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October 31, 2007
He looks so happy...
Sorry for the radio silence! I'll have a new substantive post up Friday or Saturday, but for now I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite little poems. Stevie Smith's "Not Waving But Drowning."
Click here to read the poem and listen to the poet read it herself. She's a hoot.
Posted by reparent at 7:36 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2007
Silly Web Quiz: Superhero Edition
It's been a while since I really did a fun web quiz (since I'm guessing no one went to the His Dark Materials site and found their daemon, because not enough of you have read the trilogy by Philip Pullman, so you don't know what a daemon is, and why they're so cool.
But you all know what a superhero is. So here's a silly web quiz to determine Which Superhero Are You?
Boringly, pathetically, I appear to be:
Superman
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You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.  |
Which is especially poignant because our local cable provider has recently decided to drop The CW from our programming guide. That means that we can watch Smallville, but we can't tell our POS DVR to record this season's episodes. And we're never home to watch the episodes. Grr!
(Yes, I said it. We watch Smallville. Well, we watched Smallville. Stupid Comcast.)
On the slightly more interesting side, my Supervillain alter-ego is:
Dr. Doom
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Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity. |
I kinda like that. "Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity..." And let's face it -- Dr. Doom knows how to rock a tunic and plate mail armor. See, most villains would wear the tunic under the armor. But not Dr. Doom! No one can see how well the emerald green tunic brings out his eyes if he does that.
I guess from now on, you should all call me Professor Doctor Doom. For your own safety, of course.
(via Windshadow's awesome WoW blog: Big Bear Butt Blogger)
Posted by reparent at 8:38 AM | Comments (1)
October 4, 2007
Meet Miss Ann Thrope...
When I was an undergraduate (and then a post-baccalaureate), I attended massive universities, and had classes all over. I had favorite and not-so-favorite parts of campus. I had places that I thought of as "my" spots.
When I started grad school, that all changed. Suddenly I wasn't on North Campus for a chem class, and then racing to West Campus for Italian. I was in Mills Hall for every freaking seminar. At Pitt I was firmly ensconsed within the Cathedral of Learning. At one point, one of the grad students a year or so ahead of me calculated the number of hours he had spent in the main seminar room. It brought tears to his eyes when he saw how high the number was.
Teaching sometimes allowed me to see other buildings. I was lucky enough to get to teach in a state-of-the-art computer lab in the Gardner Steel Conference Center while in my last year at Pitt. But for the most part, I lived, taught, and studied in one building.
The same goes for UVM. The English Department has long taught in the building in which our offices are located, Old Mill, and the connected Old Mill Annex building and Lafayette Hall.
I know there are other parts of the campus, but I don't get to see them. Well, that was the case until just recently. My irrational demands for computer classrooms (imagine an English teacher needing computers! Scoff! Sputter! Incredulity!), and the campus-wide space crunch caused by ever-increasing enrollments mean that I am (and all of my colleagues are, as well) now being sent all over campus to teach.
And while I see a steady stream of humanity passing outside my office window, there really is a difference between watching the students who walk past the Old Mill, and watching the ones who walk between the Business College and the science buildings. At least, the students seem different. But it may be just that the attitude is decidedly not what I'm used to seeing and hearing around Old Mill.
I'm reminded, every Tuesday and Thursday as I walk across campus to my graduate seminar (which is held in the Business college!), that while I really like my students (grad and undergrad), I don't really like... people.
I'd make a terrible Walt Whitman.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers
-from "Song of Myself," Section 5.
See? That's Walt. Me? Not so much.
Posted by reparent at 4:39 PM | Comments (1)
October 1, 2007
Holy Crap!
Holy crap is right! Today's post is all about the astounding, amazing, and aggravating! And exclamation points!
-Do you like our multi-disc collector's edition?
-Must be expensive.
-Very. I'm Rachel.
Holy crap, there's a new version of Blade Runner (i.e., "The Final Cut") coming out! Here's director Ridley Scott's interview with Wired, and here's a write-up in the New York Times. Dangit. I don't have time to fly to New York or Los Angeles to catch this thing in the theater! And yes, the Times article does feature spoilers (as you knew it would), so read at your own risk.
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Holy crap, the travel industry is screwing us over even more than we knew they already were! I've already ranted at you about the way the airline industry treats its passengers once we get to the airport. But now it turns out they screw us over when we're buying our tickets. But Richard, I hear you saying, the insane airfares are already bad enough! What else could they do to us? Well, Michelle Higgins at the Times informs us that the same rental car, hotel room, and airline seat often costs less -- much less -- if you buy it through one of the rental agency's/hotel's/airline's non-US web sites. Try Budget.ie instead of Budget.com when you're renting a car in Ireland, and you'll save money. As Higgins reports: "Paula R. Rivera, a public affairs manager at Hertz, wrote in an e-mail message [...] 'Costs and competitive conditions in individual markets are among the considerations that affect pricing.'" In other words, the infallible invisible hand of the "free" market make sure that we pay more. For everything.
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Holy crap, a junior at Yale (in his sophomore year, no less!) recently discovered that postmodernity kinda, you know, sorta describes what's going on today! Read the whole thing here. I'll have more to say on this soon, but it's good to know that it will always be the heady Theory-with-a-capital-T days of 1982 at Yale.
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Holy crap, I've got the same daemon as my friends Claire & Victor's daughter, Nina! (And if you don't know about the books this comes from, or from the movie that's going to be released in December, you owe it to yourself to check it out!)
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Holy crap, even though a federal judge has ruled that bloggers can't be held responsible for the crazy comments posted on their blogs, many conservative political campaigns are busy busy busy "nutpicking" the craziest comments they can find to smear their opponents! Ah, democracy, the Internets r in ur votr edukashun, stealin ur elekshuns!
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Holy crap, I missed International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrrrrr, crap! And there was a party in Second Life and everything. As always, however, Nitrozac and Snaggy show us the way forward:
So, rationalizing all the way, I have decided that today is my Talk Like a Pirate Day, because I "do what I want 'cuz a pirate is free, and I arrrrrrr a pirate!" And because I be a rebel, here arrrrr some inappropriate Talk Like a Pirate Day remarrrrrrrks!
(Shiver me timbers! That video be arrrrrfully bad. Though I do like the techno dance party about 1:25 into it.)
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Holy crap, San Jose State State professor Henry Lowood is teaching an online class on "Games & Libraries"! He reports that he's taken his group of 13 students into World of Warcraft. I have a few comments and questions:
- Lowood describes taking students to Second Life as "easy" and WoW as "crazy." I disagree. The hardware requirements for Second Life make it challenging for many students to get online there, and many who are able to manage this feat suffer from frame-rate lag so severe they may as well watch screenshots. WoW is much more forgiving of low-end systems.
- From a pedagogical perspective, taking students into WoW is easy. There's so much to see and do that is external to the students that class activities take care of themselves. WoW imposes narratives and quest-lines (achievement-based motivation) on its players. Second Life does not. Send a student into WoW and they know what they're supposed to do: kill monsters. Send a student into Second Life and they almost immediately fall apart, wondering how do I win this?
- Mostly, I want more information about the course. What's the thesis of the course? What are the competing hypotheses? Where's the course syllabus and reading list? As a big believer in the productive range of educational and social possibilities for gaming and for game- and non-game virtual worlds, I have no doubt that there can be a provocative connection between games and libraries, but from his short post, I don't get it.
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Holy crap, there really is a lot of news out there, and it's just as bad and as badly reported as Jon Stewart says it is! As you might have guessed from the number of links to NY Times articles in today's post, The Spouse and I finally caved-in and started getting the New York Times on Sunday, after a little over two years of reading nothing (on paper) but the Burlington Free Press. Surprisingly, both Sunday papers are about the same size and thickness. But that's mostly because there's an inch and a half of sale circulars for four grocery stores, JCPenney ("LAST 3 DAYS!" of the earth, I suppose. Who knew Penny's was so well informed on the apocalypse?), Big Lots, PetCo, Wal*Mart ("Save money. Live better.SM" I couldn't make that one up if I tried), Michael's, ToysRUs ("Our Biggest Game Sale Of The Season!" which is referring to what season, autumn?), Kohl's, which informs me to "Expect Great Things"®, and something called SearsBook advertising "appliance innovation." I didn't know Sears had moved into the bookselling business... to sell toaster ovens.
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But what's really bothering me is when I read the Times and see stuff like this:
- "Big Coffers and a Rising Voice Lift Group on the Right"... because: 1) big money has never before insured the spread of a political message; 2) it's a good thing they're speaking up now, because conservative opinion has been soundly ignored for the past 6 years; 3) and thank the gods they're rich enough to be able to lift themselves from the oppression they face every day. Better headline: "Another GOP Group of Millionaires Buys Media Time."
- "G.O.P. Hopeful Took Own Path in the Senate"... because it's always important to know the media narrative we'll have forced on us at every turn for the next year and a half. Fred Thompson is an individualist, and probably rugged, too. Oh, and when other politicians don't do what their voters tell them to do, those politicians are out of touch. It's "leadership" when Fred does it.
- "Laughing Matters in Clinton Campaign"... Steve Benen notes, at Talking Points Memo: "The scrutiny of Hillary Clinton's marriage has been excessive. The scrutiny of her hairstyle has been absurd. The scrutiny of her cleavage has been offensive. The scrutiny of her clothing has been almost comical. And so I suppose it was only a matter of time before the media turned its attention to her laugh." It used to be the conventional wisdom that the Bush Administration had made satire either redundant or so easy as to be insulting to our highly trained satirists. Now it's the media's turn. Here's a shorter Patrick Healey: "ClintonWatch: Cackle Proves Clinton Not Merely a Bitch, Also a Witch." What was that I was saying about how comforting it is to know what the rest of the nation months from now will decide for themselves about the candidates?
Look, I don't expect the New York Times to rise much above its fourth-grade reading level. I just expect it to treat us as fourth graders who can think. And maybe that's why I expect too much.
Posted by reparent at 4:34 PM | Comments (2)