« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »

July 27, 2007

TGIF...

Holy guacamole! It's almost 6pm, and your intrepid blogger and The Spouse are only now leaving work!

Luckily, here's the latest bit of fabulous from Dame Shirley Bassey, who even at age 70, hasn't lost a bit of her divine divaness.

Turn it up, my darlings.... waaaaaaaaay up. We've got a party to get started!

Posted by reparent at 6:00 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2007

About That Potter Post...

I was going to post my thoughts on Stephen King's thoughts on reading and on the conclusions of books and book series. (You can read the relevant passages here on the Children's Lit blog. I'll post my reactions to them on Digital Digressions soon.) But today (as always seems to be the case on teaching days) has been exceptionally hectic.

Besides, I came across these while eating my lunch here at my desk (as I do). I think you'll probably get a kick out of these more, anyway.

Tech*E*Blog, your one-stop shop for all things consumer electronic, points our attention to this terrifying news update from ONN, the Onion News Network:

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

And finally, something that's going into the "I Want One" category in a big way -- 3D Mailbox:

This bad boy is getting installed on the PC laptop tonight. Oh yeah...

Posted by reparent at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2007

Busy busy busy (part the next)

I promised to talk about my feelings about the end of the Potter series today, but I have been overtaken by events, so that post will have to wait until tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are a few interesting tidbits:

ITEM: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the fastest-selling book of all time, with at least 4.1 million books flying off the shelves in the first 48 hours of its release. It's possible that the figure, as Scholastic insists, is actually 6.9 million. In any case, you won't be seeing Deathly Hallows on the New York Times bestseller list. Ever. Michael Giltz explains why. What do you think about this outrageous traveshamockery?

ITEM: One of my colleagues had asked me a few days ago to help her to set up a course blog. UVM supports and hosts faculty, staff, and student blogs using Movable Type, which is nice of them, but MT isn't easy or intuitive. To prep for my meeting with my colleague, I set up a new blog, Standing Still, and have started posting how-to instructions for doing different things with MT. I hope to make the blog a useful resource for my entire department. Next up: including images in posts. If you have struggled or are currently struggling with MT, especially at UVM, zing me an e-mail with topics to address in later posts.

ITEM: Henry at Crooked Timber ventures into the Dark Side of the Force and joins Facebook. I've gone back and forth on this question, and have not yet joined, even though (or perhaps because) UVM has its own Facebook chapter now. Besides the issues Henry discusses, I'm also concerned about infringing on my students' space. What do you think?

ITEM: And finally, something specially for The Spouse (though other academic spouses may find it eerily familiar). Ph.D. (Piled Higher & Deeper), a web comic by Jorge Cham that I recently got tipped to, has quickly become one of my faves. If you suffer from graduate school, or are a recovering graduate student, Piled Higher & Deeper may be right for you. Here's a strip that I found particularly amusing/distressing, and if you've ever inflicted your own academic work on a non-academic significant other, or been the victim of this sort of abuse, you'll get a kick out of it too:

Posted by reparent at 2:48 PM | Comments (3)

July 24, 2007

The Healing Power of Potter (Spoiler Free!)

As you might know, this blog has a strict NO SPOILERS policy. This means that you won't be subjected to the (possibly) untimely revelation of crucial plot points of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. You won't even learn who, what or where the "Deathly Hallows" is or are, if it or they even exist. So there!

But this no spoilers policy grows out of my own experiences having many, many books, movies, and TV shows spoiled for me. I've learned that I cannot read book reviews anymore, and I can only read the first (and sometimes the last) paragraph of movie reviews in Entertainment Weekly (which does surprisingly reputable movie reviews), because even good reviewers today mistakenly and horribly believe they have a sacred duty to summarize every surprising element in the plot of these stories before you even have a chance to pick up the book or get to the movie theater.

Grrrrrr!!!

On Saturday, my elite, super-special, boxed, color-illustrated, and much-more-expensive-than-the-rest edition of Deathly Hallows arrived in the mail. The Spouse and I had spent the day geocaching with a huge group of friends, and on the way home had dropped by the movie theater to grab tickets for the evening show of Harry Potter and the Order of the University of Phoenix. There was no time to read between showering and heading back out to the movie. And when we got home, we were both exhausted and a little sunburned from hiking and navigating and GPSing all over Essex and Colchester Pond. No time or energy to read.

On Sunday, I woke up with a headache. A bad one at the base of the back of my skull. But I had no time for pain, because we had already committed to going to brunch with friends. And we needed something brunch-foody to take with us. This meant that I was up and baking cinnamon crumb cake before showering and then heading to brunch. With a headache. A bad one.

On the plus side, once the cake was in the oven, I could start reading. And read I did. This was a good and bad thing. I became so entranced in the book that I forgot to take the massive doses of analgesic I needed to banish my headache. And then we were late for brunch and running out the door. And then the brunch was really loud, which didn't help.

By the time we made it home, my headache was starting to move from the back of my skull to the front, and I was sick to my stomach (from the pain, not the brunchy food, which was very good). I've had worse headaches (I used to get migraines), but this was one of the worst non-migraine headaches I've had in years. So I dosed myself liberally with Ibuprofen and gently crashed on the couch with Potter.

I understand a lot better now why doctors use virtual reality when treating patients with serious pain. By keeping myself immersed in Rowling's story, I was able to give myself the time (quite a lot of time, it turned out) to get rid of the headache and to start to feel like a human again.

It also gave me the time to finish the book, which I did later that night. The Spouse (a very light sleeper) was amazingly selfless and let me continue reading in bed while he tried to sleep. I finished the book before midnight and went to sleep, tired and feeling lots of complex feelings. (More on that tomorrow.)

Now I can read blogs, watch TV, talk to colleagues and students, and otherwise engage in the real world without fear of having the plot spoiled for me.

But there's a difference between inadvertently letting something slip in your enthusiasm, and intentionally setting out to ruin something for as many people as possible. That's why "Mays" is the recipient of Digital Digressions' First Annual (or as needed) Out the Airlock Award.

Mays is a DJ on local Burlington-area radio station 99.9 The Buzz. Yesterday, as I was driving downtown to a meeting with a colleague, Mays announced, apropos of nothing, that he was going to save us all months of reading and then revealed the end of the book. Twice.

AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!!

That's just horrible and cruel and senseless. And so...

HAL still have the utmost confidence in the mission. And you should read the last book before someone spoils it for you. Really, you should.

Posted by reparent at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2007

I'm Busy... And Don't You Spoil The Ending!!!

The Spouse and I are finally going to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix tonight. And after that, I'll be occupied for the next 700 pages. Er... the next few days. With an important work project. Yeah, that's it. An important project for work.

Posted by reparent at 4:38 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2007

Machinima Music Madness!

The Ataris recently concluded a contest at Machinima.com that asked the machinima-making-masses to create music videos for three of their songs ("Not Capable of Love," "The Cheyenne Line," and "Connections Are More Dangerous Than Lies") using the World of Warcraft game engine. It's a promo for the new Ataris disc, Welcome the Night, but to facilitate the promo, the band had to give away these three tracks. Since these three songs are, presumably, the tracks slated to be released as singles, that's an odd strategy. (You can still download the three tracks for free here.)

The contest is over now, and here are the three winners:

First Place: "Frame of Mind" by Sedrin

Second Place: "Connections Are More Dangerous Than Lies" by Baron Soosdon

Third Place: "Connections Are More Dangerious Than Lies" by Dead Workers Party

I'd also like to draw your attention to one of the finalists that didn't make the top 3: Selserene's "To The Fairest"

You can compare Selserene's video with the official (i.e., featuring the band) Ataris video for "Not Capable of Love" at the iTunes Store. (Double-click on the song title to watch a 30-second preview.) I like the Blood Elf version better, I think.

Finally, for something not-completely different, the Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain have been confirmed to perform live at Blizzard's annual BlizzCon this year. Here you can sample the heavy metal goodness of "I Am Murloc!" (Warning: this video contains death-metal power chords, thrusting orc hips, and brief superhero-themed homophobic content.)

Anyway, what I'm most interested in with these machinima are the ways they depend (or not) on knowledge of the game for viewers/listeners to enjoy them. (And what should we call the consumers of music video? Listeners? Viewers? Multi-modal-mu-vid-mavens?) Sedrin's "Frame of Mind," for instance, is a critique of the tendency toward excess in the Achiever play-style (mentioned in yesterday's post, and then ably copped-to by Coeurlion in the comments). It's easy in WoW to get caught up in the race to level 70, and in the race to get the most elite weapons and armor. Sedrin shows us his avatar's Buddhist coming-out party, renouncing worldly goods and rediscovering friendship and that the world has color. If you've never yelled at someone for ninjaing loot, or been yelled at yourself for an innocent (we hope) mistake looting, does this video mean anything at all to you? Can it?

Baron Soosdon's video, on the other hand, seems like a pretty straightforward tale of lost love and zombie invasions. However, if you're a WoW player, you might have noticed the cross-faction romances of our main characters (Blood Elves are Horde, the Draenei are Alliance) -- a big no-no. And if you're a lore-junkie, you might have noticed the allusion to Horde Warchief Thrall and Alliance Mega-Mage Jaina Proudmoore, whose own forbidden love has been the subject of long speculation. Obviously, this isn't crucial knowledge needed to make sense of the video, but it does set up a clear dichotomy between what we might call naive and experienced readings of the video.

The Dead Workers Party video also makes use of in-jokes and references, such as the absurdity of playing World of Warcraft on an Atari 2600, itself an in-joke reference to the band's name, The Ataris. The video's concluding in-joke pokes fun at the difficulty in knowing who or what is on the other side of the often attractive avatars on screen.

And the L70ETC song, "I Am Murloc!" may be catchy if you're into that sort of thing, but if you've ever played WoW, it's an instant classic. Murlocs are irritating, little, deadly fish-people who swarm up to you and then make you into their own special fish-food du jour. Horde and Alliance both have quests that require navigating through Murloc-infested areas, and killing many, many Murlocs. Every WoW player knows the sinking feeling of doom when you're trying to get just one Murloc to attack and end up hearing the Murloc sound: "Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!" coming from 3-8 others, all heading your way with murder in their unblinking eyes. Can this song/video have the same impact on non-Wow-ers?

I don't have a conclusion to this ramble. That's usually a good sign that there is (or should be) a paper hiding three or four so-whats down the road. We'll see.

Until then, rock on!

Posted by reparent at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2007

I Do It All Over. And You?

Over at WoWInsider, Mike Schramm asks what kind of Bartle gamer you are.

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology tests the play-style and interests of players of role-playing (primarily) games. It was developed (appropriately enough) by games researcher and designer Dr. Richard Bartle, whose blog, QBlog, is a hoot to read. Looking back at that sentence, it doesn't really come across as a very serious endorsement of Bartle, does it? Hmm... sounds like a topic for a future post.

I am an ESAK. That means that my gameplay interests and skills most closely match the Explorer scale (73.33%), followed by the Socializer scale (66.67%), the Achiever scale (46.67%), and finally the Killer scale (13.33%).

According to the test:

People with high Explorer scores tend to enjoy finding all of the unique areas of the world, often enjoying the immersion of the experience. Finding a place with unique monsters and seeing what those monsters do is usually more fun for an Explorer than defeating the monsters themselves.

And that's actually true for me. In World of Warcraft, I enjoy seeing new zones, taking my low-level alts (alternate avatars) to new places for which they're grossly under-leveled, and picking up new flightpoints. This doesn't help me to level very quickly, but it does keep the game feeling like a fresh series of challenges for me.

For instance, when I started playing my first avatar, a druid, I used the druidic power of invisibility to sneak all over the planet. I had a great time, but I was constantly asking myself how classes without invisibility (which is most of the other classes in WoW) could stand having to be seen all the time. Now I know, as I (slowly) advance my two non-invisible alts -- a mage and a warrior. And the challenge of getting my level 33 warrior into and out of the level 51-58 Western Plaguelands to pick up the flightpoint at Chillwind Point (which I did last night) was great fun. Did I kill anything? No way. Anything I would have seen there would have stomped me and used my torso for a planter. Was it a great achievement? Only in my mind. But in my mind, it was pretty darn cool.

Take the test yourself here. I'm curious to know what the rest of the universe finds interesting in role-playing gaming. I'm also curious what those of you who don't game (or who don't game much) would find interesting, in the Bartle schema.

Posted by reparent at 9:34 AM | Comments (2)

July 16, 2007

Dog Is My Co-Pilot, Not My Antenna

You may have noticed that I like cats, but did you know that I'm also crazy about dogs? Like Dr. Cornelius Gibson, the Shiba Inu puppy:

(You can get your daily puppy pix fix at The Daily Puppy.)

So it was particularly upsetting to learn that Republican presidential wannabe Mit Romney treated his luggage better than his dog:

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario.

[. . . .]

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

TBogg expresses himself in his usual succinct, direct and spot-on way, responding to Mitt's defenders:

It was just like the kennel he curled up in at home...only it was hurtling down the freeway at seventy-plus miles per hour strapped to the top of a Ford Ranch Wagon. And besides Mitt delivered puppies all night one time so SUCK ON THAT!!! BILL FRIST, YOU CAT MURDERING FREAK!

Sorry.

[. . . .]

Nothing quite knocks a wacky whimsical family anecdote off the rails like a "whoopsie" moment when the dogs kennel flies off the roof, takes a high speed tumble on the freeway only to be mercifully stopped and crushed by an eighteen wheeler hauling Alpo.

God is nothing if not ironic.

Which is why I'm happy to see the dogs of this country fighting back against their oppressors and the enabling media that wags obediently as they revel in their reign of terror.

I present to you: Dogs Against Romney!

Led by the courageous (and photogenic) Rusty, Dogs Against Romney promises to bring you the opinions and experiences of America's dogs as they unite against this luggage-fetishizing fiend and work to keep him from becoming the Dog-Abuser-in-Chief.

Keep fighting the good fight, Rusty. Good dog!

All joking aside, this is a serious issue.

Strapping a dog to the roof of your station wagon for a 12-hour drive while your luggage and supplies stay inside the wagon should be considered criminal. People like this shouldn't have dogs. And they certainly shouldn't be made President.

Posted by reparent at 11:06 AM | Comments (1)

July 15, 2007

¡Ay Carumba!

As you've probably heard by now, Homer and the gang now officially live in Springfield, Vermont. In case you're wondering, Springfield, Vermont is located here:

Yes, out of the 100+ Springfields in the U.S., and thanks to the magic of movie marketing, Vermont's little town that could is now even less... real.

The roughly 10,000 residents of the town "...where the rivers flow"© managed to convince about 6,000 non-Springfielders to vote for them, based at least in part on the Simpsons tribute video the town created. You can watch all of the videos submitted by hopeful Springfields here.

I guess I'm ambivalent about this because I really don't think that the stars of TV's longest running sitcom and animated series are woodchucks.* Of course, not being a Vermonter™ myself, I can only offer an outsider's perspective, which as all Real True Vermonters will tell you, is less than worthless.

Anyway you look at it, though, Springfield, Vermont is now the home of animated characters whose relevance to current popular culture is clearly in decline. If The Simpsons were still a trenchant force for insightful cultural commentary, then I have no doubt the wave of unreality would spread. Which Vermont town is Shelbyville? Is the cleaner, nicer, more cultured, more educated, and snobbier neighboring rival city Burlington? Or might it be Manchester or Concord, across the state line in New Hampshire? I see the lack of interest in extending the metaphorization of Springfield as a clear sign that the Simpsons Movie will not be a galvanizing moment in cultural transformation.

But that doesn't mean that we can't still have fun with the movie's web site! Much like the silly web quizzes we all love, the site lets you "create your Simpsons avatar!" The customization options are surprisingly robust, which makes the whole experience, of course, a giant personality test. Here's my avatar:

So, how do you see yourself in Simpsons-ese?

* It was explained to me last summer by an n-th generation Vermonter that "woodchuck" is roughly analogous to the n-word. As my native informant explained,

woodchuck:Vermonter :: the n-word:black people.

That is, it can be used by Vermonters to describe themselves and each other, but is absolutely verboten for flatlanders.** Like me. Which probably makes my use of it above a big no-no. D'oh!

**Flatlander. n. 1) A term of disdain employed by natives of Vermont for: a) Anyone not from Vermont, i.e., from Massachussetts or Colorado; b) Anyone whose ancestry cannot be traced back at least 5 generations to Vermont, with each generation residing solely in Vermont.

Posted by reparent at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)

July 14, 2007

Storm Your Own Bastille Today (A Photo-ish Essay)

Howdy, bonjour, bienvenue, and aloha!

I've been thinking about blogging (and the lack thereof) lately, and my attempts at the CyberCulture course blog last semester to start a series of very brief items. As you might have noticed, the Digital Dartboard turned out to be just another massive project, rather than a time-saving fun-time project. And "massive projects" are a problem when you're feeling overwhelmed by everything else that's going on, not going on (but should be), and might be going on. As I usually am.

And then I bit into a fortune cookie and received the following wisdom:

LEARN CHINESE - Banquet = "Yan-hui"

Wait, that's the wrong side. Though knowing the Chinese (but is yan-hui Mandarin, Wu, or Cantonese? Why don't they ever tell you this?) for "banquet" is sure to be ... well, maybe it will be good for a particularly tough round of Jeopardy!, I guess.

Anyway, on the flip-side of the fortune I learned that my lucky numbers are 7, 15, 40, 38, 46, and 18. So if you win with these numbers, you're now obligated to send me a very healthy cut of your prize money. And I learned:

Do not let ambition overshadow small success.

And I found myself thinking that, for once in my life* I might have actually found an applicable and revelant fortune. Usually, my blogging works like this:

Step 1: Get an idea for a blog post. This step happens with surprising frequency.

Step 2: This is the choose-your-own-misadventure step.

• If you choose to Get Distracted by the Other Things You Have to Do Right Now, turn to step 3.
• If you choose to Go Teach Your Class, turn to step 3.
• If you choose to Think About All of the Cool and Unexpected Connections Among, Causes Of, and Implications Growing Out of Your Original Blog Post and the Rest of the World, turn to step 3.

Step 3: Realize that your cute and cuddly little blog post has magically morphed into a Big Scary Major Production.

Step 4: Tell yourself that you'll get back to the post when you have the energy and time to spare.

Step 5: Go to step 4.

Step 6: Profit! (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

So, to implement the mystical power of the Fortune Cookie, to bring some new posts to this blog, and to make myself feel a little less guilty about not doing more of those first two things, and maybe even to start retraining my brain to think about achieveable projects rather than the One Project To Rule Them All -- which of course, requires both the power of Sauron and the fires of Mount Doom to compose, yet neither of which, sadly, is part of UVM's faculty research support -- which would be a Great Good Thing for my research agenda, I'm going to start blogging in smaller, daily chunks.

Of course, we'll have to see how that goes. This post, for instance, started out as a quick note to all of your Francophones, Francophiles, and FrancoAmericans to get out and celebrate the Quatorze Juillet, that's "July 14th," which is Bastille Day for the rest of us.. You see how well that worked.

* Once, while an undergraduate in Austin, Texas, I grabbed a bite to eat at a Chinese place in the foodcourt of a mall. My fortune that day (which I shall remember, verbatim, forever) read: "He loves you as much as he can, but he cannot love you much." I wasn't dating anyone at the time, which may have been the point of the fortune, but I still found the message a bit... forward. If you have a fortune cookie horror story, feel free to share.

Posted by reparent at 2:22 PM