July 18, 2008
Singing Saturday Came Early
With the web launch of the new project from Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity... that guy) -- Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog!!!!
Starring Neil Patrick Harris (our favorite -- and out -- former child-doctor), Felicia Day (she most recently of the awesome web series The Guild, and Nathan Fillion (...dreamy). The series follows the efforts of Dr. Horrible (Harris) to get into the Evil League of Evil and win the love of Penny (Day), while superhero Captain Hammer (Fillion) tries to prevent both. And there's singing.
It is truly awesome. Click on the picture or the text link. Do it now. Watch the first two acts (Act III will be released on Saturday the 19th). But be aware that all three acts will be taken down on the 20th. After that they'll be available through iTunes for a fee per Act.
So watch them now for free, while you can, my cheap cheap friends. I think they're great, and I can't wait to see how the iTunes downloads do, commercially. I expect they'll do very well.
Posted by reparent at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2008
Her Name Was Lola, His Name Was Donald
The National Writing Project in Vermont's Invitational Summer Institute started last week, and continues for the next three. I'm on the leadership team, and it's exciting, exhausting work. The NWP brings together K-12 teachers from across Vermont, and across the spectrum of academic disciplines, to intensively focus on how, when, and why we teach writing.
As part of our daily work, we do a lot of quick writings. Here's one of those from last week. The prompt (devised by yours truly) was "I heard that song on the radio..."
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I heard that song on the radio: Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." It was the first song I had tuned to when I got my first portable radio, appropriately enough, from Radio Shack. Around the time our aerial antenna started failing and we finally got cable, the family made at-least-weekly trips to the local 'Shack for replacement and upgrade supplies. I remember getting it on one of those trips, though not what I'd done to deserve a treat. I'd been told I could pick something out if it wasn't too expensive, and I knew exactly what I wanted. My radio was shaped like Donald Duck's head.
I never really liked Mickey Mouse, but I'd been crazy about that duck with the rage issues as long as I could remember. Now he could go anywhere I went. He did.
I put the 9v battery in the back of his head and clicked the volume dial from off to three or four. I expected to hear music, something like what the cool older kids listened to. From the speaker in the back of Donald's head all I heard was static. Slowly thumbing the tuning dial, I heard that voice. "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl," and I was hooked. Obsessed, even. When the song ended I spun the dial wildly, desperately trying to find another station playing that song about the hottest spot north of Havana. Luckily, it was the mid-1970s, and Lola's yellow feathers in her hair (and her dress cut down to there) were all over the airwaves.
It was the only song I wanted to hear, and wherever Donald and I were, chances were you'd hear static, a snippet of non-"Copacabana"-song, static, a snippet of non-"Copacabana"-song, static...
My parents tired of the song surprisingly quickly. I remember hiding in my bedroom closet with the door closed, the back of Donald's head to my ear while well-trained fingers worked the tuning dial in the dark, searching, searching for someplace that wasn't suburban Dallas. Searching for a crowded floor where music and passion were always in fashion.
I was too young to really understand what the song was about, but perhaps the message was as true for me then as it was for Lola and Tony in their faded past. Don't fall in love. Because even in the mid-70s, "Copacabana" wouldn't last forever. In a few weeks the local stations would start putting other songs into heavy rotation, eventually dropping "Copacabana" altogether. And like Lola, Donald and I would have to learn how to deal with a changed world that had left us behind.
Posted by reparent at 6:05 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2008
Cydonia Countdown
A while back, I included Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" video in a post about neo-retro-Westernism (I'm thinking of trademarking the term, or copyrighting it, or something... I'm sure The Spouse will be happy to explain the difference to me yet again). I asked you then to watch the video and pick out all of the allusions you could to other media and/or narratives and/or narrative/visual tropes.
Faithful commenter Liam rose to the challenge and did a great job. I was especially impressed with his catch of the blue-tinged holograms a la Star Wars.
But wait! There's more! I also noted the following:
- The early training sequence is strongly reminiscent of Paul Atreides' sparring session with the fighter drone from David Lynch's Dune.
- The "Flaming Energy Ball" pose is straight out of the manga/anime series Dragon Ball Z, in which it is a combat staple.
- The raptor makes me think of Ladyhawke, even though it doesn't do quite the same thing. In fact, the hawk-like bird doesn't fit at all, as it's forced to serve two narrative tropes at more or less the same time: it's both the alter-ego for our hero and a (vulture-like) symbol of the death awaiting him.
Which brings me to a great, though non-allusive sequence:
- The hawk raises its wings as if in flight (though it is clearly standing on a perch.
- Our hero bounces up and down as if riding his horse (though he is clearly standing on the ground).
- "A Gustof von Musterhausen Production" we're told in intertitle.
- Our heroine appears in a choker-shot (extreme close-up), mouthing "Oooh" -- is she impressed with the "moving" hero/heroes, or with Gustof? Who can tell? It's fabulous.
Back to the allusions.
- Liam flagged the "come hither" wave, which is a "taunt" used endlessly in anime and martial arts films. The deployment of said taunt almost always drives the enemy/ies into a mindless rage (hence the name), provoking them into charging recklessly toward the hero/heroes and thus their doom
- I could swear I've seen the car with jet rockets on its rear fenders (at 3:08 in the video) before. I thought it came from Cherry 2000 or Circuitry Man, but now I'm not sure. Any ideas?
- I truly love the shot of the camera crew visible in the mirror at 3:14.
- And I also love the irony of our hero mouthing, "No one's gonna take me alive!" at 3:51... while he's firmly and securely captured and restrained in the town stocks, soon to be pelted with manure.
- The woman in the shiny armored bikini on the unicorn is straight out of Heavy Metal.
- The sloppy licking-kiss the villain gives our heroine is Jabba's "kiss" with Princess Leah in Return of the Jedi.
- Our heroine's gallows outfit is Wilma Deering's from Buck Rodgers (go Erin Gray!).
- The motorcycle-in-the-old-west trope is the central plot point of Time Rider.
- Our hero's costume change from slimming black to not-so-slimming white plaid is reminiscent of Gandalf's reincarnation/return as Gandalf the White in Lord of the Rings.
- And finally, the Zoro mask our hero wears upon his return... speaks for itself, and yet makes no sense whatsoever.
Whew! I'm exhausted. What did I miss?
Posted by reparent at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2008
What We Need More Of...
A short break from working on the book.
I was talking with a graduate student about computer-generated voices, and the subject of MC Hawking came up. I mentioned that my favorite track from the nerd-core artist was "What We Need More of Is Science," which got me thinking about the track, and its retro-animated video.
So, to externalize the cognitive loop I've been stuck in for days, here's MC Hawking:
Enjoy.
[Hums to himself: "Upon blind faith they place reliance/ What we need more of is science."]
Posted by reparent at 6:26 PM | Comments (1)
December 11, 2007
Still Grading
Hi. I'm still grading. And having meetings. And having meetings about grading. (Maybe I should start grading my meetings...)
Anyway, when I finish grading, I've got a few research projects in front of me that I need to get to. One of them has to do, in part, with pop-up books. How cool is that? (Don't answer that. It's a rhetorical question.) In the spirit of tomorrow's new challenges (as opposed to today's really tired old challenges of grading and meetings), here's a really awesome Photoshopped pop-up book. Enjoy!
Posted by reparent at 5:56 PM | Comments (0)
December 9, 2007
The Golden Compass - Spoiler-Free Thoughts
Liam asked what we thought of The Golden Compass, so here goes.
I have read the books many times, and love them. The Spouse hasn't read the books. I'll try to accurately reflect our various reactions to the film because they really were quite different.
The movie, we both agree, looks wonderful. The settings and machinery in Lyra's world are great retro-futuristic pieces that really help to establish the setting as related-to, but different-from, our own world.
Nicole Kidman is incredible as Mrs. Coulter. 'Nuff said.
Also incredible, though in a smaller role, is Hattie Morahan (I didn't know who she was, either) as Sister Clara, the matron of Bolvangar. She's luminous and oh-so-very-very wrong. When she's on the screen, you can't look away.
Not so fabulous is Daniel Craig. But that's only because he's not much of a presence in the first book. (And I'm not going to say anything substantive about the other books.) The film does a surprisingly good job of following the book, and so Craig's Lord Asrael doesn't get much screen time.
The one thing that I am seriously torn about is the ending of the movie. I won't give anything away, but the movie ends before the first book does. This sets up a different dynamic for the cliff-hanger between the first and second books/movies. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And, if you've read the books, there's a whopper of an ironic statement that ... well, they're going to have to bring it back for the second movie, as it really is important to what happens next in the narrative. (And commenters, please don't reveal anything about the ending or the irony there. Not everyone has seen the movie or read the books yet.)
On the other hand, the movie is gaining tremendous attention/controversy because of its anti-religious agenda. I won't reveal anything of import by telling those who haven't yet read the books that "The Authority" is the books' name for God, and "The Magisterium" is The Church. We learn very, very early on in the movie that the agents of The Magisterium aren't rooting for the success of the same people we are in the story. I bring this up because The Spouse was unclear, after watching the film, what, exactly The Authority was. The euphemistic nature of the term does lead one to assume that defying The Authority simply means breaking the rules of The Magisterium/Church. (He was also not at all aware that The Magisterium is The Church -- it seems like a civil authority in the film.) This ambiguity is, I am certain, intentional on the part of the film.
(I do wonder, however, how much of the film is really lost on those who haven't read the book. It's certainly not as bad as it was when my father and I went to the theater to see David Lynch's Dune. Without a solid grounding in the epic storylines and vast array of characters from the book, the film can be impenetrable. The Golden Compass isn't impenetrable to viewers who haven't read the book... but following my conversations with The Spouse about it, I think that I had a much richer, more nuanced experience than he did. He simply didn't know enough to be able to decipher all of the narrative and visual shorthand employed in the film.)
Yahoo's Buzz Log recently ran a brief story about the controversy and how it is fueling debate (and web searches about atheism) all over the Internet. Yahoo has since closed the comments on that article: "due to numerous violations of our Comment Policy and Guidelines. Hopefully this will just be a cooling off period, and we look forward to restoring existing comments as well as accepting new submissions." Controversy and debate are, apparently, good for Yahoo... as long as they happen on your web site.
The real anti-religious material in the books, however, only intensifies as the series progresses. It will be interesting to see what the filmmakers do with this.
Finally, The Spouse and I discussed the relative merits of the film in a market saturated with heroic fantasy child-narratives (Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, etc.). I mentioned that one of the distinguishing features of Pullman's books is that they're exceptionally well-written. Their subject matter is more serious and much darker than Lewis' or Rowling's books, and Pullman is frankly a better prose stylist. When translated to the screen, however, C.S. Lewis' didacticism and pedantry is all-but-impossible to detect beneath the lush visuals and epic plot. Rowling's endless comma-splices and reliance on stock-characterizations are invisible on screen, and her narrative excesses are trimmed away in the more compact medium of the films. Pullman's rich play with language, ideas, and the interior lives of his characters, however, is largely lost on the screen. The films begin to seem... alike, much more so than their source material ever could.
Posted by reparent at 11:50 AM | Comments (3)
December 2, 2007
A New Patient in The Asylum
I could have sworn I'd mentioned The Asylum, the addictive and affecting web game by German programming team Parapluesch, before. But searching through the archives, I couldn't find anything. Well, better late than never.
I'm probably misremembering a post here because The Asylum is a game I've assigned to several of my classes, both here and back at Pitt. There's a reason for that -- it's easy to pick up for the non-gamer, yet it's deep and surprisingly emotional. It also has an interesting way of playing with narrative(s) within the game structure. As a teacher, gamer, and literary critic, I think it's tremendous fun.
You play as a psychiatrist for abandoned and/or abused "cuddly toys." (That's German for stuffed animals, apparently.) Dr. Kindermann (child-man) is away in Japan on research, leaving you to treat the patients as best you can. If you get stuck, Dr. Kindermann was kind enough to leave you his therapy notes on each patient, which may give you the hints you need to help each of the cuddly toys regain his or her precious sanity.
Joining Lilo, Sly, Kroko, and Dolly, is new patient Dub, a turtle with a compulsive exercise habit. Helping Dub requires a slightly different approach than with any of the other animals. I'm not going to give anything away, but if you need assistance, the helpful readers at JayIsGames have all kinds of hints for you for Dub and the other animals.
Thanks, Jay, for getting the word out on the latest chapter in the Asylum mental health saga!
Posted by reparent at 3:04 PM | Comments (1)
November 11, 2007
Ask Digital Digressions!
Once again, it's time for ASK DIGITAL DIGRESSIONS, the blog post inspired by your deepest desires (for... you know, information... about this... blog...).
Q: Hey, DD, what's up with the one-pants-leg-cuffed look you're sporting on the Author Photo? Signed, Confused in Cuff-Land
DD Responds: I'm glad you asked that, CiCL. The photo in question was taken by The Spouse during our recent trek to Bonny Old Scotland. While bicycling around the Island of Shapinsay in the Orkneys (which is where an important part of Frankenstein takes place), we stopped to enjoy the North Atlantic and take some pictures. This photo was one of the resulting photo-documents. My pants leg is cuffed to prevent my jeans from catching in the bicycle's chain. Since the chain is only on one side of the bicycle, I only need to cuff one leg to avoid getting mangled by a tragic pants-tastrophe. (Besides, that's one dang sexy calf muscle right there!) So now you know.
Q: I noticed you just added a new category to the blog, "Queer Theories." Obviously, that's a sign that the blog is going to be addressing more queer issues in the future. So... what's the best LGBT blog out there? Signed, Asking For No Particular Reason
DD Responds: Wow, AfNPR. That's a toughie. Personally, I read Center of Gravitas, Scott-O-Rama, Someone in a Tree, and Bloggernista (who I think I new once, far away, and in a not-so-happy long ago time. But I always, always check Joe.My.God. And so should you. Not only is Joe's blog consistently entertaining, it's also profound:
Best, most multi-faceted use of the phrase "We found ourselves on the dance floor" evah.
Q: Which school would win in a steel cage death-match: Ohio State or the University of Virginia? Signed, Betting on the Big 10
DD Responds: And is that your final answer BotB10? I'm sorry, but you lose. A recent study by Ohio State researchers Ohio State sociologist Dana Haynie, and her indentured servant graduate student, Stacy Armour, argued that:
youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal "abstinence only" programs.
Except that they're wrong. Now, researchers at UVA (led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology -- go doctoral candidates!) have shown that "youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on."
Read the whole article for the details on the scientific smack-down. It's juicy behavioral genetics goodness. And it shows that the Cavaliers kick Buckeye butt.
Q: What the heck's up with the nom-de-blogs on this blog? Signed, Coeurlion
DD Responds: I'm glad you asked that, Coeurlion! This blog holds fast to a strict policy of respecting our commenters' (yes, both of you) identities. That means not letting the LOLCat out of the bag, as it were. And, just for the record, this blogger prefers "Chard" as a nom-de-blog, which, however, this blog and its blogger refuses to use.
Q: What's the best show on YouTube? Signed, Wretched 'cuz of the Writer's Strike
DD Responds: Obviously, that would be The Flight of the Conchords, originally airing on HBO, and then running in a much better format on YouTube. Check out:
Or this favorite of The Spouse:
Just watch them all. It's better than what you'll see on TV these days.
Thanks for tuning into another installment of Ask Digital Digressions!
Posted by reparent at 4:40 PM | Comments (1)
September 12, 2007
One... Last... Duty... to Perform...
I am, to put it mildly, too busy to even breathe at this point. It's not a fun sensation. There's a substantive (really!) post coming, but I won't be able to get to it before Friday. So, until then, here's a picture of Havanna, the German Shepard puppy with her adopted big brother/sister Tahoe (darn those modern genderless names!):
And, to help you to forget all about the tension and trauma of the so-called "Petraeus Report," I give you Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's awesome flash narrative, "Operation Nukorea." Turn on your speakers, click the link, and be amazed.
Posted by reparent at 6:21 PM | Comments (0)
August 29, 2007
The New Semester Begins
Well, the semester has started and the world has not yet ended (as far as I know).
The new courses are running, and each has a snazzy new blog. Check out my teacher-geeky graduate-level Practicum in Teaching Writing blog here. I'll refer to this as "the Teaching Seminar," regardless of what the University has it coded as in its arcane and Vaal-like computer system, so don't be confused. In the Teaching Seminar I'm tasked with teaching the new teachers how to teach English 001, our version of Freshperson Composition. I like it, and it's absolutely essential for our new Graduate Teaching Fellows, but it's not exactly going to set off any super-cool detectors. Sigh. One day society will realize that teaching is dead sexy. Until then...
We've got my other course this semester, Composing Digital Narratives, a course that is really, honestly, cool and sexy all at the same time. Sort of like David Beckham if he were a college course being taught in a computer lab in the bowels (seriously, we're waaaaaay underground) of the administration building.
Anyway, in the Digital Narratives class, we'll be using crazy tech to mess with everything you thought you knew about stories and storytelling. Should be mucho fun.
~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~
In other news, my colleague over in the tech garrison here at UVM, Justin Henry, links to Khoi Vinh's thoughts on "ignorant objects," that is, a provocative take on technology and the Velveteen Rabbit phenomenon. I highly recommend you check it out. And while you're there, note the minimalist design of Vinh's blog. Spare, sparse, yet seriously sharp!
Which brings me to our good friend BoingBoing, now in v2.0. They've dropped the clutter from their site design, added comments to their posts, and launched a new sibling site, BBGadgets. I'm hooked.
~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~
While checking out the new BBGadgets, I came across this picture:
And I was reminded, as I so often am, that the future we were promised is not the future we inhabit. There's an article in there somewhere, I think. Something about the rhetorical appeals and promises in the visual design of the future from the 1940s onward. Hmm...
~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~
And speaking of the future we inhabit, here are two bits of cultural ... um, something.
Item 1: The Wall Street Journal notices the LOLCats phenomenon:
I know it's hopelessly co-opted now, but I can't help myself. I luv me sum LOLCats. Especially when they make it sooooo easy to put together LOLWSJs like that.
Item 2: I am not a hipster. Seriously. I'm not being ironic. Or maybe I am. Who can tell anymore? Anyway, check this out:
Posted by reparent at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
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 8:27 AM | 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 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)
September 26, 2006
Shooting War
Here's a provocative new graphic narrative I just came across: Shooting War, by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman.
Set in a future in which John McCain is president and the war in Iraq continues to grind on, this one isn't for kids.
Online now is the first part of a longer book that will be published in hardcover next year. Somehow, I think that will have a very different feel than these parts do online.
I came across this in the October issue of Wired, and immediately thought it would be good for every class I teach. My freshperson seminar on digital narrative spent the day today discussing the material form of texts and the effects of the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. My senior seminar has just finished a few weeks discussing Art Spiegelman's Holocaust narrative MAUS, and is now having great fun exploring the depths of Alison Bechdel's graphic auto/biography, Fun Home. And in the course I'll be teaching this spring, "Lives Online: Cybercultural Studies," the online presentation of Shooting War, as well as its free availability, as well as its central exploration of blogger culture and neuroses, make it triply ideal.
Is this a sign that I'm in a rut? And is that a bad thing?
As always, check it out.
(X-posted to Literature in a Wired World and The Illustrated Novel, though in a shorter form.)
Posted by reparent at 7:02 PM
September 14, 2006
I'm Late (and a special Silly Webquiz Thursday!)
Hoo boy, am I ever late with this post!
These past few weeks have been insanely busy. Which is no excuse, but there it is.
Anyway, this week in the senior seminar we're discussing Art Spiegelman's MAUS.
Given that, it may be appropriate to mention the following web quiz mentioned by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money: "In What WWII Army Should You Have Fought?>"
You scored as Poland. Your army is Poland's army. Your tenacity will form a concept in the history of your nation and you're also ready to continue fighting even if your country is occupied by the enemy. Other nations that are included in this category are Greece, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Poland | 88% | ||
Italy | 69% | ||
British and the Commonwealth | 69% | ||
Finland | 56% | ||
France, Free French and the Resistance | 50% | ||
Soviet Union | 44% | ||
Japan | 44% | ||
United States | 38% | ||
Germany | 31% |
Should I be offended that in MAUS, Spiegelman depicts the Poles as pigs?
Posted by reparent at 1:30 PM | Comments (1)
June 1, 2006
X-Men 3 & Ethical Issues
Where has the time gone?
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, Self? It sure has been a long time since Richard updated Digital Digressions!
But what you don't know is that the blog has been getting lots of updates in the last few weeks. You just can't see them. That's right -- they're stealth posts. And since they're super-ultra-top-secret, I'm afraid they'll have to stay cloaked. You know how it is.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Any-hoo... the Husband and I saw X-Men 3: The Last Stand last weekend. We liked it. It had eye candy. Lots of eye candy.
But it also had an intriguing ethical dilemma or three, which is of course the topic of this post. Now, fear not. I will maintain my long-standing pledge to refrain from disclosing the essential plot points of a film before you've had a chance to see it. Rest assured I won't be saying a thing about the invasion of the trans-dimensional pirate aliens, nor will I be spilling the beans about Storm's baby, and I won't even hint that it's magnetic mutant powers suggest that somebody's been playing for the other team, if you know what I mean. And I think you do.
No, I'm more interested in the things that set up the conflict(s) in this film than in their (shocking!) resolution. So, telling you that there's a mutant "cure" and that Jean Grey comes back "from the dead" as the screwed-up but insanely powerful Phoenix doesn't give anything away that wasn't in the trailers.
Here's a fun thought-experiment: Imagine that Pfizer has taken a break from developing the next generation of Viagra, and has created a substance (we could call it "Norm-All"™) that instantly and non-lethally erases various signs of "difference" from humans. It could be that Norm-All™ changes brown people into white people, or left-handed people into right-handed people, or liberals into conservatives, or women into men, or gays into straights. Whatever.
Would you take Norm-All™?
Would you support the production of Norm-All™? Or would you work to see it destroyed?
That is, essentially, one of the questions posed by the film, and I'm fascinated by the film's stance on the issue. If such a substance existed, then it could be taken voluntarily by people wishing to rid themselves of their "differences." But it could also be weaponized and used against those who challenge the status-quo. Uppity feminists protesting your corporate hiring and promotion policies? Send in the SWAT team with Norm-All™ dart guns. Race riots erupting over yet another police beating? Hose them all down with Norm-All™ transdermal formula.Do gay bars creep you out? Just set off a Norm-All™ gas grenade inside the ventilation system!
It's just that easy.
On the other hand, Norm-All™ also presents opportunities for those who feel truly afflicted by their differences. Who are you to deny them this opportunity to be Norm-All™?
What do you think?
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
And finally, we get to my other fun dilemma -- what do you do when you're faced with someone with a destructive personality? If you're Professor X, you splinter that personality and lock away the "bad" parts (and a big chunk of mutant power) deep in the subconscious, leaving only the shiny happy parts (and a not inconsiderable amount of mutant power) free.
Of course, this is a recipe for disaster. And this is also why I argue that all literary critics and theorists need to know something about our good friend and sometimes misogynistic nut-job Sigmund Freud. Freud's ideas about personality may be complete hooey, but they still to this day exert a death-grip on narrative structures and characterization.
For instance, the suppressed part of Jean Grey's personality (which goes by the name Phoenix) is a being of pure instinct and desire, unfettered by morality or ethics or petty concerns with right or wrong. Phoenix just wants to have fun. And destroy the universe with her mind, of course. Phoenix is, in other words, pure id. As we learned from Forbidden Planet, "monsters from the id" can destroy not only highly-advanced societies, but also the nuclear family.
We could argue as to whether "Jean Grey" is ego or superego. If we wanted to say that she was a normally-functioning ego, then we would claim that Professor X's psychic surgery implanted a super-psychic super-ego in her mind, which allowed her to repress her Phoenix-id. Personally, I find her incessantly goody-goody personality and anxiety to be indicators that in fact all she had was super-ego. Regardless, as Freud predicts, once the super-ego weakens, the id is able to influence (or become, I suppose) the ego. And then -- as we see in the movie -- bad stuff happens.
In any case, we're faced with two problems here. First, was it right for Professor X to do this to young Jean Grey/Phoenix?
Second, was it right for the director, writers, hairstylists, and costumers to do what they did to Phoenix?
The first question is debatable. The second is not.
Look at this woman. This is not a being of pure desire and power. She's dazed-and-confused. Her hair looks like it's straight out of a box -- and not a good box. And that dress! What, were there left-overs from yet another Jane Austen film remake? Just throw in some dull red dye (hey -- we've got some left from the hair job... perfect!) and she's good to go.
To cotillion.
This woman should be flying. Fast. She should be fighting. Viciously and without provocation. She should be eating. Gluttonously. She should be humping everything that moves. And loving every second. She should be scheming. She should be loud, rude, and thoroughly out of control. Instead, she looks (and acts) like she just got back from a full frontal lobotomy.
For shame, director Brett Rattner! For shame, writers Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn! For shame, costume designers Judianna Makovsky and Lisa Tomczeszyn! And for shame hair department heads Anji Bemben and Candace Neal!
This was an opportunity to really develop a side of this character that we've never seen before. This was an opportunity to let a beautiful actor go absolutely wild. This was an opportunity to show what happens when "monsters from the id!" get ignored.
This was an opportunity that was wasted utterly.
Posted by reparent at 12:18 PM | Comments (5)
March 28, 2006
Mercury's Done It Again...
Mercury (the car-maker, not the planet) has a new Web-Media-Thing.
I subjected both my undergrads and my grad students last semester to the last Mercury Web-Media-Thing, Meet the Lucky Ones, a fragmented tangle of story lines told through interactive tableaux and 50 separate video clips. It's wild. I highly recommend you check it out.
Now we've got The Neverything, a much more linear work, though still featuring something like the Lucky Ones' interactive tableaux.
The Neverything seems to be a cross between a Cohen Brothers-esque exploration of gently odd characters and a Charlie Kaufman-esque high-concept idea.
Only clips 1-5 are up now, with new ones promised each week, so you're getting in at the ground level. Check it out.
Posted by reparent at 10:03 AM | Comments (3)
November 9, 2005
PoMoMou (John Fowles, RIP)
Drape low the black crepe. (And in a completely uncharacteristically unironic way, this time.)
Postmodern literary icon John Fowles has died "after battling a long illness."
We are now officially in PostModernMourning (PoMoMou, for those of you into such things).
John Fowles is the author of such PoMoLit classics as The Magus (which was a major part of my dissertation), The French Lieutenant's Woman (which book was, unsurprisingly, better than the movie), A Maggot (which is on my short-list of books to read when I get a spare moment because it is universally acclaimed), and many others.
Fowles was an author who always played with the big ideas about life, the universe and everything, and whose play always made absolutely fascinating narratives.
Unlike certain PoMo authors (*cough* John Barth, especially his recent stuff like The Book of Ten Nights and a Night*cough*), John Fowles never let his literary works devolve into mere exercises in onanism. For Fowles, each was important. Each novel was relevant. And that relevance and importance was palpable as you read.
My stack of John-Fowles-Novels-To-Be-Read will grow no more.
So get to mourning, already!
Posted by reparent at 9:06 AM
October 17, 2005
Busy Busy Busy
So, no substantive posts for a few days.
However, I leave you with a follow-up to the wildly popular Shining post.
Apparently, the good (and twisted) folks at PS 260 have an internal contest to see who can make the wildest re-cut film trailer. If you haven't seen Shining, go read the post and then watch the clip. It's a scream. Then check out the next entries on the PS 260 site:
West Side Story as a zombie movie:
and Scary Titanic:
Now, I personally believe that making Titanic "scary" is redundant. The use of that damn Celine Dion song is a form of psychological warfare from which I fear we will never recover.
Also, I think that the West Side Story clip is brilliant but flawed -- it's just not fair to add glowing eyes and mouths to make the scary kids even scarier. The effects are gratuitous, especially when you think about how scary the brief glimpse of the little girl is in context.
If you've never thought about what it is that lets a trailer function as a condensed re-telling of a film's story -- a re-telling that may be your first experience of the story -- these clips will give you a lot to think about.
UPDATE! -- Holy crap, there's another one! Starting with 2002's most profitable horror movie ($1.5m budget, $22m box office), Cabin Fever has now become the feel-good-feeling-bad movie of 2005!
Pure genius.
Posted by reparent at 9:36 AM | Comments (1)
September 29, 2005
Thinking and Writing and Blogging and Being
Dang.
Maybe it's just this time of the year -- summer is officially over, the semester has really started to settle into its groove, the leaves are starting to change in places -- but everyone seems so introspective lately. And not just that, but positively down.
I'll provide links in my next post, but for now I just want to say that I'm thinking about all of these posts on being (and surviving as) a graduate student, on being (and surviving as) a faculty member, on publishing (or perishing) because (or in spite of) blogging...
Now, the usual blog narrative that starts with "I've been thinking about X" then goes on to post lots and lots (quite often) of prose about X. The nod toward thinking is a rhetorical performance to show how very important X is (it's worth my valuable brain-time), and what a good (public) intellectual the blogger is.
But it does not allow for the work of the processes of thinking to be made visible. Instead, we only get the results.
Well, not today, loyal readers. Today you get the admission that I really am puzzled and encouraged and troubled and unsure about where I am and where I was and where I see myself going and how I see myself getting there and what relation any of this has to the mountain of words put online by other lovely bloggers.
So, while I process all of this, I leave you to entertain yourself with this Boing Boing post from a while back about a robot cat you can buy in Japan. Click on the "Link" link at the bottom of the post (or on the image below) to see the video footage.
Posted by reparent at 2:03 PM | Comments (2)
September 16, 2005
To IF or not to IF...
Long story short: check out this online game-version of Hamlet. What follows is a medium-length exploration of some ideas raised in my graduate seminar about the nature of academic literary interpretation and the problems posed by Shakespeare's moody Dane. Eventually, I'll meander my way back to the game. You've been warned.
This week in my graduate seminar on hermeneutics and contemporary narrative (a.k.a.: "Interpretation Theory and the Freaky New Stories That Really Make Us Need That Kind of Theory"), we began discussing N. Katherine Hayles' latest book, Writing Machines. (Her new book, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts isn't due out until next month, but what a title!)
In the course of our discussion, we thought about a point Hayles makes about her own scholarly transition from "solving problems" to "investigating problematics." The students were, justifiably, unsure as to what she meant by this, so I brought up a universally-acknowledged problematic text to ground our investigation of problematicity: William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
In the interest of time, we focused on one problematic aspect of the play -- Hamlet's indecision and inability to take action. We proposed a problem-solving approach to this aspect of Hamlet, positing that Shakespeare's lengthy play about equivocation and ambivalence is really a statement of the ultimate futility of life; i.e., Hamlet isn't the only one incapable of making a difference, of righting a wrong -- this is the essence of the human condition in an uncaring and unjust world. In this interpretation, the problem of what to make of Shakespeare's wallowing in Hamlet's paralysis gets resolved quite nicely.
However, the problem with this sort of interpretation is that it shuts down (or tries to, at least) other interpretations. And when these other interpretations muster enough strength and evidence, they tend to discredit this interpretation. It's also rather pat, isn't it?
Against this, we set a different approach, one that explores the dynamics of what makes the play problematic, and that refuses to presume that problems in interpretation are equal to failures or flaws. In the previous model, the problem of Hamlet's ambivalence is, essentially, a flaw in the greatness of the play until it can be rationalized through an interpretive solution.
In this approach, the problematic features of Hamlet make the play more interesting and valuable, not less. With this perspective, Hamlet's failure to exact revenge throughout the play allows us to generate multiple interpretations -- maybe we should think of Hamlet as: a Freudian neurotic, a product of class-based privilege, caught in the midst of an inescapable conflict about gender, sex, and power... the list could go on forever (and does, in Hamlet scholarship).
The conflict between problem-solving and problematics is one that continues to be fought at all levels of literary endeavor. We'd like to think (at least some of the time) that even the most difficult and problematic works can be successfully interpreted, that there's a meaning in there somewhere, and that we could find that meaning. We want that problem to be solved. And even though most of literary work in academia investigates problematics, to get to the dynamics of the problem, the researcher has to embrace the ideology of problem-solving! (After all, we may be open to the possibility that the problem may reveal an entire world of ideas and beliefs, but we have to believe in our own interpretation as being the approach that best opens up that world (i.e., the solution).
It's a tricky game, and one that we're often not aware of playing.
But we can be aware of playing another tricky game, Robin Johnson's The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Games of this sort are alternately called "text adventures" and "interactive fiction." I grew up playing these games (as you can read in my latest fabulous star-profile) , and I always called them text adventures. However, the move in the academy has been to adopt the more erudite nom de jeu interactive fiction, which gives rise to the initialism "IF," which allows for the malapropic acronymic pun in the title.
Anyhoo, IF comes from the dark ages when personal computers were so powerful that they could display text on a screen! That was it, really. The player is given a paragraph or so of text setting the scene, and then is left to type in simple commands to direct the action of the game. At the end of the text provided by the game will be a sideways carrot, like so: > This is the player input line. Type what you want yourself/your character (Hamlet, in this case) to do, and if the game recognizes (parses, in computer lingo) the words you used, it will carry out those actions.
In Hamlet, for instance, after leaving Hamlet's bedroom, you/Hamlet run into Horatio, who tells you about seeing your father's ghost. You, of course, head out into the cold to see this ghost!
Balcony
You are on the palace balcony. Bats are flapping around in the twilight. Miles and miles of crinkly Danish countryside stretch out below you.
A ghost is here.
An exit leads south.
> look at ghost
He looks a little paler and more transparent than you remember him, but this is unmistakably the ghost of your late father. He is dressed in full armour and looks a little bit peeved, just as you would if you were dead.
> talk to ghost
"Hey Dad," you say cheerily. "What's up?"
"Hamlet," says the old man after a sigh, "you remember how I was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back? Well... it's like this. Your uncle Claudius poisoned me so he could become king and marry your mother. I'd be awfully grateful if you could kill him for me."
"All right," you say, "I'll do it!"
Your life suddenly seems to have purpose.
Now, besides being clever and amusing, it's also an interesting way to play with narratological concepts (such as the implied reader, the narratee, the author, the implied author, and speech acts) and to investigate the multiple rich problems presented in and by the original text.
So, for all of you academic types who made it this far (over 1,000 words! Not exactly an example of Berubean exuberance, but well outside the usual bounds of blog terseness) -- what thinkest thou of problem-solving, problematics, and IF Hamlet?
(Thanks to Boing Boing for spotting this!)
Posted by reparent at 12:09 PM | Comments (1)