May 8, 2008

I'm Back

And just in time for my birthday! Yes, today is my 37th birthday, and thanks to the relativistic effects of traveling close to the speed of light, I have it on the highest authority that I don't look a day over 37!

I know you want to know all about my recent trip to outer space, and I was worried that I wouldn't be allowed to discuss it for global security reasons. However, we're lucky that film footage of this top-secret mission has been leaked to the press, with more to come, I am certain.

Now that the space-cat is out of the moon-bag, so to speak, I can speak candidly about the mission I was on. If you haven't seen the leaked clips, watch this:

Yes, the truth can finally be told.

I was on a mission to fight the Evil Space Nazis (ESNs) on the dark side of the moon.

It was very exciting. We've got lots of pictures from the whole shebang, and I'll post some of them in the next few days.

But this adventure with ESNs started me thinking about retro-futurism. Why is it so cool to mix the past into our frothy futurist cocktails? Blade Runner (ha! The Spouse hates it when I go on and on about Blade Runner) famously made 2018 Los Angeles a 1940s-esque noir-fest.

But I digress. Over at his Sweet Homo Alabama blog, Z.C. Byrnes points us to a very cool mashup of canonical western film High Noon and... um, killer robots. How cool is that?!

"Have you forgotten he's got his own deflector shield?" Classic!

Watching this video I was reminded of a tune we heard while in space heading toward the ESN base. In space we got fabulous radio reception from all over the globe, and the crew and I were treated to a fun track on the BBC: The Last Shadow Puppet's "The Age of The Understatement." It's a hoot. Check it out:

Now, while the video gives us Soviet tanks and choruses, the music is heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores. But with a modern twist. I could imagine killer robots being behind that twist. In fact, I bet it was the killer robots who were running the Soviet army. You read it here first, people.

Which, of course, makes me think of that other great recent western-themed future fantasia in song, Muse's "Knights of Cydonia." If you've been living in a retro-futurist-proof bomb shelter for the past year or so, you might not have heard this song. But even if you've heard the seriously western-themed song, have you seen the video?

Oh, Gustof von Musterhausen, your little film is so full of awesome it hurts my brain.

I've written before about remix culture and prosumers (producer/consumers with the near-professional quality modern tech allows), but with "Knights of Cydonia" we get the full circle -- professional video producers remixing genres, effects, narratives, and throwing in a whole heaping of allusions to other works.

And it's all wrapped in a laser-shooting, kung-fu fighting, unicorn-riding sci-fi western package. Excellent.

P.S. Bonus points go to whoever identifies the most allusions in the Muse video!

Posted by reparent at 4:39 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2008

That's Edu-tainment!

I really, really enjoy the "You Suck at Photoshop" videos. I think that's probably because "Donny" manages to be pretty darn funny and I like his voice. I guess I should say something about that last sentence. The Spouse and I were watching The Daily Show a few nights ago and the interviewee was Grover Norquist, sworn foe of "big government" and taxation. Norquist has been a huge force in modern conservative politics, and has quite a reputation.

He's also got the nasal, adenoidal voice of a high school physics club officer. Let's face it, vocally he's no Darth Vader.

"Donny" isn't either, but his voice fits the persona in the videos, and the frequent near-breaks do a nice job to clue us in to Donny's mental and emotional state. (Hint: it's not good.) That's subtext for the videos, and I really appreciate subtext.

All of which is to say, here's the latest in the series:

Another thing I really like about these videos is that they tell a story while they instruct. They're edutainment.

There are other videos, however, that edutain in other, less positive ways. I posted recently about the groundswell of user-generated support for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Grass-roots mass media efforts, however, are only as good as their creators. As we saw in the last Hillary video, the grass may be rooted, but it's not... good. Well, here comes another "hip" effort from Hillary-land. Brace yourselves.

I think we learn a lot from this video as it tries to entertain us with a "hip" "rap." First, it teaches us that even progressives feel better when there's a cleaning lady around. Classist, exploitative labor practices be damned -- Hillary, you're our kind of maid. Now get in there and start scrubbing. You missed a spot. Or something like that. (Hint: listen to the opening again if you're lost.) Second, rap has gotten a reputation as an art form of "the people," as it was started by people socially and economically disenfranchised from corporate patronage and privilege. That would make it seem an ideal vehicle for supporting a Democratic candidate for president. But we learn from this video that you need a little something I like to call "talent" to make rap work. And dude, you don't have it.

But there are people with talent out there, who can make anything entertaining and informational in rap form. Sammy Stephens is one such talented man. This video isn't new, but it's informative (and entertaining) to watch it in dialogue with the Hillary rap.

See? It's just like a mini mall. Though to be fair, it may be that Stephens has better material to work with. The "Mini Mall Rap" even works as an acoustic slow jam.

Someone should tell the Clinton campaign.

UPDATE! The Spouse sent me yet another example of Hillary's "supporters" "helping" the campaign. I think at this point even Hillary wishes that someone please make it stop!

Posted by reparent at 4:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 7, 2008

Wake Up Cat 2: The Return!

Wake Up Cat, possibly the single most awesome video ever uploaded to YouTube, now has a sequel: "Let Me In":

As our fuzzy bringers-of-destruction are exclusively indoor cats, we don't have to deal with this dynamic. Those of you with indoor-outdoor cats -- what do you think? Has Simon Tofield nailed this as well as he did with his first cat video?

Posted by reparent at 3:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 1, 2008

Moonlighting

You know the economy is in trouble when your own cat begins to moonlight on LOLCat sites. Exhibit 1: a cat who looks suspiciously like my kitty Sabrina, staring at a laptop that looks suspiciously like my laptop:

We suspect, as well, that the grammar and diction also match Sabrina's usual patterns. She is the superior feline intellect chez nous.

Posted by reparent at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

February 6, 2008

It's Nothing Special Wednesday!

Well, we've survived Super-Duper Tuesday, and it's now Nothing Special Wednesday. Looking at the latest delegates count, the GOP race seems to be widening, and the Dems are still too close for anyone to call.

In his latest pop-ed (it's an op-ed on pop culture) for Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King notes:

One possibly good sign: Hip TV watchers have grown increasingly foxy about the polling process. The age of innocence is over; voters once willing to come clean and say they voted for Mike Huckabee because [Ted] Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" loincloth is still the high point of their rock lives are harder and harder to find.

Can I be blunt? I think a lot of voters right now lie right through their teeth when talking to pollsters. And that might be the most optimistic trend in an election year where the coverage has never been dumber or more dubious.

King sees this as a good sign, that voters are starting to think for themselves when they vote rather than listening to the incessant din of worthless blather force-fed them by the media. I'm not so sure.

I firmly believe that athletes are to be seen and never heard. (This isn't a digression, really.) When they open their mouths, if anything intelligible comes out, it's always the same pablum. "Well, we just have to play this game like it's any other game. We really need to come together as a team. We need to give it all we've got." Blah blah blah blah freaking blah. They do this because they know that if they said what they were really thinking, they'd become the next John Rocker and lose their lucrative endorsement deals. So they say what they're expected to say. It's easier, and it keeps everyone happy.

I see the same thing happening in exit-polling interviews. Voters say what they're expected to say, regardless of what they think, and especially regardless of what they did.

So, if you wanted to vote for Obama but you just can't get over that whole race thing, why not strike a blow for color-blindness and tell the nice pollster that you did? When you're walking out of the polling place with your church-going neighbor, what's wrong with telling the pollster that you voted for Mike Huckabee, even though you actually pulled the lever for Mitt Romney because... well, he is kinda handsome? After all, no one will ever know.

And it's not like the government hasn't been lying to us for years about much more important things...

(For more about Cthulhu, click on the image.)

Posted by reparent at 9:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2008

How to Teach

Teaching is hard.

And using Adobe's Photoshop program is hard.

Which makes teaching people how to use Photoshop especially hard. Luckily, Donnie Hoyle is here to teach us all how to suck less at Photoshop. To date, Donnie's released four videos in the series, and you owe it to yourself to watch all four. His teaching style is... unique.

For me, one of the interesting things about Donnie's videos is that he really is communicating useful information about Photoshop, and he's doing it in a contextualized manner that helps his viewers to care about what it is he's doing and how he's going to do it.

I'm also reminded of the perennial problem I face when I teach: how can I maintain the focus I want to have in my classes (on the material and the students' growth and development) while also being an out and visible queer presence and resource on campus and in my classes? I'm not sure that this is exactly the approach I would recommend, and yet... Donnie has me wanting to do more with paths and filters!

Posted by reparent at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

Back on the Air (so to speak)

Aaaaaaaaand... we're back!

The break this winter was really strange. I finished the courses I was teaching, turned in the grades, and then... didn't crash. I was too busy with other school-related work and getting ready for Christmas travel (which meant that we had to finish our gift-buying very early and ship everything before we left -- and if you know us, you know that we're always late with our Christmas gifts). Then The Spouse and I traveled down to Richmond, Virginia to spend Christmas with his family. Then, back up here, more school-related work, and into New Years.

Whereupon I finally crashed. Sickness galore. And, without the prospect/specter of a new semester's courses to prep for and teach, I fell into a weird stasis. But I'm back now, and there's much to be done. (As always.)

Anyway, this semester is all about looking to the future. I'm finishing my book this semester, traveling to conferences, and finally launching a newly redesigned and rebuilt web page for the faculty union.

In my research, I'm always looking toward the future, and not just because I get to work with cool, digital things, either. Digital researchers often prognosticate about what's coming next (Ray Kurzweil is a good example of this), but I try to avoid making predictions about the future of technology. I try to think about what we should be doing, rather than what we will be doing. Often, this involves not evolutionary leaps or tech breakthroughs, but simply adjusting our existing practices. (Ray Kurzweil is a good example of this, too -- he often tries to use his speculations and extrapolations to suggest ethical and productive new practices and relationships with machines.)

With that in mind, here are three videos that present new technology that can (and will, I hope) lead to new practices and relationships with machines.

Our good friend Victor e-mailed this to me, and since then it's shot up the viral charts, getting over 2 million views in just a few weeks. Not bad for a grad student!

The next two are related: Photosynth and Seadragon. For some reason the videos for these won't embed. So, you can use the links above to go to Microsoft's site for each and watch the videos posted there, or you can use these links to watch the videos at TechEBlog of Photosynth and Seadragon. Below, I've embedded the presentation that first introduced me to both of these technologies:

I'm excited about these developments. Sure, they're pretty cool, and fun to watch. But more importantly, they begin to suggest new ways of storing, manipulating, and assembling data to create usable, intelligent, and entertaining information.

When I think about these three (somewhat) disparate projects, I immediately begin wondering:

• What will corporations do with these technologies? That is, how will they package them, and to what ends?
• What practices and uses will emerge from users' interactions with them?
• What will these practices teach their users?
• What can we, as teachers, use these technologies to teach our students?

In his previous presentation at TED of Photosynth and Seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks about how Photosynth can pull together images from across the Web and Flikr to create virtually limitless image-fields of what Aguera y Arcas calls the "interesting parts of the earth" -- that is, all of the parts that people take pictures of. It's not exactly the Esper machine from Blade Runner, but it does let you see around corners as the Esper does. What's behind (architecturally speaking) the photographer of the first image of St. Peters Basilica? Photosynth shows you. And as Aguera y Arcas notes in his TED talk, the potential for Photosynth grows as more people share their images.

While Photosynth and Seadragon are mainly (so far, it seems) informational applications, Johnny Chung Lee's research into head-tracking 3-D interfaces is affective. The sense of immersion possible in a responsive 3-D environment is much greater than in a 2-D environment, even one that is designed to appear 3-D. As you can see in the video, even the boring, relatively plain abstract space created by Lee becomes a real place that you feel you're moving through. Lee talks about the potential (and problems) for adapting his technology to games, but it could also be adapted for something like Seadragon and Photosynth, obviously.

This would give us new ways to manipulate data and new interfaces for performing that manipulation. Anyone here remember what life with computers was like before the Apple Macintosh and Windows gave us graphical user interfaces? And now look at what we do with computers and how we do it.

Posted by reparent at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)

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 6, 2007

LOLDinos!

Today was the last day of classes, and then I guest-lectured the graduate theory seminar. I'm pooped. So, here are some of my favorite LOLDinos.

Wait. You don't know what a LOLDino is? Let me explain. John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum in Kentucky and took a bunch of pictures. Then he posted the pictures and asked his readers to LOLCat them. He posted the results here.

Here are some of my favorites. Enjoy!

Posted by reparent at 8:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2007

The F-Word Strikes Again!

A family member recently sent me one of those presumably humorous e-mails that gets sent around the world billions of times before fading into obscurity... until it gets sent around the world billions of times 6-8 months later. This one was a collection of take-offs on the "Demotivators" posters, which are themselves satires of those ubiquitous motivational posters with an artistically-composed nature image and some platitudes about how "you can do it!"

These posters are rather more targeted, and much more profane, than the Demotivators. Some of them were amusing. As a procrastinator myself, I particularly liked this one:

And this one speaks to the math-challenged everywhere:

But then I came across this one, and I wasn't amused:

And this came from a family member who isn't homophobic or otherwise hostile to gays in the least. I'm guessing s/he didn't even really notice it. I mean, of course, calling something gay just means it's lame, right? Yes, we've already covered this topic. But it's not going away.

In fact, Details Magazine just made "faggot" the number 9 item on it's 2007 Power List. They explain who and what makes their list:

There are no white-haired moguls or bank chairmen on the Details Power 50, no one who holds court in Davos or at David Geffen’s beach house. Because, as anyone who understands power knows, it isn’t about corner offices and cocktail-party invitations—it’s about the space in your head. And the men who have it are the ones who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust—the things you think about. So on this list, Silicon Valley overlords rub shoulders with Father of the Year Kevin Federline, preachers consort with pornographers, and those fresh-scrubbed, inescapable kids from High School Musical 2 walk the halls with the new wave of school shooters. These are the people who have taken over the space in your head—whether you like it or not.

Lovely. So, we wend our way down the list to number 9, and we reach "The Other F-word." Its age is "Forever young." Even lovelier. Here's what Details has to say:

If you take a look back, it appears that 2007 was the year of the F-word—but not the one you’re thinking of. America’s rent-a-quote harridan of hatred, Ann Coulter, used the word to slag presidential candidate John Edwards. Presidential candidate Bill Richardson used the Spanish version (maricón) to slam a guy on the Don Imus radio show. Controversy exploded after Isaiah Washington allegedly dropped the F-bomb on a fellow cast member of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a word that anyone who ever spent time in an American school yard is familiar with: faggot. But some bullies grow up, get famous, and keep on using it. “I hate gay people,” blurted former basketball star Tim Hardaway. Tucker Carlson bragged about having given a dude who tried to tap toes with him in a men’s room a taste of his bow-tied brutality (“I . . . hit him against the stall with his head, actually”). Hmmm. The word faggot, it seems, is on the tips of a lot of men’s tongues. They can’t stop thinking about it. Without it they’d be lost, and that makes you wonder who really has the power.

I applaud Details for realizing that the right-wing obsession with gay sex reveals... something about these folks. But the casual homophobia on display in a humorous de-motivational poster like the "Popped Collar" one above is a sign of continuing and deep-running problems. For both the straights and the gays.

We all have a lot of work ahead of us.

Posted by reparent at 6:27 PM | Comments (1)

November 29, 2007

Visualize Whirled Peas

Today's post is all about visualization.

First up, we've got Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury visualizing (i.e., making visual) the recent phenomenon of the "Barack Obama is a Muslim" e-mails:

(Click on the link or on the cell to go to the full comic strip. The thread continues for several more strips, so hit the "Next" button.)

This visualization, of course, correctly identifies these e-mails as desperate attempts to smear a candidate. We expect as much from our political cartoonists. The Washington Post? Eh, not so much. AJ Rossmiller at AmericaBlog and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo call the WaPo on its pathetic performance.

Our next visualization is a real brain-bender. BoingBoing points us to the wall-sized chart of Irene Pereyra and Tom Klinkowstein showing "A Day in the Life of a Network Designer's Smart Things, or A Day In a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030." The idea here is that ubiquitous computing and wearable computers will mesh by 2030, providing us with an uninterrupted flow of data and processing all day long. It's wild and incredibly detailed. As Anthony Townsend notes: "t seems also to be a potential inspiration for user interfaces to the vast amounts of personal data and media we'll throw off in the future." Cool stuff. Click on the link or on the image to download the full pdf file and scroll around it. The key to all of the future-terms is on the far right-hand side.

And finally, one last bit of visualization goodness (and naughtiness)! Artist Maurico Ricardo starts by drawing people's private bits, and then, magically, transforms them into perfectly harmless (ha!) cartoons. With some of the drawings, it becomes very difficult to see the original randy line-drawings. Enjoy!

Posted by reparent at 3:56 PM | Comments (2)

November 24, 2007

Briefly Noted: Cool &/Or Provocative

The Spouse and I saw The Mist a few days ago, and it was really good. We heartily recommend it. It's got a surprising amount of suspense, rather than just heaping on the gore.

And it has a moment, pretty early on, that I think I get now that we live in Vermont. Don't worry, this won't spoil anything. (This blog has a strict no spoilers policy.) The film takes place in Maine, which isn't that different from Vermont. Maine is, however, the whitest state in the U.S. Yes, Vermonters, there is a whiter state than ours.

Anyway, Andre Braugher plays a hot-shot attorney from New York who vacations at his Maine home (as you do). We're told in the film that he could have a seat "on the bench" one day. Well, early on in the film, Andre decides that the white folks (and especially the white locals -- which is redundant) are trying to pull a fast one on the black out-of-towner (and which is worse should be a subject of much debate) and he leads a group of "his people" (the 5 other black people trapped in the store) outside.

I'm not going to say anything about what happens. But I do want to mention this point because of its interesting racial implications.

We might assume that this is a racist plot point -- the black folks are too stupid to stay inside where it's safer. However...

Is Braugher paranoid? Being black in the whitest state in the country has got to be a bizarre experience.

And being an outsider, regardless of your skin color, is a bizarre experience in New England. My mother spent part of her childhood in Massachusetts, and she always told me that the Mass. folks were the most intolerant, closed group of people in the country. On the social ladder, that may be true. But I wonder about it in general, especially up here in the north country.

And let's face it -- going for help rather than staying in the store just because there's a heavy fog makes sense.

The Spouse and I were both impressed with the psychological and sociological depth of the film. (When was the last time you said that about a horror film?) This is an intriguing moment in the film for me, and one that I read differently now that I live here in Vermont.

Also, you probably read about the giant sea scorpion they found that was nine feet long. Here's a graphic from the CNN article:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: insects and arachnids are just plain evil. Yes, we know that gravity and physics prevent these monstrosities from getting this big on land. But give them a little buoyancy... EVIL!!!!

And finally, a brief return to my thoughts on movies/film/video online. I was reading John Rogers' blog Kung Fu Monkey, and I came across this post, which is intriguing for many reasons. But the one I want to mention here is his use of the word "prosumer" to describe high-quality but affordable digital video cameras.

I mention this because of the double-nature of the word. As Wikipedia points out, the word is a back-formation meaning either/both producer/consumer and professional/consumer. It is, of course, also a play on the Pro/Con dyad. This is great, as it really gets to the heart of the video online phenomenon: the consumers are also producers, and are increasingly able to become professionals. Sweet.

And there's a new branding effort going on to reclaim the much-maligned term "progressive" that makes some really nice use of the pro/con dyad. Here's one of the commercials in this effort:

You can watch the others here.

Posted by reparent at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2007

Thankfulness Week Begins!

Hey, it's the first day of Thanksgiving Vacation! In the past, UVM followed the traditional Thursday-and-Friday-off model of Thanksgiving breaking. Then, after the faculty rioted, burned down the administration building, and detonated a suitcase-sized nuclear device in the office of the Chair of the Board of Trustees, the university decided to face facts. Here's the month of November, with the old days-off marked in a lovely and soothing periwinkle:

Now here's the month of November, with the actual days most students would take off marked in a more alarming shade of pumpkin:

As you can see, the students decided that they were very thankful, indeed, and needed more time to adequately consider, express, and celebrate all of that thankfulness.

So, the University decided to give everyone the whole week of Thanksgiving off. Of course, students still check out early. (Some of them very early, indeed.) But now it's a little more fair for everyone.

To begin the week of thankfulness, I'm going to start with something I am thankful for: Sharable media. Without the video-sharing sites, without Flikr, without I Can Has Cheezburger's Lolcat Builder, the world would be a much sadder, plainer, less interesting place.

And speaking of sad, plain, and uninteresting, here's a new form of sharable media I just came across -- sharable and embed-able PowerPoint slideshow viewers! Slideshare.net does for PowerPoint what YouTube did for self-indulgent video blogs! But that's not why I used "sad, plain, and uninteresting" as the segue here. On LifeHacker I came across this bright little ray of light in a dark, dark world of bad PowerPoint presentations. Alexei Kapterev is here to tell you all about "Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it)," and thank the Lords of Kobol he is!

As an English Professor, I don't actually have to sit through that many bad PowerPoint presentations at work. (Another thing for which I am thankful!) But I see them practically every day. The English Department surrounds one of the premier meeting/presentation venues on campus, and the hallway outside my office has four large windows that look down into this large, stained-glass-bedecked room. And what do I see? PowerPoint. Almost always. And what's on the slides? Bad stuff. And what are the presenters doing? Reading from the slides. I shudder.

(I should file a hostile work environment complaint. Proximal exposure to that much horribleness can't be good for my health or my productivity.)

Anyway, watch the slideshow. There's no sound. There doesn't need to be. I especially enjoyed the Microsoft Vista Launch PowerPoint slide. Ouch!

Posted by reparent at 6:01 PM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2007

Thinking About Video Online, some samples

This past Wednesday, I posted about a series of online videos by "Betty Munson," and started thinking out loud about videos online. I'll be continuing along that train of thought, and this post, (a repost from the Digital Narratives blog, will give us a lot of examples to consider as we think through the issues surrounding and arising from video online.

To set the stage, the Digital Narrative students had just announced to me and to each other what their second major project would be, and in what format. I was surprised to see that sooooo many of them chose to make videos. The post below provided them with a little bit of background on highly-regarded (or at least highly-watched) videos, and where to host them, and then a whole truckload of interesting videos and video-making collectives online. Enjoy.

Click the link below to see the post.

First, a few useful links.

Viral Video Chart tracks the number of times a particular video is posted to a blog, aggregates those numbers, and then creates a list of the week's most often-posted videos. It's a handy way to see what's getting play across the blogosophere.

YouTube is the granddaddy of all video sites (not chronologically, but definitely with regard to the sheer volume of crap it's got stored in its house). Here's video on YouTube from Smosh, which I'm posting because of their excellent use of freeze-frame in video to avoid having to deal with stunt effects. It's cheap and effective:

Nerve is an edgier, more sex-obsessed (but usually not NSFW) site with tons of videos. There are a number of series on the site, ranging from dramatic to comic to documentaries. The documentary series Boys and Girls is particularly interesting, as it straddles a line between traditional documentary and all of the satires on documentary format. Here's an episode from Boys and Girls, chosen in honor of last week's National Coming Out Day:

Google Video used to compete with YouTube, but then Google bought YouTube in the celebrated/reviled GooTube acquisition, and so now no one knows why Google keeps the old, DRMed, less-user-friendly Google Video around. On the plus side, because it is Google, you can search all of the video sites at once.

Yahoo Video... heck. Who even know Yahoo had a video site. Well, they do.

And on to the videos.

P0ykpac describes themselves as "a Brooklyn-based comedy troupe consisting of Jonny Gillette, Ryan Hall, Ryan Hunter, Taige Jensen, Jennifer Lyon, and Maggie Ross." CLick the link above to see all their videos. Highly recommended is their "This is P0ykpac Live" video, in which two of the members talk to their viewers, and the widely posted "Hipster Olympics." If you're a gamer, you should also check out their "tribute" to "Mario: Game Over."

Mr. Deity is, as you might have guessed from the title, a satire of religion. But it's sweet, really. And extremely funny. Check it out, and then be sure to watch the promos for the second season. Note that the "show" has "seasons." This has major implications for television, which has seen its viewership continue to decline in recent years...

Kelly is a force of nature. Her latest feature video is "Let Me Borrow That Top," but many view "Shoes" as her crowning achievement. They're wrong, of course. "You Can't Text Message Breakup" beats them all. And now Kelly is on the Vh-1 show "I Hate My 30s." Watch and see why:

Barats & Bereta are a comedy duo with a large number of videos online. You can use the link above to see all their films, but this one is my favorite. If you've got at least one sibling, it might become yours, too:

And here are more worthwhile videos.

Ready Set Bumbo is a trilogy of stop-motion films featuring, um... a baby, a pomerian, a foam-seat-thing, and assorted clones and other babies-in-foam-seat-thingies. It's hard to describe, really.

It turns out there are a lot of comedy collectives out there releasing videos online. And there are a lot of sites that gather together all of these videos for your enjoyment.

Funny or Die is like a YouTube devoted to comedy. It was through Funny or Die that I found the following videos.

"Switching to a Secure Frequency" is a great example of tight writing combined with minimal, easy-to-create effects to produce a really clever little video:

Calculus is another really odd group making little nuggets of comedy neurotoxin. I'm especially intrigued by their decision to put all of the dialogue on screen. It's like a moveable A Softer World. Very cool. Check out all of the Calculus "topics" at the link above, and watch their latest for a taste of their dementia:

And finally, something really interesting and not-comedy-oriented. A group of five impoverished Belgian filmmakers decide to make a sci-fi movie. After each episode airs, they'll read the comments posted by viewers, and direct the action according to what the viewers say. It seems to be a pretty cool approach, but it's too early yet to really judge. Watch the first two episodes here, and click on the link above to go to their website:

That should give all of you a whole lot to think about as you work on Narrative 2.

Posted by reparent at 4:17 PM | Comments (1)

November 16, 2007

Geography Week...

This week was Geography Week (also Geography Awareness Week, according to some fliers) on campus. And so this post is devoted to geography, and to The Spouse, who loves maps with a passion that knows no bounds.

While reading Joe.My.God. I came across this map, which isn't really funny. It's too accurate to be funny. See for yourself:

The map comes from a blog called Strange Maps, which does indeed feature nothing but strange maps. While I was scrolling through the recent posts, I came across this one:

This map is of particular interest, because The Spouse and I will be spending some time in London this spring. I do hope we won't be surrounded by losers.

Posted by reparent at 6:35 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2007

Cruel... but Necessary?

I've been thinking about films and videos online for a while, now. The next few posts are my attempt to put some of these thoughts together in some reasonable order.

First, something juicy to start us off. John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey turns our attention to these two videos posted to YouTube by Betty Munson. They're sequential, sort of, so watch them in order to get the full effect.

Rogers has this to say about these:

"So who is Betty Munson? Is she real? Or is she an entertainer who's figured out that video entertainment on the web is more like haiku -- short bursts of standalone narrative that can be linked over time? Or is she both, one become the other? Either/or, spiffy."

I agreed with him. I thought the first was interesting, and the second was really, horribly, gratifyingly cool. So I clicked on the video and tracked Betty back to her YouTube profile.

There, I learned that she had posted a third video (which was really her first, but it was the third I had seen:

Now, at this point I was beginning to wonder whether Betty Munson was really Betty Munson, or rather "Betty Munson," a la lonelygirl15. As I watched this clip, I was bothered by the gynecologist. Not because she was a jerk, but because I thought I recognized her. I freeze-framed on her and it became clear to me that she is an actress -- Lisa Zane. I had most recently enjoyed her as Diana, the exiled Roman trying to gain control of rebellious ancient Ireland in the TV series Roar. (The SciFi Channel had aired most of the series' episodes, and The Spouse and I enjoyed watching them many, many months later from the DVR. More info on the show here.)

Going back to Kung Fu Monkey, of course the Hive Mind had beaten me to the punch. First commenter "Sander" outs the videos as part of a fictional narrative work. In this case, it's Cruel But Necessary, a film imdb claims came out in 2005. Here's the plot summary, written by "anon":

Cruel But Necessary is the story of Betty Munson's strange journey of self-discovery and soul-awakening in the traumatic years following the revelation, on videotape, of her husband's infidelity. Her marriage over, struggling to raise her teen-age son alone, Betty becomes driven to discover other secrets that may surround her and so she videotapes every aspect of her life during the gradual disintegration of her comfortable upper middle-class existence. Sometimes used as an eavesdropping device, other times as a confessional, Betty's camera dispassionately records the layers of family and personal dynamics. The film is seen entirely from the viewpoint of Betty's video camera resulting in a "surveillance tape" that is a kind of voyeurism of the absurd.

I can't find a copy of the movie anywhere, and I don't remember it getting a wide release. Here's a blurb from the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival. Maybe it failed to get a distributer.

In any case, why are these clips getting released now? Is it a marketing ploy? A sign of an upcoming sequel to the original movie? Certainly, the "finding yourself by videotaping others" theme isn't new in movies. sex, lies, and videotape (one of my favorites of all time) did it in 1989. The Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet made Hamlet's need to videotape everyone around him one of the film's central modes of characterization in 2000.

But in sex, lies, and videotape there's really no way to distribute the videos James Spader makes. They're private and mostly secret. Things have changed. As we saw in yesterday's post the desire to document one's life (or the expectation that one should document one's life) on sites like Facebook and MySpace (and YouTube and the other video sharing sites), means that not only is nothing really private anymore, but that what used to be considered private is now easily and widely broadcastable.

From the point of the consumer of these videos, it's a huge shift. We don't just watch professionally-made videos anymore. We watch each others, and we frequently enjoy them more than we do the professional stuff out there.

While this is new in respect to video technology, it's not really a new dynamic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, diaries and journals were often published and read widely.

But what's the difference, still thinking about this from the perspective of the viewer/reader of these personal works, between reading Samuel Pepys' diaries, and watching the video blogs of someone like DiGiTiLsOuL?

One of the grad students in the department is starting work on his MA thesis on digital media, and I keep pushing him to address this issue: what's the aura (to use a term from Walter Benjamin in a decidedly, intentionally, not-exact-and-not-really-what-Benjamin-meant sort of way) of video, and how does that compare with print? How do their respective modes convey information, and what is the potential for impact, for affect, with their viewer/readers?

In our composition classes, we teach students how to increase, ideally, their rhetorical authority and their ability to convey their individual voice through the mute medium of print. But are those concepts really even parallel enough to remain applicable when we think about personal videos? Bree's hesitations and fumbles in the lonelygirl15 videos endear her to us and invest us in her narrative, but infelicitous prose and awkwardness often alienate readers.

Much to think about here... and we haven't gotten to the perspective of the producers/composers of these videos!

Posted by reparent at 2:25 PM | Comments (1)

November 4, 2007

Fall Back... In Plain View of Everyone

Welcome to the end of Daylight Savings Time! That event is one of the happiest festivals of the year chez Digital Digressions. "Falling Back" means never having to say you're sorry for sleeping until 7 or 8am, because it's now 6 or 7am, and you suddenly seem like a good, upstanding member of the (early-rising) community.

Ah, the joys of time travel!

Of course, life isn't all champagne brunches in bed here at the hacienda. No, regardless of what temporal witchery we may effect with our digital chronometers, we have an older, primordial force to reckon with.

The cats.

Or, as we like to call them, our fuzzy alarm clocks. See below, for an in-depth and unflinching look at life with felines. I must warn you... you may be shocked by what you see. You may be disturbed. (We sure the hell are, most mornings.)

I don't know what perverse demon-god brought the so-called "Protestant Work Ethic," the phenomenon of the "morning person," and cats desiring ever-earlier sunrise breakfast specials in to existence, and then conflated them into a huge, looming monolith of cultural (and individual) expectation that we should all get the frack up before the sun rises, but that demon-god had dang well better have received a MASSIVE promotion and raise for that one.

Anyway, I was reading the Sunday New York Times ("so much paper, so little news" -this morning's review by The Spouse) and I came across the article on the front page above-the-fold of the Week in Review section, "See Me: Yours for the Peeping." And this was the image that took up almost all of the above-the-fold page:

The article is all about how new buildings are being designed to heighten, not minimize, your exposure to the rest of the world. That is, whereas in earlier, simpler (pre-digital, but we'll get to that in a minute) days, buildings were designed so that you could create a private space for yourself and/or your family. (For instance, memorably, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, both a resort community and a public housing project designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright-esque Howard Roark were built so that each of the units in the resort and tower had no view of the neighboring units, providing the illusion that each unit was it's own space, rather than simply one of many in the development.)

However, in the age of Facebook and web cams, Penelope Green tells us that our architecture is now facilitating our exhibitionism like never before. Architects like Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo strive to create "glass-walled condominium towers" that "allow [...] residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below." But not only can you now flash your neighbors, you can also flash your cohabitants! Green tells us of "peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that's a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too."

Mmmmm... sounds tantalizing, doesn't it? I can't wait to use my new glass-cube bathroom! I bet you can't wait for me to use my new glass-cube bathroom, either!

But all of this architectural philosophizing is predicated upon our on-line behavior, which is, admittedly, increasingly exhibitionistic. Why do we text message each other at all hours of the day and night? Why is there no shame in having loud, often personal conversations on mobile phones in public spaces? (The NY Times has an article about the popularity -- and illegality, damnit -- of personal phone jamming devices.) Why should I care that the NaBloPoMo site tells me that I have "No friends on this social network yet"? Do I care? And why do we blog our lives, and keep our MySpace and Facebook pages up-to-the-second?

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with Pat Mardeusz, research librarian extraordinaire at UVM's main library, about exhibitionism on campus. She was leaving campus one evening and she saw a scantily-clad young lady walking down the sidewalk. The car in front of her was filled with scruffily-dressed young men, whose heads all turned in eerie synch to watch her walk by. Pat told me about how angry and protective she felt in that situation. I understood where she was coming from, but I immediately thought about the presumption of public performance that seems to be an inextricable part of youth culture today. They seem to expect that everything they say and do will be out there for others to read/watch/listen to/whatever. And, as the NaBloPoMo "you have no friends" notice points out, the more people who watch you, the more popular and socially powerful you are.

But is it the same in the "real," i.e., non-digital world? Wearing trampy provocative clothing undeniably makes one more noticeable and more noticed, but does the social power of that noticing also translate?

One final thought on this. I was talking about female objectification with the grad seminar a few classes ago (we were discussing an article on visual literacy, visual rhetoric, and the role of subjectivity in visual interpretation). We ended up talking about the respective connotations of images of fully or mostly naked men and women in the media.

In your mind, which more often conveys strength, power, or security, and which conveys weakness, vulnerability, and defenselessness -- undressed men or women?

Which brings me back to the glass bathroom article in the Times. What are we to make of the shirtless guy in this picture? (The Spouse told me he thinks the guy is urinating. I'm not convinced of that, but it's certainly apropos of the article. And, for the record, if that's the case... ewwwwwwww.)

And what would you make of the picture of the building if it were a topless woman facing away from the camera? Does that change the stakes in this discussion of moving our exhibition off-line? Why?

Posted by reparent at 3:06 PM | Comments (1)

September 1, 2007

There is a House in New Orleans...

UPDATE: I've replaced the old viewer client for "The Saints are Coming (Version 2)" with the same clip from YouTube. The quality isn't as high, but The Spouse informs me that the AOL viewer gives Internet Explorer fits.

It's the second anniversary of the debacle and the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and I still don't have much to say about it.

As I mentioned in posts from 2005 (here, here, and here), this isn't a political blog, but as the various waves of feminist theory and praxis have insisted, sometimes the political is personal, and the personal is political. And, for me, it's all tied up in the ways we imagine (literally, how we construct our own "image" of the event, and how the media "images" it for us) what happened then, what is still happening now, and what it means to us.

I haven't been back to New Orleans since the MLA conference of 2001, so I'm not in a very good place to pontificate on the state of the city. But one of my former students came by my office to talk about VOIP and mobile phones (as you do), and mentioned that he'd spent time this summer in Central City rebuilding houses. He said that he was glad that he'd been a part of that effort, but that at the end of the day, he wondered whether it was really worth it after what had happened, and the state that the entire area is still in now.

But this post isn't about the reality on the ground, it's about the image of the reality on the ground, and the possibilities for the past, present, and future of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and I guess, of the rest of the world.

Back in 2006, U2 and Green Day covered The Skids' song, "The Saints Are Coming" during the reopening of the Louisiana Superdome as part of a charity effort "to bring instruments and music programs back to New Orleans."

The video for the song blends studio footage, concert footage from the Superdome performance, and a reimagining of the aftermath of the storm. The second-half of the video has been further refined and re-edited, and that "second version" is the one I'm linking to below:

Scott brought my attention to "Version 2," and as with the first version, he's absolutely right: "Tell me if you get chills up your spine like I did the first time they sing the chorus lyric 'the saints are coming' and the jets streak across the sky." Every time I watch the video, I do.

It is, I think, "shock and awe" as it should be. It is shocking to see military planes flying in purposeful formation over U.S. airspace. And it is awe-inspiring to think of what the combined might of the U.S. armed forces could have accomplished over here.

I'd like to contrast that with another music video that uses military footage to make a point about what is, was, and what could be -- Linkin Park's "What I've Become Done" (thanks, Coeurlion):

Here's the bulk of the lyrics for the song:

So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done

I'll face myself
To cross out what i’ve become
Erase myself
And let go of what i’ve done

[. . .] For what I’ve done
I start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I’m forgiving what I’ve done

It seems to me that Linkin Park is attempting to express the sentiment that no matter how terrible one's actions and/or feelings might be, that self-reconciliation is always a possibility, and that no life is beyond hope. The emphasis is on the hyperbolic nature of angry teenager self-understanding. You may feel, Linkin Park tells us, like a neo-nazi, but you can move past this and become a green growing sprout of positivity.

But what comes across because of the strength and terror of the images they've chosen to use, is that all of these atrocities are forgivable. That if an actual klansman forgives himself, that he'll be okay. That the military industrial complex can "cross out what they've become" and move on to a happier time "somewhere that's green."

I know I'm asking too much of Linkin Park here, but when images of above-ground nuclear testing, race riots, police squads moving against protesters, deforestation, the slaughter of elephants for black-market ivory harvests, industrial pollution, third-world starvation and first-world anorexia, Mussolini, the Klan, neo-nazis, the fall of the WTC, injecting heroin, an oil tanker wrecked upon a shore and spilling millions of gallons of oil, Chernobyl, and children with assault rifles (to name just a few) become mere stock footage used to illustrate an excessively emo wallow in self-hatred, then we have a problem.

Posted by reparent at 11:40 AM | Comments (3)

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 21, 2007

So Now You Know

Boing Boing continues to give us news we can use:

Man, I love infographics! Thank you, Vjornaxx.

Posted by reparent at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2007

More (and Less) Human Than Human

What do these three photographs have in common?

Can you guess? Click the link below to find out.

They're all three completely artificial. Each of them was computer-generated by a very talented digital artist. (Here are links to Max Wahyudi's portrait of actress Song Hye Kyo; the Flickr posting of the minimalist bathroom; and Piotr Fox Wysocki's online portfolio.)

I've mentioned before on this blog that you just can't trust images anymore. The idea of "indexicality" (that photographs have a 1-to-1 relation to some real moment, space, and event, even if that moment is long past, the space has been demolished or repurposed, and the event was memorable only to the photographer) is under attack from all sides.

The Spouse was recently advised to purchase a disposable camera to be kept in the glove compartment of our car so we can document the event in case of an accident. Why a cheap, low-quality disposable camera? We both have camera phones and also have a pretty nice digital camera. Because the police are hesitant to allow digital photographs as evidence in their investigations as they're so easily manipulated.

In short, the police don't believe your digital photographs are indexical. They're just not real enough anymore.

I had the same thought when Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money persuaded me to take the MyElectionChoices Presidential Candidate Compatibility Test. The test begins by asking you which issues will be most important in your final selection of a candidate for president. It then provides you with a selection of actual quotes from all of the candidates on the issues you had identified and asks you to indicate which ones you agree with. At the end, it tabulates which candidate has the most comments on record that you agree with.

It's a clever way to engineer a silly web quiz with "real-world" implications. But I don't believe it one bit.

In short, I've become so cynical that I don't believe that anything a presidential candidate says is indexical.

Sigh.

And if you're curious, I selected 3 issues and here are my matches:

• Mike Gravel (D) - 8 matches
• Hillary Clinton (D) - 7
• Barack Obama (D) - 7
• Bill Richardson (D) - 6
• Joe Biden (D) - 5
• Christopher Dodd (D) - 5
• Ron Paul (R) - 5
• John Edwards (D) - 4
• Dennis Kucinich (D) - 4
• Sam Brownback (R) - 2
• Mike Huckabee (R) - 1
• Tom Tancredo (R) - 1

(This post's title, by the way, comes from the movie Blade Runner, in which the Tyrell Corporation builds robot "replicants" that are, according to the company motto, "More human than human.")

Posted by reparent at 12:02 PM

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 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)

April 13, 2007

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

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

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

But they might have chosen to use this photo instead:

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

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

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

And ever. And ever. And ever.

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

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

(X-posted to Lives Online)

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

April 3, 2007

Fresh New Designs for Spring!

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

Click the link to read all about it.

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

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

Awesome makeover, Mike!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(X-posted on Lives Online)

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

February 5, 2007

Some Questions on The Gaze & The Internet

I just pre-ordered the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for our niecelings. And for ourselves, of course. The deluxe edition. I wonder who's going to die in this one? Which brings me to today's topic.

In class on Friday, we discussed Simone de Beauvoir's feminist manifesto The Second Sex, and Laura Mulvey's foundational work of feminist film theory, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. While the first is certainly exciting, it's the second that I want to think about a little bit here.

Mulvey argues that "film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle." So far so good.

Her critical apparatus is Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, on which I'm not especially keen, but her conclusions are certainly worth discussion.

Mulvey's key term from this work has come to be known as "the gaze," though Mulvey most often sticks to the Greek scopophilia, "pleasure in looking." As Mulvey explains it, in classical cinema (meaning mainstream Hollywood movies, as opposed to classical music, which is the antithesis of mainstream), male characters are "the bearers of the look," and female characters become mere "image." That is, guy characters look at lady characters. Audience members, meanwhile, are looking at the guy character looking at the lady character. This results in the audience identifying with the guy character, which reinforces the (possibly subconscious) belief that lady characters (and, by extension, lady people in real life) are rewards to be won and objects to be enjoyed.

If you think about the many examples from classic Star Trek of men looking & women being looked at, every time Kirk (it's usually, but not always, Kirk) finds a new space-girlfriend, the camera zooms in on her in a soft-focus choker shot. Compare these two shots from the classic Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." The first time we see Joan Collins' character, Edith Keeler, we get this:

The very next shot is of Kirk trying to explain his presence in her basement:

Notice the grittiness of the frame with Kirk, and the haziness surrounding Keeler? This is almost always a visual tip that Kirk has just fallen in "love."

Kirk, being the active captain-type guy that he is, is active. His female love-interest, on the other hand, becomes not merely passive, but is actually reduced to the status of a painting, a thing.

Mulvey, writing in 1975, argues that "An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen."

This, of course, was before Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and the rise of the Calvin Klein -esque beefcake model. These guys have made a living being beautiful and being objectified even while they're being active male "bearers of the look" that objectifies their female love interests. (When, that is, there is a female love interest. One could make a fascinating counter-example of the dueling objectifications at play in movies like Top Gun -- in which Val Kilmer has no female love interest -- or Fight Club -- in which Edward Norton's character seems even more enchanted by Brad Pitt's chiseled physique than by Helena Bonham Carter's lady-parts.)

Which brings me back to today's topic. Not quite Harry Potter, but instead young Daniel Radcliffe, the (currently) 17-year-old actor portraying Potter in the films of the books. Mulvey talks about cinema, and it's important to think about the ways in which cinema creates voyeuristic spaces for us all, but what about the Internet? Without a director or cinematographer to choose the shots, close-ups, pans, and dissolves, who is responsible for where we look online, and at what we look? Does the power dynamic of the objectifying gaze still apply?

Radcliffe, you may be aware, is about to make his debut in London's West End (it's the British equivalent of playing on Broadway) in a revival of Peter Shaffer's play Equus. If you're not familiar with the play, it's about a messed-up teenager who has a ... erm, very special ... relationship with the horses he cares for. The action of the play mostly follows his relationship with his psychotherapist, Martin Dysart, who tries to understand and help the boy, while simultaneously reflecting on his own dysfunctional life. It's a powerful play, but, as you might guess, not the most uplifting one.

At this point I think it may be important to (re)introduce the concept of the "unicorn chaser." I've blogged about unicorn chasers before, and I'm about to give you another one to help wash any unpleasantness from your mind. Here you go:

This image was brought to us courtesy of Bill in Portland Maine. Ain't it cute?!?! If you find yourself disturbed by what follows, just click the "Back" button on your browser and bask in the amazing cuteness of this picture.

Because, did I mention that the teenager in Equus spends most of the play naked? And there are already promo pictures from the Radcliffe revival. Brace yourself and then click the link below to continue.

The publicists for the revival have released promo pictures for the play, as publicists do, but these seem a little more... lascivious than most.

If I were to psychoanalyze these pictures, I'd suspect that the publicists were trying to convince the world that yes, Daniel Radcliffe does, indeed, appear naked through most of the play, and has no problem with that whatsoever.

But do we have problems with seeing our cinematic avatar of all things Potter-esque in the buff? And who knew he was so buff?

And is it beyond the pale to note that he's only 17?

And does the presence of the Abercrombie&Fitch-worthy shots of Radcliffe with his female costar make any of this any better?

Over at GayGamer, Fruit Brute notes that "There's no denying that Mr. Radcliffe has grown in to quite the smokin' young stud at the tender age of 17, but I don't think most people were prepared to see their favorite boy wizard in the buff. It's interesting how unwilling our brains are to accept the fact that our child stars grow up, become adults and grow happy trails that would make a Freshman magazine model jealous."

Okay, so if you're still with me, I have questions.

• Does the objectifying gaze exist in live theater?
• Does the gaze exist in our interaction with images posted to the Internet?
• Does the availability of images like this (which, because of their association with a canonical high-art work of drama might not even be close to being NSFW), reconfigure the gaze as something that the audience constructs?
• Does type-casting Radcliffe as Harry Potter perform a version of the gaze in which Radcliffe is permanently reduced to a particular form of object, that of the avatar for a particular fictional character?
• Even in the pictures with Joanna Christie, who is the eroticized, objectified image-ified de-personified person -- Radcliffe or Christie?

I'm dying to find out what you all think about this. If you've made it this far, of course. As Mulvey argues, "Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like." Or maybe it's just that we don't want to be able to count the ridges on Harry Potter's chest.

If you're feeling so inclined, hitting your BACK button on your browser will now take you back to that adorable unicorn chaser of the puppy. Go ahead. You've earned it.

Posted by reparent at 4:48 PM | Comments (9)

November 25, 2006

Shocked (again and again - we keep watching)

By now you've possibly heard about the UCLA student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, who was tasered repeatedly by UCLA police officers in a series of unfortunate events. If you haven't seen the video, take a few minutes and watch it here (fair warning -- this is a disturbing video, and probably NSFW, due to the screaming and suggested violence):

From the Bruins Nation blog (who were the first to provide details on the incident), the Associated Press, and the Daily Bruin student newspaper, we learn that this is what happened:

• 1) UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was using one of the computers inside a UCLA library computer lab.
• 2) A random ID check (UCLA ID is required to use University computer labs) by Community Service Officers (CSOs) revealed that Tabatabainejad did not have his student ID card on him. The CSOs asked Tabatabainejad to leave. He did not. The CSOs called the UCLA police to remove Tabatabainejad from the library.
• 3) By the time the UCLA police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun leaving the computer lab. The UCLA police grabbed Tabatabainejad.
• 4) Tabatabainejad began yelling for the police to unhand him.
• 5) Bruins Nation reports that "the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition."
• 6) During Tabatabainejad's efforts to leave the computer lab/the UCLA police's efforts to escort Tabatabainejad from the computer lab (take your pick), the UCLA police tased Tabatabainejad at least twice more, and threatened to taser any UCLA student who got in their way.

This incident is disturbing regardless of the motives of Tabatabainejad or the UCLA police officers at the scene. The violence is disturbing. The use (and abuse?) of force is disturbing. The threat to non-ID-carrying students is disturbing. And yes, the ethnic angle of police aggression against an Iranian-American student is disturbing. As John Aravosis points out at AmericaBlog, UCLA student columnist David Lazar ended his moderate-seeming column calling for calm until all of the relevant facts can be discovered and understood with this bio: "Send your favorite Rodney K