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April 23, 2007

New Digital Dartboard Post Up on the Other Blog

Hey, why not check out the new, out-of-control Digital Dartboard post up at Lives Online?

There's much digital goodness over there. So get clicking already.

Posted by reparent at 6:18 PM | Comments (0)

Machinima Strikes Back!

Here's this week's machinima goodness: a music video to those upbeat kids, Breaking Benjamin, and their song, "So Cold." Keep smilin' guys!

The video was made by Paul Marino using Half-Life 2, and features a lot of footage from the game. (In fact, if you haven't finished the game yet, there may be a few spoilers in here for you!) I think it's a fascinating mix of the game's narrative with the tone and lyrics of the song.

But wait, there's more! Here's a special bonus sorta-machinima clip for your edification and enjoyment!

GayGamer's FruitBrute clues us in to the latest sorta-machinima video by Monty Oum: Haloid:

It's "sorta-machinima" because Oum takes two iconic video game characters, Master Chief from the Halo series and Samus Aran from the Metroid series, and has them duke it out in the grand tradition of "Who Would Win: Batman or Superman" contests. In this match-up, fortunately, the fight takes an unexpected turn. However, because he's combining franchises, he can't use the games' engines to create the video. He animates it himself. Thus, it's like machinima, but this isn't machinima.

The video is pretty darn good. The animation in the opening sequence isn't great, but Oum's sense of timing and his skills as an editor are on full display. And the fight itself is fun. I have a major quibble with his choice of music, though: when you're going to rely that heavily on Matrix-style bullet-time and superhuman fighting skills, using the music from The Matrix just feels redundant.

Also, you should read Oum's notes (scroll down to the FAQ) on making the video. They did a lot to make me feel better about Master Chief's electro-tingle, but I really wish the gender play in this video were more about the fact that girl gamers roxxor hard, and less about the straight-guy fantasy that "hot lesbians are awesome."

(X-posted on Lives Online)

Posted by reparent at 6:02 PM | Comments (1)

April 19, 2007

A Day of Silence

Yesterday, April 18th, was the annual "Day of Silence."

Obviously, this blog participated, refusing to post in solidarity with the cause.

Day of Silence is a project of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Participants in the Day are encouraged to hand out cards that say something along these lines:

Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence, a national youth movement protesting the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies in schools. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by harassment, prejudice, and discrimination. I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward fighting these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today. What are you going to do to end the silence?

Though I support GLSEN and the Day, I'm not sure that more silence is the best approach. This seems to me to especially problematic given the increasingly oblivious college campus, where half of the student body at any given moment is listening to their iPods. The other half is split between people shrieking into their mobile phones and people click-click-clicking text messages at each other. Each of these groups render themselves completely insensate to the goings-on around them. And they seem to think that their ignorance of their surroundings is contagious. My cats seem convinced that when they can't see me -- because they're hiding under the covers on the bed, for instance -- that I can't see them or their zaftig kitty butts sticking out from under the covers. I bring this up because just the other day I was teaching class and a student received a text message. I knew this because I was standing next to her desk at the back of the room and her phone -- which was sitting on her desk -- started vibrating. BRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZ. Hard to miss. Then, in a fit of thoughtfulness, the student turned away from me and texted a message back. I was relieved that I couldn't actually watch her thumbs dance over hey keypad. Judging by the speed of her click-click-clicking, she's a whiz at it and the blur of her thumbs might have given me vertigo. When she had finished, the student closed her phone -- clam-shell snapping shut -- and placed it back on her desk, turning back to face me again. I wasn't offended, as much as I was puzzled. Who thinks it's okay to do this in class when the professor is standing next to you?! But I digress.

GLSEN encourages "Breaking the Silence" rallies where people speak out about their experiences after the Day, but this seems to me to be yet another preaching-to-the-choir "event" that fails to reach the people who most need to hear something other than the hate and derogatory humor and slurs that our culture still thinks is a-okay.

What do you think? About any of it?

Posted by reparent at 2:51 PM | Comments (2)

April 13, 2007

Why Digital Literacy is Important: Reason #5,774,201

You may have heard about the recent resignation of Monica Goodling, the former top aide to US Attorney General Alberto Gonazales, who quit amid continuing questions about the US Department of Justice's firings of a group of US Attorneys.

When MSNBC reported on Goodling's resignation, they used this photo:

But they might have chosen to use this photo instead:

The second photo comes from Goodling's law school web page. Come with me (and Wonkette) now to that long-ago age of 1999.

As TBogg notes: "I used to have a much higher opinion of people who went to law school before I started reading the internets."

Thanks to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine initiative, web pages that went up and then came down can live forever.

And ever. And ever. And ever.

And you thought it was creepy that the nerdy manager at The Gap had seen your Facebook page when you interviewed for a summer position. Imagine what that page will mean to prospective employers in another 8 years.

Personally, while I do hope that Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy can use the Sneate Judiciary Committee to find out what really happened with these firings, I'm much more interested in getting to the bottom of the mysterious "Ron" (if that is his real name) and the "several kidnapping experiences that are best forgotten."

(X-posted to Lives Online)

Posted by reparent at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut -- Busy, Busy, Busy No More

Well, Kurt Vonnegut is no longer with us. Sigh.

He died from brain injuries sustained in a fall.

This makes me sad. But so it goes.

Vonnegut was the author of many (if you want to know how many, read the obit) books, but my favorites were always Galapagos and Cat's Cradle. I tried reading Slaughterhouse Five, his most famous book, while I was high school. I couldn't get into it. I tried again in college and was puzzled, but it left me cold.

Then, this past summer, I had the opportunity to re-read it. I was supervising a graduate student's comprehensive exams, and she had put it on her reading list. I re-read the book before a meeting with her. Wow.

Some books have a built-in timer -- if you read them too soon, they're flat and tasteless. Too late and they're crusty and bitter. I read The Catcher in the Rye too late. I hated it, and I hated Holden Caufield for all the stupid things he did. It now seems that I had read Slaughterhouse Five too early.

Vonnegut gave a speech at the University of Texas when I was a student there, and I got to see him talk. It was a hoot. He was a hoot -- cranky, obnoxious, and very, very smart. (While in college, The Spouse got to see Leonard Nimoy speak. With all due respect to Mr. Nimoy (and he's due a lot), I still think I got the better deal.)

Vonnegut even ventured into Second Life. You can read about the set-up for the event here, or watch a video of an interview he gave in SL here.

"The time for the final sentence has come. [. . .]

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

-- Cat's Cradle, 1963

Posted by reparent at 7:25 PM | Comments (0)

April 6, 2007

My Very, Very Emo Humps

From the blog that brought you Robo Humps, now comes EMO HUMPS!

You can hate me all you want, but I think I like Alanis again now. (Scroll down to the end of that post and follow the links. They're not ironic, I promise.

Posted by reparent at 7:06 PM

April 3, 2007

Fresh New Designs for Spring!

Spring is just around the corner, and something (besides pollen, mold, and dust) is in the air. It seems that everywhere you look, sites are getting EXTREME MAKEOVERS!

Click the link to read all about it.

First, Arizona Senator John McCain launched his new campaign website: Stormtroopers for McCain '08. Okay, so it's not actually targeted to Imperial Stormtroopers, but you have to admit the color scheme is highly... evocative...

Next, we've got the McCain MySpace page, which got a whole heap of sapphic supportiveness. MySpace is no longer just the domain of America's youth, it's also a favorite hangout of our elected members of Congress. We know what happens when Congressmembers find out about Instant Messenger, but what happens when Senators decide to set up their own pages? Hilarity! It seems that the Senator's staff pirated a MySpace template from Mike Davidson, and didn't give Mike credit for the site design. Oops! And not only that, but they were stealing Mike's bandwidth by including sample images hosted by Mike on their page. This allowed Davidson to create, in his own words, an "immaculate hack" -- he was able to hack McCain's page without touching anything of McCain's. And this is what he did:

Awesome makeover, Mike!

But wait, there's more! Josh Marshall (he of the Talking Points Memo) is redesigning his popular liberal blog, and wants feedback on design ideas. I like this a great deal. Marshall isn't just slapping a new look on the old site, he's researching emerging trends in information presentation to find the best practices for the web. I'm looking forward to test-driving the new look and layout.

And as if that weren't enough, Daily Kos is not just redesigning its site, it's switching formats altogether! As I was reading the post announcing the change, I was struck by a few things:

Lots of folks may freak out over the changes, but I think the community at large will enjoy this new version of DailyKos with its many comments, avatars, and sig lines with pictures. I know I will.

When I read this, I immediately thought of forums, as these are all features of forums. But forums aren't really like blogs, which confused me. (For a comparison of forums and blogs, check out the official forum for the TV show Survivor, and compare that with a blog like Boing Boing. The setup, layout, and overall feel of the sites are very, very different.) But, I decided that I must be imagining things. Until I read:

Forums on the new DailyKos will include: Elections, Politics, Open Forum, Humor and Jokes, and any others that occur to us.

Oh. But notice the rhetoric here -- CT isn't exactly saying that Daily Kos will become a forums-only site, just that the new site will have forums. Whew. That's a relief. Except that...

One feature that will excite many of you is that there will no longer be front page stories, diaries, or mojo, thus simplifying the DailyKos experience for everyone. It might take some getting used to, but we'll all be happier for it afterward.

A blog without front page stories isn't a blog at all. It's a forum. And they're ditching the diaries, too. This does not "excite" me. It saddens me. I found the diaries to be one of the biggest and coolest community-building ideas in the blogosphere. They're going to be using phpBB, an open source forum platform, which is nice, ideologically. But I'm still filled with foreboding.

I have an ongoing discussion with The Spouse about my refusal to read newspapers online. Okay, it's not really a discussion, it's more of an argument. And it's not really about my refusal to read newspapers online, it's really more about my refusal (so far) to write about my refusal to read newspapers online and then send that off to academic journals. But still.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I have much the same problem that Josh Marshall discusses in his post: online newspapers do not have the same "topical serendipity" as print papers. That is, I scan, glance around, and flip through the pages of a print newspaper. I don't do this with online papers. And I don't do this with forums. When I'm on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, I'm there to find answers to particular questions, not to enjoy a sense of community. I read World of Warcraft blogs for that. And I really do feel more connection to WoW Insider than I do to the official WoW Druid Forum. (Druids ftw!)

So, there you have it. A whole lot of sites are getting a whole lot of spring cleaning. When did you last redesign your site?

(X-posted on Lives Online)

Posted by reparent at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)

Machinima Makes a Comeback

This set of machinima is Second Life-centric, with a lot of information that can help you to become an uber-leet Second Lifer!

Natural Selection Studios has started a great series of "Noob Be Gone" videos intended to help you banish your noobishness.

Episode 1 shows you how to manage your in-world "camera," how to interact with objects, and a bunch of other cool hacks, tips, and techniques:

Episode 2 shows you the basics for becoming an awesome SL builder:

Have you noticed that the avatars around you can do really cool things, while you're stuck with the same, sad moves? Well, eradicate your envy with this video by Torley about creating fab gestures:

And for info on just about anything else you might want to do in SL, check out the rest of the massive cache of video tutorials created and posted by Torley.

(X-posted at Lives Online)

Posted by reparent at 4:07 PM | Comments (1)