick with guilt for not updating some weeks. It was a specter that loomed over me for the rest of the week, nagging me "update your blog..." and what not. It was really weird.

3. Awesome concept for reading responses.
I love the concept of being able to maintain an open forum of our thoughts which people can take part in and leave their own thoughts about matters.

4. But...
No one ever left their thoughts about matters.

5. Except!
The spammers.

6. Crazy man on the street corner, or omnipotent being... on the street corner?
I'd say that I agree with the general consensus that blogs are giving more people a voice. That's great. Yay democracy! But how many people actually listen? My humble little blog is somewhat obscure in the online world. Approximately one blog is being created every second. Damn, that's over 30 million new blogs a year. Why is anyone going to listen to what I have to say? I don't think anyone visited it aside from class members. But that's really fine, because those are the people who'd probably be most interested in reading it.

So yeah.

Lots of love,
n

What's Wrong With the Kids Today?

2005-11-12T18:13:00.000-08:00

I think that, as of right now, the demographic that has been effected the most in this nation by the advent and proliferation of the internet as a way of life has been teens. The process of moving from childhood to adulthood is difficult and often times very traumatic. To me, it seemed that in years past journals and diaries played a large role in helping teens vent and express their emotions in a safe environment. Oftentimes there was some sort of locking mechanism on the diary itself, and the key was to be carried in person. In a word: private. This has been a common practice for years. Some of the world's greatest authors have created their best work in this sort of setting.

It seems like this occurrence is waning with the proliferation of the blog. It really seems as if it's almost a polar opposite of the medium of the diary. It is an extroverted form of expression. People can log on and read your most personal thoughts. But it is all voluntary too. So why? There are two factors that I consider. The first is that there is often times a sense of gratification. Fellow bloggers will comment on what you've posted. Often times that can be a source of support. The second is the anonymity. There is a level between you and what you write that gives the sense of detachment. The act of using a handle (as I, Handel, am) gives you a new sense of identity to some degree, however small that may be.

All I know is that if I was 13 now, I sure as hell wouldn't keep a blog. All my writing would still be kept in my little red journal.

Database Narrative, Data's Imparative

2005-11-07T01:44:00.000-08:00

Ok...

My last post did a got me thinking a lot about the inherent structure of the DB narrative. We looked at two contrasting images of DB narrative. One, Soft Cinema, played out in very much the same style as a film. The user watched it play out. The act of watching it was personal experience only with regard to the overal presentation. Two separate audiences watching it would have different experiences, and the same audience watching it twice would have a different experience each time. That's about as personalized as it gets. The second, Tracing the Decay of Fiction, has a more personalized effect in that a user is actually inputting commands. These two works are obviously different; one could be shown on a projector in a theatre, and the other could be downloaded and "played" on a personal computer. It would seem, almost, as if they could be considered to be representative of two separate media. And yet they both are examples of the DB narrative.

The one thing that I thought was similar between these two works is the fact that they are apparently lacking in any substantial progression. There doesn't feel like any propulsion from the beginning to... anywhere, really. I believe that (at least) I personnaly feel that I've been conditioned to expecting a more linearized progression. There is some part of me that expects the "Once upon a time..." and the "... and they all lived happily everafter." to be in any dynamic work (by that meaning a work that is not static in the way a painting or a photo is). I do like the idea of changing things up. I like sometimes when music doesn't have a true cadence to draw everything up in a nice little ribbon. I like being left hanging. But I still acknowledge the fact that I am not accustomed to that.

It seems to me that DB narratives have somewhat of a difficulty in providing that sort of alpha and omega. Texas, for example, just seemed to jump into (and eventually out of) a narrative at any given point in the narrative's progression. I didn't really feel like I got anything (narratively speaking) out of it, though I really enjoyed it as a work in its own right. Likewise, while I enjoyed Tracing the Decay of Fiction quite a great deal, I felt like it was more of an interactive brochure, than a fully-fledged narrative.

Fallout is da Bomb (RTSs are fun too)

2005-11-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

We've been talking a lot about DB narratives lately. I've been very interested in how DB narratives can apply to the realm of video games. We had mentioned about how video games can be considered a DB narrative in the way that the user is somewhat in charge of the unraveling of the stored story. I was giving this some thought, and I think that for about 80 or 90% of video games this isn't fully true. While it is true that there is some lateral movement possible in most games (such as side quests and what not), it can essentially be boiled down into getting from point A to point B. Point B is a given, and the player really has no choice as to whether they want B to be the end result. There are, however, two types of games (that come directly to memory) which do not necessarily adhere to this.

The first I'd like to mention is real-time strategy (RTS) games. There is no real narrative at all to these games. They're like chess on steroids. You have the goal of beating the enemy into submission, and there is no plot to be unraveled. I think that these games could be considered exempt entirely from the DB "narrative" designation. Just win.

The second is games like Fallout. You have (essentially) a fully open-ended environment to interact with. Do you want something that someone else has? Be a friendly and persuasive negotiator and become well known for your diplomatic abilities... or you can do like I do and just steal it from them when their back is turned. The game will adapt to these sort of decisions, changing the environment to reflect your actions. If you are upset by what someone says about you, you can literally decide to murder everyone in town (grizzly, I know). Beware that in the next town the word of your evil-deeds has most likely spread and your reputation will repulse people. Even this example, though, has a starting point and an end goal.

In this analysis I am looking at games as functioning similar to novels, and if they adhere significantly to that design of a linear narrative it entirely negates their ability to function as a DB narrative. I also believe that recently there have been an increase in non-linear narratives, or at least non-linear narratives with linear sub-narratives incased within. Management/god games like Black and White and the Sims, the GTA series. These could all be seen as possessing a more DB-style narrative...

Right?

Wow, there are a lot of games out there... and I've kinda confused myself thinking about all of them...

And Another Thing!

2005-10-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

The following is an account and critique of an event I witnessed this summer:

this man at the dentist's office was going on a mad rant about how children these days lack communication skills and a decent grip on the world. he kept going ON and ON and ON. he placed the blame on television and computers and the internet, just right down the good ol parental list. i just sat there and took it all in. i watched a lot of TV growing up, i have three computers and have managed upwards of 4 websites at any given time. i absolutely adore the label that adults have given us: generation W.H.Y.... isn't that clever?? man, cuz it sounds like Y which relates with respect to generation X... but it's also a question. now adult-types, i'll tell you W.H.Y., and i think it has scarcely to do with TV watching, internet surfing and killing prostitutes and getting your money back after you "patronize" them under the overpass in Grand Theft Auto 3. it's because parents don't put any effort into raising their children. the question W.H.Y. doesn't refer to WHY the kids are the way they are, i think, but more specifically it refers to adults. WHY the hell did they think they should have children when they are so self absorbed in their own lives and careers? WHY did they want their children to be raised almost exclusively in a daycare? WHY are they so hostile to new forms of entertainment? WHY WHY WHY, PARENTS??? That's right, you hatched us, so now we're asking you. Anyway, this gem of human existence started talking about jobs and careers and how kids these days are going to be unprepared for the real world, are total slackers and overall lack people skills. after he brought up this subject, it finally came out that he worked at a TV station.... i finally had to step in and ask him which station he worked for. THE WB. fascinating. perhaps he's of the persuasion that there should be an age requirement for watching TV (the "send the kids to bed before Dawson's Creek" camp)? My mind was having a field day trying to process his logic of simultaneously working at a TV station and blaming it for the corruption of (his) children. then his kid came out from the dentist's room carrying a Sony PSP. that just baffled the shit out of me. was he playing it while they worked on his teeth, or was he carrying on an intelligent and cogent conversation with the dentist during his exam? the latter would have showcased his people-skills and surely would have made his father proud. "mrhff mrarg mrf aaarrrggg," "yes, i do think that the UN should have the final say in international crises." "mrgarrr arrgeeer" "i told you before, i'm already married"

In my previous post, I talked about certain new media being criticized by aficionados of older media. That is, new media being judged in the context of old media. In this post however, I want to comment on the judgment of new media in a social context. We (gen-WHY) are, it seems, good scapegoats for the rest of the nation to dig into sometimes (I don't want to sound like an angsty teen here, because I'm not either of those things). Perhaps we could be viewed as having entered into the world while the gods was asleep at their posts. We're the slacker generation, the fat generation, the computer-addicted generation, the generation that doesn't give a damn, the generation-WHY Eric Chester doesn't have to pan-handle for change on the street corner.

Perhaps the WHY refers to WHY we are the apathetic, chubby techno-geeks we are. Now I hate the idea of saying things that are a sort of catch-all for the people in this generation, but I think it's safe to say that in this nation we are the first group of people who have been immersed in computers, cell phones, the internet, et al. practically from birth. Since these sorts of things have played a large part in our lives, people seem quick to criticize their effects on us. Why is it that we can't do a more thorough search of society for this cause? Why does something have to be wrong with us in the first place? This all reminds me of the nation's response to jazz in the 20th century. Something HAD to be wrong with the kids because they wanted to dance and go out and listen to music. Jazz had to be at fault. It's just too sexually suggestive, and it's going to turn us all into harlots and men of loose morals. I say this in jest, but it really does seem to be an echo of history now. We are defined by Gen-WHY expert Eric Chester as being "those legally old enough to have a job but too young to know that the words 'rap' and 'music' don't belong in the same sentence." Fo' shizzle, daddio.

Okay, so in summary my two questions are: a. WHY do the majority our problems, as a generation, necessarily stem from media? and b. Who said we have a problem in the first place? Is it a requirement?

The word is about, there's something evolving
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution's near
But to me it seems quite clear

That it's all just a little bit of history repeating

The newspapers shout a new style is growing
But it don't know if it's coming or going
There is fashion, there is fad
Some is good, some is bad
And the joke is rather sad

That its all just a little bit of history repeating

And I've seen it before
And I'll see it again
Yes I've seen it before

Just little bits of history repeating

Some people don't dance, if they don't know who's singing
Why ask your head, it's your hips that are swinging
Life's for us to enjoy
Woman, man, girl and boy
Feel the pain, feel the joy

And side step the little bits of history repeating

Underprivileged Media

2005-10-25T00:42:00.000-07:00

It has taken me forever to formulate this damn thought... For days I walked around with this idea into my head, and yet every time I sat down to my computer I would just stare at the blinking cursor for the longest time with no bloody idea about what it was that I was going to write about. No more, though. This time I pinned that elusive thought down and stapled it to the floor of my brain several times with industrial-strength BOSTON staples. So there, thought.

I have always felt like there is a war that new forms of media have to fight in order to gain acceptance. We've talked about this a little bit in class, but it is something that has been driving me INSANE since before I can remember. It seems that a newer medium is forced to prove itself to be of value to society, and most times this is an uphill struggle. I've been thinking about this specifically with respect to video games and comics. Both media have similarities with both film and written text. My problem in the matter lies in the concept of viewing comics and video games as bastardizations of text. It's a very elitist point of view to take, and probably has something to do with why I became a media studies major. When I was younger, I think it's safe to say that I was somewhat looked down upon by my older sister for being so invested into video games. At that point she had spent the majority of her literate years sequestered away from the world and entwined in her books. She would often criticize me (sometimes quite harshly) for playing video games, and tell me how they could never compare to a good book. I've still been waiting for her to be proven right. I say this because I think it is ridiculous to try and judge one of these media on the basis of the other. I could never genuinely say that I got more satisfaction out of a video game than I did a novel, and I could never say the converse. It seems to be quite a similar case for comics (although my sister didn't give me quite as much hell, since I did have paper in my hands). Does the fact that they have pictures in them make them too proletariat for the average novel connoisseur? Hrmmm....

Another obnoxious thing I find is when people go to see a movie which was based off of a novel/video game/comic/TV show/etc. and then walk out of the theatre saying things like "OH MY GOD, THE NOVEL WAS SOOOOO MUCH BETTER." And it always has to be a movie rendition that sparks this thought process. It just seems absurd to draw direct correlations between subjects on two very different media formats. I mean, sure there are probably parts cut out that people liked or whatnot, but the material itself undergoes an immense transfiguration. If you have a little freetime, reduce a 500 page novel down into a 120 page screenplay. Then if you have a bit of extra time to spare, turn that into a feature-length film. Also bear in mind that during all of this the material is being parsed through multiple brains, so the result is not the vision of a single mind's eye. So you liked the book. Good. You didn't like the book. Good. You liked the movie. Good. You didn't like the movie. Good. But it just doesn't make sense in my mind as to why anyone should feel the need to say that one was better than the other.

$5.00 says that nobody walked out of the theatre after seeing Brazil in 1985 and said "Well, it was a nice try, but the song is far better." Put that in your pipe.

Incidentally, I love my sister.

No Pane, No Gain

2005-10-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest and say that I love comics. I consider myself to be pretty well exposed to the various types/genres/eras/whatever you want to call them. They've never played a huge part in my life, but I love reading them all the same.

The thing I wanted to focus on the most in class today was the idea of the comic itself returning. We talked a lot about what the implications are of comics proliferating throughout the online community, but we only talked briefly about the future of comics as still being something that is printed on paper and read. It is my personal belief that comics is on the verge of being revitalized. I think McCloud was a bit too dismissive of Miller's Sin City, and he almost seemed to be taking an elitist stance against it. He seemed to view it as something base and unintelligent, but I don't really feel like it was his place to judge it as such. After all, the primary assumption that comics has fought against is the notion that they are simple sources of entertainment for uneducated people who can't understand and appreciate the finer points in life. It's the same battle that video games has been fighting. In order to win this battle, you need to refrain from waging it against your compatriots.

This being said, I am curious to know what McCloud's take is on the film adaptation of Sin City. In my personal experience, it has come the closest out of any film I know of emulating its comic predecessor faithfully. Marvel has cranked out some movies that have been entertaining, but have stuck very closely to the Hollywood mould. I have seen the Batman movies, the Superman movies, the Daredevil movie, but Sin City was the first in which I really wanted to go back and read the comic (yes, I saw the movie before reading the comic). Moreover, I know that I am not the only one. Several people I know have done the same thing. No matter what your personal convictions are towards the series, you cannot deny that this is a positive thing for the industry.

I also just want to touch briefly on the idea of comics being a medium targeted to the uneducated or blue collar individuals. Some really influential artists have been involved in comics. McCloud mentions it, but Neil Gaiman wrote the stories for The Sandman series. Yoshitaka Amano, a famous Japanese artist, has done the illustrations for many graphic novels (actually, I just recently found out that he did the illustrations for Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters). In short, comics is a serious and legitimate medium. Artists from other media know this and are exploring the possibilities that it provides.

So yeah, I like comics. After finding out about that Amano/Gaiman collaboration, I think I'll be hitting the comic book stores pretty soon... I just wish I had found out about it sooner.

By the by: THE SANDMAN: The Dream Hunters was nominated for Hugo Award and won the 2000 Eisner Award

Source Tags

2005-10-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is an absolutely amazing concept. I really like the idea of crossing (possibly breaking down) a boundary between the online world and that of the unplugged, un-wired, un-wireless and Bluetoothless. I am having trouble deciding for myself whether this sort of thing falls into the category of hypertext, or if it is simply too broad. While it seems to fall into the idea of having a sort of structured and linear-esque essence to it (similar to hypertext), and yet it is very ergodic in nature in that you actually have to hunt down what it is that these tagged pointers refer to.

I've actually known about this site for awhile, but it was only from our recent discussions that I remembered it. Since I used to tag in years past, I encourage you all to go out and try it... I can say that, right? Just don't bomb private property, that's not cool (and not as many people will see your link).

The Loan Gunman

2005-10-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

Hooo...

So my roommate has a pretty slow laptop. I, on the other hand, shelled out a fortune this summer to get my computer burning fast so I could do video manipulation, 3d graphic design, etc... One of the [fairly desirable] side effects is that my computer can run video games REALLY well. Perhaps you can see where this is going. My roomie uses my computer to play games that his can't handle. That's really no problem by me... unless I have things to do (post?).

Now, this may sound like I'm trying to come up with an excuse for why I haven't posted (the main reason was that this was week 1 of 2 from hell), but I'm actually taking this in another direction.

Watching my roommate deftly maneuver through corridors while gunning down anything in his way got me to thinking about media.

Sidebar: I know I've talked about video games quite a bit, but I think it's reasonable to do so in a class that studies new media. I've played them my entire life, but it's only now that I have started to think about them on a deeper level.

I'm starting to look at video games not as a specific medium, but rather as a category for many different media. I suppose that various video games could be classified in multiple ways depending on different criteria, but as I was watching I started thinking of the effect of perspective in relation to games. There are some games which are in first-person (Half Life, Doom). There are also quite a fair deal of 3rd person games where you watch your character interact with the environment (Tomb Raider, Max Payne). There are games in which you assume a sort of god-like roll (Sim City). How do these differences draw the player into the game? It's quite common for my roommate to say things like "how did he hit me?" He talks as if the character he commands is an extension of himself.

I'm still trying to figure out what all of this means, but this is something that I find really interesting. Anyone have thoughts on the subject?

The Right Typing on a Typerwriter

2005-10-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

Everything in the world has been working against me for the past week, but I finally am getting out my post (more to come for this week, too).

I found the Gitelman readings to be quite engaging. Perhaps a reason for this is her seemingly casual and obtuse references to the paranormal in relation to new technology. Specifically, she talks about seances and typewriters. It was really this more than anything that stuck with me. I began to think about remote viewing. If you don't know what that is, it's basically the concept of using clairvoiance to see the goings on at another perhaps inaccessible location. I was fishing for a tie to the readings, but I think that for me the tie came during our class discussion.

We talked about the idea of obsolete technology. Why is it that some things are destined to fail, regardless of their merits, while other technologies succeed? Disbelief aside, imagine if remote viewing was proven to be a legitimate "technology." It seems to me as if there would be initial shock that something like that was possible, but after a while it would tone down into a common commodity. This is not unlike the life of the typewriter. It was initially a rather astounding technology, but it eventually diminished into a rather unremarkable staple of modern society (well... even less so with the advent of the word processor).

So yeah.

In the words of the 733t, "WTF?"

2005-09-25T23:37:00.000-07:00

Okay... does anybody who is in my class know how to get rid of the damn spammers on the comments section? I want to have a comments section, because I like having a place for people to leave feedback. What I don't like is writing about the news media and then being told how cool my blog is and how I should check out a blog for HUMMINGBIRD FEEDERS. I love the concept of a machine parsing my text and seeing that I compare McLuhan's writing style to a hummingbird, and then making the logical operation that I must be a bird enthusiast.

IF "Dieses ist mein Handel" prints "hummingbird"
THEN "Dieses ist mein Handel" = Audubon member
ELSE select another arbitrary buzzword
AND faith_in_humanity = faith_in_humanity - 1

Can anyone help?

On a Wing and a Fare

2005-09-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about the emergency landing of the Jet Blue flight on Wednesday. From a media studies perspective, I'm really interested in the fact that the passengers were able to watch the televised newscasts of what was happening (via streaming satellite). Apparently the onboard screens were shut off ~15min before landing, but they were still able to watch live footage of themselves circling for hours while experts were hypothesizing as to what their fate would be. I was thinking back to the concept of immediacy. Live television, for good or bad, has become a staple of modern televised news. Live TV gives us perhaps a greater sense of immediacy, as we see what is unraveling as the event itself takes place. Spectators at the landing - when the freeway was shut down and everyone watched - could be said to have an even greater sense of immediacy, as there is no mediation imposed on them by broadcasted news. The passengers are in the most immediate of all states, though, in that they are simultaneously the spectator and the spectacle.

Just thought that was an interesting set of circumstances.

Booin' at McLuhan

2005-09-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

I dreaded this reading from day one when I saw it on the schedule. Well... perhaps "dread" is the wrong word. I guess I was just not looking forward to it. It comes down to this:

Ol' Marshall annoys the hell out of me.

He annoyed me back in Intro, and (lo and behold) he annoys me now. His writing flows like a hummingbird. Just when he gets to something that sounds interesting, BAM! He's off to another subject. It's a pity the man is dead, because it means that I can't take him out myself. Anyway...

His deal of hot and cold media made some sense, but he was so insistent upon cramming everything into these two diametric labels that I was just left thinking "so what?" I felt he really tried to pidgeon hole media with this concept, but I feel that it's deceiving to act as if any of these media forms are single-sided as far as their "hot" and "cold"-ness. TV, he says, is an example of cold media (meaning it's interactive... right?)... but how is it interactive to sit there and watch a program? I guess you can change the channel... but you're still not really interacting with it all that much. So why did he have to insist upon these labels? No need, Marshall, no need.

That's pretty much it... So much for "Understanding Media."

Love and Death, or Shaking the Speare of Shakespeare

2005-09-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this as a sort of response to amers' post entitled "Death and Text: Some Shakespeare." I agree with most of what amers has said here, but the comment "Love is not permanent" caused me to raise my eyebrows. I have some issues with that, perhaps because it's a rather broad statement. Love is not permanent to whom? If it is a love that two people share with eachother, and they carry it with them to their deaths (which indeed is inevitable and should be expected), could it not be said that that love was permanent for them? If viewed from a third party, one could say "well, they're both dead, and with it dies their love." But what about love on a universal (or at least global) level? There are 6 billion plus people on the planet as of late, so there's definitely a substantial amount of love in there.

Then I suppose there's the somewhat angsty teen way of looking at it in that all love is destined to fade to black... or perhaps a depressingly gloomy shade of gray.

Regardless of my thoughts on the subject, I want to close this post with one of my favorite quotes. It's from the film "Hedwig and The Angry Inch."

[a very obnoxious woman is singing "I Will Always Love You" in one of the trailers in the park]
Tommy: What do you think? Do you think love lasts forever?
Hedwig: No, but this song does.

Tertiary Orality??

2005-09-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

Okay... it's been a bit of a while since I've posted, but I posted at the beginning of last week, and this is the end of this week... so yeah. Also, I wanted to spend a bit of time rolling the concepts of primary/secondary orality vs. literacy around in my head. Let me take a crack at what I've got thus far:

Video games. Damn, man. I've been playing video games since before I can remember. Hell, I might have been born with a Nindendo controller in my hand. Point is, in my ~15 years of video game experience there has been a HUGE change in technology. Example: I just installed both "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Call of Duty" on my computer. Both are WW2 first-person shooter games. The former was made in 1992, the latter in 2003 (I think). The differences are astounding. "Wolfenstein 3D" was groundbreaking in its time. It was among the very first 3D games. It also featured actual digitized voices for the enemy characters. The plot was simple: you're a POW who has to blast his way out of a Nazi castle. "Call of Duty" on the other hand has graphics that leave Wolfenstein in the dust. All characters audibly speak dialog (not just random shouts in German); there is an orchestral score; you take the role of US, UK and USSR soldiers in recreations of battles like Normandy and Stalingrad. I know this isn't all that unique when you look at the whole gamut of games out there today, but the point is that in the span of 10 years, games have come incredibly far.

Now I'll bet you're wondering what this has to do with the concepts of orality and literacy. Well let's get down to it.

The graphics are amazing... wow... but forget about that. The thing I want to look at is character dialogue. I grew up playing games where all storylines were conveyed through text. Little blue boxes with white words would pop up on the screen and tell you who was planning on destroying the world. Basically, the plot progression of any "in depth" or explansive video game (e. g. not typical arcade games) relied on the concept of literacy. That's the way it was from its inception, and it's still quite prevalent today. Fairly recently, though, it has become commonplace for there to be vocal dialogue in games. Entire storylines are conveyed through speech. Now, do you think it's possible to look at this as some sort of... tertiary orality? Okay, video games originally spawned from the literary culture which has become an intrinsic part of our culture. Now this literacy has been transformed into a sort of orality in these video games. The one difference I see is that we were talking (or Ong was talking) about how the advent of literature isn't really even considered a technology anymore since it is so commonplace. Seeing this tertiary orality as a technology is unavoidable in avid gamers, however. Is this because society is moving so fast that a technology jump of this sort takes place over a very short period of time? My thoughts on this are getting progressively abstract, so I feel like it would be best to stop here before I confuse myself. Anyone have any ideas about this, though?

A comic

2005-09-06T02:00:00.000-07:00

Just thought of this comic after class today. It's entitled "Game System" and comes from the Perry Bible Fellowship. It's a great comic series that comes out (approximately) every Sunday. The website is www.thepbf.com.

Random Thought Deposit

2005-09-05T02:35:00.000-07:00

If my thoughts were like grains of rice (or some other non-perishable good), this particular entry is akin to a burlap bag into which I can place said grains so as to make room for others.

Did that make any sense? Man, I hope so cuz that took a while to think up there.

Okay. I thought this was somewhat amusing. This is an ad from microsoft. I don't know if you can read it, but it is for "the new msn Search." It says "Have questions, get answers with Instant Answers." Okay... who was the brain-box behind the Instant Answers campaign? Now you can get answers with answers, but these answers are of the instant sophistication. Wait, it gets better. The sample query is "Where is champagne?" A reasonable question, as many people know of the beverage, but not the geographic location that this particular libation hails from. Thanks to the magic of Microsoft's new Instant Answers we get solid results: "Champagne (wine) sparkling wine produced by a traditional method in the Champagne region around..." Now, perhaps I am just not quite as clever as those hepcats from MS, but all this search has managed to tell us is that champagne is located in the Champagne region. Magnificent. I am so glad to see that Microsoft is continuing its tradition of excellence.

Next thought: College is weird this year. I have a roommate... I mean, he's a close friend of mine, but still. I got a single freshman year and I was a sponsor last year, so this is a relatively new experience for me. I'm also going to be working a lot harder. Last semester was my hardest so far (including my brief stint in the science world), and yet I managed to get really decent marks. I need to start figuring out my life. Damn... I mean, where am I living next summer? How am I going to get a job? What are my goals after college? I have to start thinking about all this junk now and it's creepin' me out. I kinda just want to be a kid again.

That's a funny thought: being a kid again. I've been feeling recently that I am sort of growing out of college. I mean, I love it here. I love going to school, hanging out with friends, etc. but the thing that gets me is the college social life. I mean, talk about banal. Every weekend it's the o so common "what are we going to do tonight?" and the answer is always something to do with sleazy college parties and alcohol. Surprise! I'm bored of that. I want a real life where I do real things. I sowed my oats freshman year, and now I'm actually proud of the fact that I can remember what I did on a given night. It's ridiculous. This weekend, for instance: dry week ended for almost all (all?) of the colleges except for Pomona. So what happened? College kids swarmed like flies around a dead animal. What the hell? It looked like someone had detonated a small thermonuclear device at CMC. I wanted to drag some cops up there just so they could bust people on littering alone. Wow, such egregious disrespect for... everything.

Blah.

Okay, I need to wake up early for class, so I should make the 2ft trek to my bed. Goodnighter.

Thoughts deposited.

I'm an Intruder

2005-09-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

"Intruder" was really kinda depressing. A lot of emotions went through my head as I "played" it. Actually, the first time I explored it was at ITS. I went there with a friend to print out some articles (including "Remediation). While I was waiting for her to get all of her stuff squared away, I just fired it up. There is no audio on the computers there - which in reflection is a really smart idea in a communal technology center - and because of this my reaction to it was disturbingly different from what it would be the second time around.

As I played, I was bombarded with phrases on the screen. Due to the resolution of the flash program and the speed at which the text was traveling, I found it quite difficult to read and eventually I had pretty much given up hope of catching more than about 10% of it. I was somewhat entertained by the games, even though I couldn't really figure out the point/rules of some (and the vagina dropping strange objects out of it was quite confusing for me, too). I made it to the football one when my friend was ready to go.

So I came back to it this evening on my computer with my speakers and my reaction was... quite different. I'll be totally honest and say that I am a big gamer, and because of this I naturally gravitated towards the visual/gaming aspect of the experience. As I continued to play though, I started picking up bits and pieces of the story being told ("killed a man," "whore house") and I began feeling quite uncomfortable. I felt like I was a child playing a video game and feeling very uncomfortable while two adults (parents?) were arguing nearby. I felt like I was listening in on something that was not meant for me to hear (I was, for all intents and purposes, and intruder), and because of this I tried to pull myself further into the game, using the stimulus of it to drown out whatever else was going on.

Then I started realizing that, for some games, the story wouldn't continue until you messed up (the football one and the girl jumping over the hole, for instance). I was trying to do well in these games so that I would be spared from listening to it.

The games themselves were very simple, and reminded me of playing the atari on Saturday mornings. For me, that's a really innocent and comforting memory. The final game really bothered me, though. I thought of footage I had seen of US helicopter pilots gunning down several people (the video can be found here... it's rather disturbing, so heads up). This particular game drew a connection between my happy atari memory and the helicopter footage, and that made me uneasy.

Now! How this relates to the "Remediation" article in my head: I think that "Intruder" is an example of something that's hypermediated. I was hit with a deluge of stimuli. So much so that it seems impossible for me to absorb all of it. This is remedied slightly in this case by the fact that I could watch "Intruder" several times in order to take in as much as I could. In much of hypermediated mainstream media, the viewer is constantly being smacked in the face by information. "Remediation" was obviously written a few years ago... yes, I just leaned over and checked... so it was obviously written 5 years ago. The big tipoff for me was the screenshot of CNN. It was being used as an example of a source of information that has been hypermediated, and yet it looks almost spartan when compared to today's MSNBC CBS ABC AOL... I grow tired of typing these names... I just found it quite entertaining to see how far we've progressed as a culture as far as 24-hour news is concerned.

On another note, Blogger's coding for posting messages is really getting on my nerves. It tried to turn all my text into a hyperlink. I also like courier because it makes me feel like a writer of some sort. If it's too much of an eyesore drop me a line and I change it up.

Intro

2005-08-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

Hello World.