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August 2, 2007
Of Cats, Rabbits, Students, and Eyes
Wowzers! There sure is a lot going on right now.
First of all, August is Kitties-Go-To-The-Vet-For-Checkups month chez Richard(s). The kitty with serious health issues went today, and her sister will be going on Friday (but don't tell her -- we want to survive until then).
I Can Has Cheezburger, as always, puts it best:
Second, why is it that when you try to be flexible with undergraduates (or with graduate students who need "just a little more time" to finish their seminar paper or the dreaded thesis), they crap all over you? The summer course on Children's Lit was supposed to end on Thursday, July 26th, the last day of classes. I made the final project (an exceedingly modest one, given the scope of this 5-week summer course, mind you) due on Monday, July 30th. I still have not received final projects from a number of students. Some have had the decency to e-mail me with a plausible excuse. Some have not. Grrrrrrrr.....
Third, Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing shows off the coolness that is, and is on, her iPhone, in this post. Sigh. Anyway, this item caught my attention: a music video by UNKLE with Thom Yorke singing "A Rabbit In Your Headlights." It's a disturbing (seriously) video, but the ending is... words fail. "Awesome" has lost too much of its meaning, and "breathtaking" (literally, I gasp) is now too clicheed. There's a story here. Or maybe I'm just compelled to create and/or impose a story because of the images. Of course, in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster argues that I'm not really talking about a story at all, but rather a plot, because I'm drawn to the hints about causation in this video. And I'm convinced that there are hints here. And maybe the disturbing, traumatic elements of the video are needed to allow the ending to work the way that it does. Is there a necessary degree of cruelty in all profound art?
Fourth, and speaking of words failing... your humble blogger has yet to join the next generation proper of gaming hardware. Sure, I've got a Nintendo DS, which is excellent and interesting, and sure to be the source/subject of at least 2 published articles (good ones), but I have yet to acquire a Nintendo Wii (drool), an XBox 360 (sigh... bland yet offering very pretty graphics), or a PS3 (sigh... bland yet offering even prettier graphics). I haven't really considered getting a PS3 because it's just so darn expensive and there really aren't any must-have games out for it yet. (Shame on you, Sony! Shame!) That might be changing, however, with the release of the next-generation EyeToy, the Playstation Eye Peripheral for the PS3. (The EyeToy was the black web-cam that Sony used to bring motion-capture to the PS2.)
The first game released for the Eye is the aptly-named Eye of Judgment, a collectible card game (CCG) like all of the other collectible card games (e.g., Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, World of Warcraft CCG). You have a deck of cards, each of which contributes in some way to your battle against your opponent and her cards. You may find it interesting or instructive to read Tycho's run-down of the way Eye of Judgment's card battles operate. Or you may just want to cut to the chase and read the web-comic about it....
In any case, what makes Eye of Judgment interesting to me is the way Sony has finally started using its processing power to augment reality instead of replacing it, as most games do. Click on the image below to watch the trailer, and make sure you pay attention to the very end:
98% of the trailer is pre-rendered cinematics featuring the battle animations of the various cards. But then, at the very end, we start to see what the PS3's super-duper processor can do when you hook a camera up to it: it can animate the cards in your hand, and let you interact with your deadly little card buddies. And that's just plain cool.
There's more, but this has already dragged on for too long, so the rest will have to wait for another post.
Posted by reparent at August 2, 2007 8:27 AM