February 13, 2009

WAR! What's It Good For? Multomodality!!

This week in the 21st Century Literacy seminar we started discussing a tremendous book, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing:

We're reading it because of the way Lindqvist presents his history -- the book is written in 399 short passages arranged chronologically. He groups the sections into 22 different "chapter-like" facets of the history of bombing, but each of these 22 stories moves forward and backward in time. This requires the reader to jump forward and backward in the book, making the transitions in time also feel spatial. You really feel the movement forward and backward. It's quite cool. And, it's also very, very intense. Lindqvist doesn't pull any punches as he sets out bombing from its invention in the 8th century to the present day, focusing on the mechanics, effects, and implications of bombing. This is some scary stuff.

And not to be irreverent, but Lindqvist's book has had me thinking about form and content, about what we use war for. And this is what keeps coming to mind:

If you're not fluent in New Wave German, here are the lyrics to the English version of the song, but don't peek at them right away. In the seminar we watched the video in German and discussed what it sounded like Nena must be talking about. The grad students (except for one), bless their young hearts, couldn't retell the story. My New Wave heart was sad. But we discussed the context of the song -- 1980s Cold War reality, as well as the musical styles of the time. Then we read the lyrics together and discussed them, too. I like the lyrics site I linked to above -- I've never read the German and English side-by-side before. What do you think? Given the problem with "loose nukes" we have with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as the proliferation of nuclear countries, is this more or less likely to happen now?

Here's a song that didn't seem to get as much radio play in the US as it was getting in the UK when we were there last summer: The Last Shadow Puppets' "The Age of the Understatement":

What I find fascinating about this video, of course, is the way the video director uses the Russian military and Cold War imagery. If you just listen to the song, it feels more like a Western film, much like Muse's "Knights of Cydonia".

I'm also reminded of this classic song from Kate Bush, "Experiment 4":

This song isn't about the visuals at all, but rather the story retold by the lyrics. One of the grad students identified House's Hugh Laurie in video, and I noticed that the female scientist is Dawn French. Star-studded (if you're interested in British comedy shows)! Also, while this may have been sci-fi for Kate Bush when she recorded the song, but, of course, we have these sorts of sonic weapons now. And we use them on Americans (And this is really scary.)

And lastly, a song by The Skids covered by U2 and Greenday that uses the military (especially the air capabilities of the military) in a different, but still heart-wrenching way. "The Saints Are Coming":

The lyrics for this one are here, though the visuals are far more arresting, I think.

Note: I think this version of the video is a little more powerful, but embedding is disabled.

Also note, I was surprised after we watched this video the first time that not everyone knew that the central idea in this video -- the military recalled from Iraq to aid in the recovery efforts in New Orleans -- never happened. As I discussed with the grads, and as I've mentioned on this blog before, this video messes me up. As I tried to explain, the confluence of affective devices (the propulsive music, the shots of the physical and human devastation, the awesomeness of the military presence, the amount of help it was possible the military could have given, the thought that our massive military could use its might for unqualified good, and of course the devastating crash back to reality because this was "As Not Seen On TV" because it never happened) provoke an almost overwhelming response from me.

So, in this new era of "Hope" or "Change" or something, what do you think of the ways we use the military and military imagery in our culture? And what have I missed?

Posted by reparent at 5:10 PM | Comments (1)

February 4, 2009

TED - The Gift That Keeps Giving (Scott McCloud edition)

I've posted TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks here before, mostly because I find them absolutely fascinating. If only every conference were this consistently enlightening and entertaining!

Today's bit of TEDey goodness is Understanding Comics author (he also wrote the graphic announcement for Google's Chrome browser), Scott McCloud.

McCloud (as usual) does a good job presenting smart, interesting material that is also accessible (okay, parts of the Chrome job weren't very accessible, but I already discussed that). And funny. He's surprisingly funny for a comic guy.

Enjoy!

Posted by reparent at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2009

Multimodality & Lingerie

As I was prepping to teach my senior seminar on The Illustrated Novel, I came across this. And since we're talking about Gunther Kress' article on "Literacy and Multimodality," it seemed a natural fit.

Now, I know, I know, you guys are going to think that I'm Dr. All-PETA-All-The-Time, but I'm not. Really. It's just that this rejected superbowl ad from PETA is practically awesome.

As I mentioned, in the seminar we're reading and talking about multimodality -- using more than one way of communicating in a single message. This ad, obviously, combines images with sounds (I know I'm supposed to think "generic hard-core sexiness, but I keep hearing the air-guitar riffs from Wayne's World) and text (in a shaky, all-caps format that really tries to be more sext than text), to promote the vegetarian lifestyle.

Obviously, lingerie-wearing she-vegetarians are far too sexy to be broadcast on America's favorite spectacle of big, beefy men trying to get good, solid, hard contact with each other in an ecstatic frenzy to get control of each other's balls.

But come on, PETA. This is really, really, ridiculous. Where are the sexy underwear-ing he-vegetarians? And while the "Sexy Sausage" ad isn't bad, it's not the same thing. Especially as the chosen veggie delivery guy is ... less than attractive. Even by bad 1970s porn standards. (Wait, how many ways is that last sentence fragment redundant and/or oxymoronic? I lost count.)

And if you check out the PETA site, be warned: the "Milk Gone Wild" ad is... pretty disturbing.

(X-posted to The Illustrated Novel)

Posted by reparent at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2009

New Semester, New Memes to Exploit

Welcome back! It's now the spring semester, and I have two new seminars I'm teaching -- The Illustrated Novel and Literacy in the 21st Century.

This post originated on the Illustrated Novel course blog, but since its topic and theme fit so well here, I thought I'd bring it over. Enjoy!

Behold Spike, the makeup-wearing punk sea kitten:

But what does this have to do with Illustrated Novels? And what's a sea kitten, anyway? (Kinda looks like a bluefin tuna, to me.) Click the link below to read all about it.

One of the points I make over and over again on this blog (and that the students in Illustrated Novel will be seeing again and again this semester) is that visual information is important to our processes of interpretation. As people-who-read, we're used to print disappearing, in fact. We crack open a book, and within a few words (if it's a well-written book), the black lines on the page vanish and we're "seeing" the events of the book.

So, in a course like The Illustrated Novel, the fact that the look of the prose and its relationship to images included with the prose will be important to our understanding of what the prose means (and what it's trying to make us think and feel), is a little odd. It goes against our usual patterns and habits of reading, especially reading for school/class.

But outside of school, we're used to visual data and rhetoric. We see logos all over the place and we can instantly identify many products just by the look of their packaging.

In the advertising world, this is called "branding," but it also shows up in non-advertising contexts. Media consultants like George Lakoff work very hard to "frame" concepts and approaches to create connotative impressions in the mind of the hearer/reader. Conservatives use framing often, as when they decided to go after the inheritance tax. To reframe the idea in the minds of voters, they took to calling it the "death tax." Now, not everyone is wealthy enough to leave a substantial inheritance to their surviving family and friends, but everyone dies. And voila, the "death tax" started gaining ground as something that even the poorest people could want to abolish.

And so we get back to Spike the sea kitten. PETA has launched a new campaign aimed at making fishing morally repugnant to more people. They've renamed fish sea kittens, because:

People don't seem to like fish. They're slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads—which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you're swimming, and the big ones—well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You've done enough damage, buddy. We've got it from here. And we're going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it's time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?

The phrase "sea kitten" by itself is a visually evocative one -- when you hear the words, it's hard not to immediately picture a kitten in the ocean -- but to cement the idea that fish really are the kittens of the sea, they've launched a web site with bright, colorful graphics that shows you what sea kittens are really like.

As you can see from Spike, they're adorable.

But if you want to really delve into the sea kitten phenomenon, you should take a minute and read this report from NPR about PETA's latest campaign. It's a hoot. Or a gurgling-meow. Or something.

And if you really think about it, picturing a kitten in the ocean isn't a very happy thing at all. Most cats don't like to swim and aren't fond of being immersed in water. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm reminded of the horrible practice of drowning litters of kittens tied up in sacks by throwing them into the river. That's horrible! And while at times kittens can be white-hot balls of raging feline fury (I have the scars to prove it), there's no way a kitten (even a kitten of the sea) could survive an encounter with a large aquatic predator. Oh no, swim faster Mr. Fluffynuts!

Posted by reparent at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)

December 9, 2008

The Perils of Social Networking, Part 3-Million-and-One

As everyone knows, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... on hidden-camera surveillance footage to be unearthed and used for future (or present) blackmailing purposes. Duh.

And I've mentioned before that everything you put online stays online in one form or another. Forever. Right, Monica?

And I always make it a point to talk with my classes about how everything other people put online about you stays online forever. This isn't news, and it isn't rocket science. You'd think a smart up-and-comer would have figured that out by now.

So, pop quiz time: Who's The Guy On The Left Honking Hillary's Hooter?

Congratulations, Obamaphiles, you're absolutely correct! That's Jon Favreau (no, the other one), President-Elect Obama's Director of Speechwriting!

Here's the potentially more sober publicity shot the campaign used when making the announcement that Favreau would be getting a White House office to write the words that make Obama's mouth move:

The Washington Post reports on:

some interesting photos of a recent party [Favreau] attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot.

And yet... and here's the fun thing... even though Favreau took (or had his friends take) down all of these photos, they're still in the Washington Post and now on blogs and web pages everywhere. Classic.

Now, we could ask why a promising power-player would jeopardize his career with something silly and avoidable like this. But we've learned (thank you Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Larry Craig...) that when it comes to politics and inappropriate touching, there really is no explanation possible. Nor does there seem to be a way to prevent it.

And we've also learned that when it comes to Facebook... trust no one.

(X-posted to Lit in a Wired World and the Teaching Seminar)

Posted by reparent at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2008

Say "Hebbo!" to Tarvuism

I've been buried under multiple stacks of papers from both classes (note to self: plan paper turn-in schedule more carefully next semester!), but I'm digging my way out, slowly. In the meantime, here's something to distract entertain and inform you.

I posted earlier about a great satirical video purporting to show the "Petticoat 5," the first computer by women, for women. That video came from the British show Look Around You, whose creators, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, are now at work on a new project.

Say Hebbo! from Torvakian on Vimeo

Popper and Serafinowicz are reportedly in talks with Adult Swim to develop their new show. I was initially doubtful about the enterprise. I loved the video, but I had no idea how they could spin this into a regular series.

That was before I clicked through to the main page for Tarvuism. There I learned everything never knew I needed to know. And it was so easy! After reading the fun stuff on the main site, I poked around the Tarvupedia. Holy crap on a cracker! There is a ton of stuff there. And it's fantastic. Now I really, really hope they get their show. I'm dying to see Tarvuism in action.

And here's an added plug for my spring classes! Notice that the Tarvunty is illustrated!

Yes, this spring I'll be teaching a seminar for senior English majors on The Illustrated Novel. If only the campus bookstore would agree to carry the Tarvunty! I'll also be teaching a graduate seminar on 21st Century Literacies. The entire Tarvuism web site is an excellent example of the literacies we use now that we're living in the future 21st century.

(X-posted to the Teaching Practicum blog and Literature in a Wired World)

Posted by reparent at 1:27 PM

October 6, 2008

Need I Draw You a Picture?

This is tremendous fun. Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog (the best, and possibly only, book about diagramming sentences), has noticed Sarah Palin's special relationship with the English language.

In an article for Slate, Florey takes a crack at sentences from Palin's interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. The results aren't pretty, even if Florey's lines are, as always, impeccable.

Florey turns, for instance, to Palin's oft-repeated meditation on Vladimir Putin's rearing head:

It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?

And generates the following diagram:

Impressive, no?

But for me, the most interesting part of the article is this bit of Florey's own thoughts on the value and usefulness of sentence diagramming:

One thing we can't learn, of course, is whether her words are true or make sense. Part of the appeal of diagramming is the fact that just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is gibberish. Cats chase mice and Mice chase cats present the same kind of entity to the diagrammer. So does Muffins bludgeon bookcases. If it's a string of words containing a certain number of parts of speech arranged in reasonably coherent order, it can be hacked and beaten into a diagram.

Which makes the inescapable conclusion about Palin's speech habits when she's not extensively and elaborately scripted, as in the Couric and Gibson interviews, either tragic or terrifying.

(Thanks to Joe.My.God for the link.)

(And cross-posted to the Composition Practicum.)

Posted by reparent at 4:04 PM

August 14, 2008

Fun With Fonts

I like fonts. I've got lots and lots and lots of fonts on my laptop and I spend an inordinate amount of time playing with them, trying to pick just the right one to convey exactly the right mood, tone, and connotations. This is a problem every year at syllabus-writing time. Which is right now.

So, while I fiddle with my syllabus fonts, check these out:

Courtesy of David at Someone in a Tree:

And courtesy of Bag of Nothing, The Empire Poster Quiz! Try to guess which movie posters single letters have been taken from. (I got 20 out of 46 right!) This is highly reminiscent, for those of you who are old, like I am, of the old TV show, Name That Tune. Eventually, someone would become so competitively inspired that s/he would declare, "I can name that tune in one note!" And you know what? Sometimes, they could. This quiz is like that. You may be surprised how many movies you can name just from seeing one letter.

Be warned, though, that many of the movie titles DO NOT begin with the letter given, even though the answer blocks seem to suggest that they might. Good luck!

Posted by reparent at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2008

Why (Not) Blog? A Teaching/Demonstration

As I mentioned in a previous post or two, I'm on the leadership team for the National Writing Project in Vermont's Invitational Summer Institute. As part of the Institute, everyone is required to present a demonstration of a teaching practice they find particularly useful.

It probably won't surprise any of you to read that mine is on blogging in and for the classes you teach. Here are the notes and links for that demonstration, which I will be presenting on Monday morning.

A few examples of Joseph Cornell's work:

"Taglioni's Jewell Casket"

"Soap Bubble Set"

As you can see, and as Sirc makes central to his argument, there is logic and coherence to his works, but that logic and coherence isn't at all like a traditional essay or argument. It's more associative, more like a collage.

Here are the blogs that the Institute Fellows have created. Click on the link to the blog directly beneath yours and post a thoughtful, encouraging comment on it.

(Coming soon. This feature experienced some... technical difficulties during the demo. So, please stand by. Won't you?)

Examples of Blogging In and Out of the Classroom:

• My personal blog, Digital Digressions: (http://reparent.blog.uvm.edu)
• Digital Composing course blog: (http://reparent.blog.uvm.edu/095/) and a few notable student blogs from that course:
  • burlingtonez (http://burlingtonez.blogspot.com/)
  • The Phantom Super Shadow Friends (http://leotardsandsmack.blogspot.com/)
  • Visual Campus (http://visualcampus.blogspot.com/)
• Composing Digital Narratives course blog: (http://www.uvm.edu/~reparent/114/) and student responses to direct prompts from that class:
  • Your strengths/weaknesses as a writer? (http://www.uvm.edu/~reparent/114/?p=28)
  • What would you like to see more of in an e-mail novel we were reading? (http://www.uvm.edu/~reparent/114/?p=18)
  • What have you learned as a writer from that e-mail novel? (http://www.uvm.edu/~reparent/114/?p=30)

Blogging Options

• Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/)
• WordPress (http://wordpress.org/)
• Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
• LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/)
• Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/)

Posted by reparent at 4:52 PM | Comments (1)

June 28, 2008

YouTube: The Sorta Expected

I've been working on some thoughts about YouTube, and while this wasn't the place I had anticipated starting, I just spent the last 45 minutes with it, which is one of the usual indicators that I should say something about this.

This is Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams' Choose-Your-Own-Adventure film in which you help him find his lost cat, Sparta. Williams has set the films up as a double challenge: 1) find the cat; 2) compete with your friends (and total strangers via YouTube comments) to find the cat in the fewest number of clicks.

This is what we expect YouTube to do: provide amusing, entertaining diversions in video format. I think it's interesting that the TV is being displaced by the Internet as the preferred method of wasting time in the Western world, as the Internet provides not only a practically infinite array of web pages to visit, but also a host of sub-domains that each provide practically limitless opportunities for time wasting (blogs, MySpace/Facebook, YouTube, porn etc.).

I liked Williams' video, and I was glad to see him acknowledge how much harder a CYOA is to create than a more traditional video. As we've seen in the video and computer game industry, any narrative with branching paths radically increases the time and energy required to produce the work. Ask any of my students who have attempted something similar -- they'll all tell you that CYOAs are a major pain in the butt. ...But they offer an interesting set of opportunities and demands for the reader/viewer/player.

One of the most familiar and frustrating of these demands is the problem of having to make choices without adequate information. How is the creator of a CYOA supposed to provide you, the r/v/p, with enough information to make an informed choice (which is not to say the right choice)? And how is the creator supposed to provide this information without making the r/v/p feel inundated with boring exposition? We're not Williams, and so we don't know Sparta's habits, nor do we know the layout of Williams' apartment or the rules of the house. Williams does a pretty good job of explaining these to us, but only after we've made a choice. I'll leave it to you to find these moments in the film -- I don't want to spoil any surprises.

CYOAs are a subject in one of the later chapters of my book, so I'll have more to say about them, and about Williams' effort, in the near future. But for now, enjoy the hunt for Sparta.

Posted by reparent at 3:50 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)

June 17, 2008

It's Not Random If You Use Numbers

As they say in my homeland, "Howdy!"

The downtime has been lovely, but as part of the new workplan I'm going to be posting something short each and every day to keep the writing mojo flowing.

So, to kick things off, a veritable potpourri of interesting, thought-provoking, and wiinsome (sic) stuff. And, as the title indicates, it's not a random collection of stuff because it's numbered!

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1) Wii now have a Nintendo Wii! Oui, c'est vrai. And we even have a few games for it that allow online play with other proud Wiiple. At present, we have MarioKart Wii, Endless Ocean, and Trauma Center: New Blood. So, if you've got a Wii, and one or more of those games, too, zing me an e-mail so wii can exchange super-secret and highly irritating Wii-codes, which will then allow us to enter those codes into our Wii systems thus unlocking online play on a game-by-game basis. (Yes, the process seems to be exactly that tedious.)

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

2) With all of the gay marriage going on in Massachusetts, and now in California and New York (though New York took the easy way out by recognizing gay marriages without performing them), I imagine straight, married people around the country must be reduced to quivering piles of lime-green jello as they await the inevitable dissolution of their own marriages. As we've been told time and again by the "marriage is a straights-only club" members, gay marriage is the final straw that will break the (straight) marriage camel's back. And now, via AmericaBlog, we have proof:

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

3) Somebody, somewhere, posted a link to this Talking Jesus Doll (I kid you not), and I haven't been able to get the darn thing out of mind for days now.

It's not that I'm particularly religious... I'm not. I just think Talking Jesus is kinda hot. I really appreciate it when "toy" companies put in the time and energy it takes to make Talking Jesus an attractive Caucasian guy with flawless hair and a reassuringly upper Midwestern newscaster accent (i.e., the accent most Americans can't hear as an accent).

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

4) While I was poking around, looking for the original link to Talking Jesus, I found this on BoingBoing, a link to t-shirt designs refuting one of the primary arguments of Creationism/So-Called "Intelligent" Design"

See, the Creationists argue that you don't have to teach Creationism, per se in science classes, just teach "the controversy" over evolution, which would require teaching Creationism and/or "Intelligent" Design. Of course, among scientists there really is no controversy. Evolution is accepted as the paradigm for the appearance and development of life on earth. And yet they try to weasel religion in any way they can. (Goodness, this is becoming quite the theological post, isn't it?)

I bring this up in part because I like the shirt designs, and partly because I have an editorial cartoon on my office door that makes the same points with astrology, alchemy, phrenology, and other pseudo-sciences. But these are wearable. Cool.

Posted by reparent at 6:43 PM | Comments (1)

May 14, 2008

Meditations on Cool

As the Vermont Summer kicks in and temperatures soar into the upper 70s (swoon, swelter, I know), here are some things to think about on and around the topic of cool.

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

Our friend Attic Man sent us this news report, which is a little late now, but it was timely when he sent it. And though Obama didn't actually win everywhere in the Pennsylvania primary election, it continues to illustrate the divide between election coolness and un-coolness. Notice the band, Earl Pickens and the Band Named Thunder (a pretty cool name) is pretty cool. Notice the Obama supporters dancing in the video... are not.

From a mass media and electioneering standpoint I think this is perfect. It attaches coolness to the campaign without alienating all of the dorky wanna-be supporters out there who may feel not nearly cool enough to vote with all of the pretty celebrities in the other videos. (Much like the Lipton commercials playing before films now that ask if you're "young enough" to drink their white tea. I suspect that many iced tea drinkers are not.)

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

Regulatory oversight and control of abusive commercial practices is cool. While in England outer space, The Spouse and I heard BBC reports of the European Union's impending action against British cell phone providers. Last year, when we were in Scotland, the big news was that this same agency was about to force cell phone providers in the UK to stop charging outrageous fees for calls made from other EU countries. For instance, if you lived in Dover, England and took the hovercraft over to Calais, France, calling your mum at home would have become 10-100 times more expensive than if you'd called her from Belfast, Northern Ireland, even though Belfast is much farther away.

Well, the cell phone companies complied, but refused to change their texting rates. So, now a call from Calais to Dover costs less than texting her: "hi mum, home @ 9." Now the EU regulators are going after texting charges, with action promised this summer. Imagine how cool it would be to live in a place where the government (or at least parts of it) care more about you than they do about Verizon Wireless! Cool.

Boing Boing adds fuel to the fire by reporting that we pay more per megabyte of data for even normal-costing text messages than NASA pays to get pictures of the Crab Nebula!

Now that's not cool.

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

Design Observer wants us to think about how cool tables of contents can be, with 30 beautiful ToCs.

Above: ToC #27, from The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. Jürg Spiller, ed. George Wittenborn, 1961.

~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~ < * > ~

A former student (hi J!) sent me this article from the New York Times about sports blogging, which raises a number of cool questions. As Times reporter Tim Arango writes, "At the heart of the issue, which people on both sides alternately describe as a commercial dispute and a First Amendment fight, is a simple question: Who owns sports coverage?" Interestingly, this isn't a fight between bloggers and mainstream, establishment media organizations. In this conflict mainstream and popular media are aligned against the sports organizations who want to control not only the sports event, but also what can be said and shown about the sports event.

Mike Fannin identifies one of the key issues:

Ten years ago newspapers weren’t in the world of video and audio,” [Mike Fannin, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors and the managing editor for sports and features at the Kansas City Star] said. “We were in the world of print. The leagues don’t have a print product. Their view of this is that we entered their world.

As the mainstream print media (newspapers and magazines) become increasingly digital, their coverage becomes, of course, increasingly multimodal. And suddenly what they're doing looks a lot like what the television networks pay millions of dollars each year to broadcast.

Not only that, but the digital coverage provided by the establishment "print" media increasingly comes to resemble what bloggers do. And if bloggers are already doing it, and if some of them are doing it much better than the establishment writers, what's to stop bloggers from increasing their coverage? Well, the team owners, for one. Except when they're stopped, that is.

Last month [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the Mavericks’ locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted.

Mr. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — "someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies."

It's a petulant response, but one that has precedent in other venues. In 2004 the national election conventions both had a large and active corps of citizen bloggers who were given "press/media" credentials and access to the events. Why not sports events? And if this does catch on in professional sports, you can expect many, many of my future posts (especially during spring training and the fall/winter season) to be coming to you from the New England Patriots locker room. Everyone wins.

Except for the athletes, who are suddenly having to face the fact that with the democritization of publishing that blogging and online communication presents, everyone and anyone around them could be a blogger, and anything and everything they say could end up "in print" around the world.

“It’s a new world,” said Jason Zillo, the head of media relations for the Yankees, surveying the team taking batting practice. “We spend a lot of time in spring training on media training.

It's not just professional sports, either, that's getting into the "who owns sports coverage" game.

The limits of coverage is a hot issue in athletics at the college level as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association issued new guidelines this year: in women’s water polo, bloggers are allowed three posts a quarter and one at halftime; in fencing or bowling, 10 posts are allowed for each day or session.

“I think we’re hitting the ridiculous button here,” said John Cherwa, chair of the legal affairs committee for the Associated Press Sports Editors and the sports projects editor at The Orlando Sentinel. “We’re getting tired of everyone trying to tell us how to do our business.”

Damn right you are, John Cherwa. For the uninitiated, what the NCAA is trying to do with these restrictions is to prevent "liveblogging" college sports events, the practice of writing a continuously updated stream of reportage and reflection during an event. Luckily for Cherwa, that horse is already out of the barn. With mobile and ubiquitous computing, and the microminiaturization of increasingly powerful computers means that just about anyone at any event could be liveblogging and most people would never know.

Many cool and uncool things here to ponder...

Posted by reparent at 12:08 PM

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 (4)

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

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

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 King jokes to Lazar at lazar@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu."

At the venerable Talking Points Memo blog, David Kurtz responds with disgust to the UCLA incident, noting that "The video itself apparently didn't prompt an outside review, but concerns from alum (i.e., donors) and parents did. Nice." And Cory Doctorow delivers a blistering indictment at Boing Boing of UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams for "blaming the student for going to the library without his student card in his pocket."

Eugene Robinson's latest op-ed at the Washington Post doesn't bring up the ethnic and racial implications of the UCLA tasering, but does discuss recent racist outbursts by celebrities Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) and Mel Gibson, as well as the infamous "macaca" jibe that may have cost George Allen his Virginia Senate seat.

This is hard stuff to deal with, and it's hard material to watch.

The UCLA video keeps sending me to ever-more-extreme unicorn chasers, the George Allen bit was unpleasant as well as unimaginably politically stupid, and the Michael Richards video is almost outside the bounds of comprehension. But what I want to discuss, briefly (I'm still needing that chaser), is the media shift represented by these, especially the Tabatabainejad and Richards events.

(For the record, today's unicorn chaser is Pleo, the robotic camarasaurus that Ugobe promised would be in stores by Christmas 2006. It's not. But it's still awfully cute.)

Watching the video of Tabatabainejad being tased repeatedly amid the screams of himself and the students in the computer lab (okay, back to Pleo for a minute), one thing you can't help but notice is that the camera operator is awful as a camera operator. The Richards videographer is better, but I suspect that this is due more to standard seating design in theaters than the operator's skill with a camera phone. And that's the point -- these events are things we know about because random, ordinary people used the technology they carry around with them every day to record an extraordinary event. A few years ago, friends of ours complained that it was impossible to buy a new cellphone that wasn't also a cameraphone (camera phones were being banned from many areas due to privacy concerns -- see here, here, here, and especially here for more on this), but today (except at Samsung) the near-ubiquity of cameraphones has rendered them almost a non-issue.

But now these features on cellphones (it's not just cameraphones, it's the capacity to take video now) are enabling a new era of what might be called "citizen reportage" (if you were Dan Gillmor) or "distributed panoptocism" (if you were Michel Foucault). Citizen reportage because the vital task of the news media -- the public reportage of attention-deserving events -- is being filled by private citizens, and panopticism because if anyone can be capable of filming your deeds and/or misdeeds, is anyone, anywhere, ever really free of the threat of unwanted publicity?

Enabling (and perhaps fueling?) the spread of amateur news video are sites like TMZ.com and YouTube, that make it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to see and hear for themselves what all the uproar is about.

In the age of Rathergate and the Mark Foley scandal, we see that blogs do, indeed, continue to make news and have real-world effects.

But our age is also the age of the wardobe malfunction and the tasered student and the racial epithet ad nauseam.

After watching the UCLA video, does it make a difference to you to learn that "The officers used the device in stun mode — which affects only the part of the body being touched — rather than the dart mode, in which tiny electrodes are fired into a person and pass a current through them, disabling the person entirely"? What are we to make of the audience members laughing at Michael Richards as he celebrates the American cultural tradition of lynching? Does the multimodal form of video provide enough affective input to override our rationality? Do YouTube and video cameraphones signal a new era of yellow journalism?

These are, clearly, issues that need much more attention. I can't help but ask my highly intelligent and deeply opinionated readership: which do you see as being the greater force for change -- blogs or the video sharing sites?

And now it's time for one last Pleo chaser.

(Via AmericaBlog, who first brought this to The Spouse's attention)

Posted by reparent at 7:44 PM

September 27, 2006

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other...

...One of These Things Does Not Belong.

For all of you Sesame Streeters out there, that's a reference to one of the many, many teaching songs from the long-running children's show. Here's how it would work: while the song is playing, they show us a group of items. We, the viewers, then have to figure out which item is dissimilar to the others.

So here we go! Ready? Which one of these International Newsweek covers from the exact same week isn't like the other?

Whew! That was tough, but as Mr. Rogers always said, I knew you could do it.

Now, are you ready for the bonus round? Try to match up each cover with its country/continent of distribution. Your choices are:

• Asia
• U.S.
• Europe
• Latin America

If you're stumped, click here to see the answers. And yes, it was a trick question. First, using the present progressive to describe the situation in Afghanistan is clearly misleading on several levels. Second, everyone knows that pop culture photographer Annie Leibovitz is revered as a goddess in Estonia, which wasn't even one of the answers!

(Courtesy of AmericaBlog and The Show with ZeFrank)

UPDATE! Crooked Timber shows us the covers from the previous week. Check it out. And feel deep shame for the state of American news media.

Posted by reparent at 1:32 PM | Comments (1)

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

August 2, 2006

Summer Nervous Breakdown... er...Hiatus

Between the research I need to do before the semester begins, the new graduate student teacher training I'm leading in August, The Spouse and my massive Luau on the Lake wedding extravaganza, and all of the preparation that needs to happen for the classes I'm teaching this fall, there isn't going to be any posting on this blog until August 28th.

Also, I'm shutting down comments on the blog because I'm getting hammered with comment spam, and I just don't have the time to rip them out 2 or 3 times every day. :-(

In the meantime, I leave you with this to ponder -- Human Video Games!!!

Guillaume Reymond's works of madness or genius recreate classic low-rez video games through the medium of stop-motion animation (and a bunch of people sitting in auditorium seats).

Space Invaders:

Pong:

(Via: Joystiq)

See you on the 28th!

Posted by reparent at 1:43 PM

July 26, 2006

It's Tough Being a Tiger

Here's something entertaining, and perhaps even a little thought-provoking.

For anyone reading this who isn't into MMORPGs in general, or World of Warcraft in particular, you can consider this the end of the post. (Just be sure to think something deep about the way(s) YouTube and GoogleVideo are changing modern communication and cultural literacy on your way out.)

For the rest of you poor blighted souls, this clip has special poignancy for me, because it reminds me a sad, sad dynamic in World of Warcraft (WoW). In WoW, my character is a Night Elf druid. Druids are fascinating blends of warrior, healer, magic-user, and assassin. We can shapeshift into bear form and take lots and lots of damage (without dying, that is). We can shapeshift into cat form and deal out some serious pain. We can shapeshift into cheetah form and run very, very quickly either toward or away from danger (depending on one's play style, I suppose). And we can blast enemies with magic or heal ourselves and others around us in elf form. I've really enjoyed the flexibility that this hybrid class presents.

However, to keep the classes balanced with each other, the makers of WoW have made sure that druids can do all of these skills from other classes, but not quite as well as the other classes. (This avoids the famous "Bullrog Conundrum" from South Park -- Cartman's ninja alter-ego announces that his special power is having all of the other super powers.) Playing druid well takes time, patience, and real strategy to learn how to synergize the various class abilities while minimizing their weaknesses. I'm still learning.

So, a while back I was playing WoW, and while my party was waiting for another player to arrive at the dungeon we were going to invade, another party member challenged me to a duel. (Duels are harmless fun in WoW.) This player was a rogue. Rogues are WoW's assassin class. They're sneaky and fast and do lots and lots and lots of damage. And this rogue was at least 4 levels below my character.

Sigh. The results were much like those in the video. Only it didn't take 3 minutes and 25 seconds for the sneaky, irritating ape-rogue to hand me my noble, majestic tiger-druid butt. Sad sad sad sad sad.

(Via Bitch, Ph.D., who linked to the GoogleVideo version of this. I used the YouTube copy because YouTube allows one to imbed the video in blog posts. GoogleVideo should work on adding this feature. Soon.)

Posted by reparent at 6:16 PM | TrackBack

July 19, 2006

Stuff Etc... Now With Even More Transformers!

I hope you're all enjoying slightly less hellish weather, as we here in Practically Canada are. (The cold front moved through yesterday, brought some rain -- which actually lowered temperatures instead of just cranking up the already-high humidity -- and now we're enjoying sunny but not face-melting weather. Yay, Canadian air!)

Anyway, this seems like a good time to blog about some of the tabs I've got cluttering up my browser window. So without any further ado...

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

I mentioned a while ago that Michael Bay is directing a live-action Transformers movie. This image and video clip of Autobot leader Optimus Prime got lots and lots and lots of play on the 'net, purportedly as early tech tests for the movie's special effects. As Tech Blog explains, that's not true.

However, now Ain't It Cool News has leaked a still shot of the semi truck form of Optimus from the film. (The picture has been removed from AICN, but it's all over the place now.)

Old-school fans of the animated series notice anything different? Here's the classic Optimus:

So? (The fine, fine people at Penny Arcade share their reaction.) Discuss.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

I was reading some blogs this weekend after a mini-blog-holiday, and I got the unshakeable feeling that things are bad. Very, very bad. (Strangely enough, I don't seem to be the only one with this suspicion -- Lindsay Beyerstein guest-blogged as much at The Accented One's, though for slightly different reasons.)

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

If you're not feeling particularly depressed yourself yet about the way the world is heading, why not watch this amazing computer simulation of what would happen if the Earth were struck by an enormous meteor. Not "could happen." "Would happen."

(This is via Grumpy Gamer, who also points us to this handy flow chart to make the coming Armageddon easier to follow.)

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

And finally, for today, if you've ever contemplated digging a hole to China, this handy web toy from the incomparable zefrank is for you. Though you should have learned long ago that you cannot dig to China from the U.S.A. (by tunneling through the center of the Earth, as, of course, you should). Go ahead and check it out. (Click and drag the map underneath either of the map panes, and the other will show the point directly opposite on the globe.) You'll see.

Posted by reparent at 4:14 PM | TrackBack

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?

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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)

April 14, 2006

Uncomfortable

The Husband sent me this link a while ago, with a completely understandable exhortation to check out the name of said photo (you can see it in the URL):

Now, I'll admit I have no idea what the title is actually referring to.

However, I find that I still remain profoundly uncomfortable with this picture. It's fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I know that German Shepards are insanely trainable, and yet I can't shake the feeling that something ... bad ... is about to happen.

No way. Definitely not comfortable.

Posted by reparent at 12:05 PM | Comments (1)

March 30, 2006

Briefly Noted: When Pretentiousness Met Video Games

More from the Something Awful photoshopping project:

It used to be that video games were mind-numbingly simplistic, consisting solely of crude blocks moving around the screen. Now we have incredibly complex stories, stunning full motion video, and amazing interactivity. It's the complex story end that has led to a great deal of pretentiousness seeping into video games. Now it's not just "move the crude block," it's "move the crude block that killed his wife and is haunted by a demon of his own guilt." This week the Something Awful Forum Goons celebrate the introduction of pretentiousness into video games by making them even more self-absorbed and needlessly intellectual. Grab your thinking cap and enjoy, bucko!

My favorite:

What's yours?

Posted by reparent at 3:59 PM | Comments (2)

February 25, 2006

I Am... Batman!

BoingBoing links to one of the coolest companies on the face of the earth.

Okay, at least they're one of the coolest companies on the face of the earth who advertises online. Because we all know that the real cool companies don't advertise. They don't have to.

But for those of us who don't happen to find ourselves on the super-secret mailing list of the Coolest of the Cool Companies, Creative Home Engineering is here to make all of our getting-to-the-Batcave dreams come true.

The company installs the hardware necessary to make your very own secret passage -- complete with awesomely cool door-activation-switch!

Unfortunately, the packages start around $10,000 (although DIYers can get kits for about $1,500). As my DIY skills are passable, but no means Bob-Villa-like, this means that it's going to be a little while until this junior faculty member will be able to afford the Shakespeare-with-Switch bust that leads to the Batpoles. Sigh.

Drool.

Posted by reparent at 7:17 PM | Comments (1)

December 7, 2005

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like ... CRAZY!

Well, it's that time of year again... time for end-of-the-semester mania, phobia, and deep, deep, grading-inspired depression.

So to fend off the encroaching SAD (seasonal affective disorder), I present to you (click on the image):

(Make sure you have your speakers turned on, or your headphones in if you're at work.)

Um, I'm not entirely sure what to call it. But it rocks. And it's a sign of a serious obsessive-compulsive personality. That's my kind of nut-job.

In related news, one of the many ways I tortured my undergraduate students this past semester was by asking them to use PowerPoint to convey not information (as most presentations do), but emotion. Imagine a presentation that doesn't subject you to bullet lists and meaningless bar graphs, but rather feelings! That was the goal. Many of them wanted to use music to set and intensify a particular mood, but they quickly found that while PowerPoint makes it easy to include music in presentations, it's really amazingly difficult to synchronize what's going on in the presentation to the music one has chosen to play!

But now that I see what can be done with non-PowerPoint media, I'm starting to get ideas for new assignments even more diabolical and heinous than my Affective PowerPoint Assault™! BWA-HA-HA-HA!!!

(via UVM's own Steve Cavrak)

Posted by reparent at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 28, 2005

Where the Streets Have No Name (that isn't smug and self-affirming)

Slacktivist alerts us to an amazing post By Neddie Jingo, "Our Harvest Being Gotten In." Go read it. Really.

The thing I'm most impressed with is the amazing interweaving of current news reports, centuries-old writings, Neddie's own thoughts and reactions, and photographs taken that morning.

It will take many more viewings (once you start adding multimodal elements like pictures, it's no longer strictly accurate to describe what one does with a post like this "reading" -- fun, huh?) to really be able to explain what I find most persuasive/disturbing in the post, but I suspect that it's the frequent use of juxtaposition that keeps jarring me so strongly.

Of course, after viewing the post, I was immediately seized by the same feeling that commenter Simon reports: "I suddenly feel so very, very poor."

And of course I immediately knew that I was supposed to come to the conclusion that, as commenter XTCfan writes: "I don't know, reading this, I suddenly feel as if they're the poor, pathetic people, while we remain rich with perspective."

But "perspectival wealth" only goes so far.

On a more positive (I guess) note, I am struck by a suspicion that we really are seeing a major shift in the national psyche. It used to be the case that the wealthy were held up by the not-wealthy as having a station that one should aspire to. The American Dream is predicated on this aspiration -- "If I just work hard enough, I'll be able to afford a bigger house than my parents had!" The rich were, in other words, different from you and me, but that difference could be overcome by a lot of work and a little bit of luck. Or so they said.

Now, it seems that the rich are being presented not as different, but as the norm. The rhetoric of wealth and conspicuous consumption that fills the news articles quoted by Neddie is all about the wealthiness of the "regular people." Following this line of reasoning, if you think of yourself as a "regular person," then what's wrong with you that you don't have your own 14,000 square-foot palace?

I mean, don't your kids like playing at Chuck E Cheese, too? What's wrong with you that you actually let them go there and get snatched? Why don't you have a moon bounce in your basement?

Because if these are people "in keeping with where our country's going," what are the rest of us? We're sure as hell not them, but it's no longer enough. Because the lines F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, " Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me" are no longer presumed to be true, even though they are now more accurate than ever.

Posted by reparent at 2:57 PM | Comments (2)

October 31, 2005

Too Many Kids Around Here Lately

It has been brought to my attention that this august and high-tech blog has recently been infested with what may only be described as... cute babies.

The shame.

The horror.

Well, in an effort to rectify this situation, and to honor the festival of Halloween, I present to you the following online comic from The Joy of Tech:

I like this comic a lot. First, it's obvious that in just a few seconds "Count Cat-ula" will be getting what he/she/it really craves: fresh human blood. If you've ever lived with a cat, you know that look. That's the look that says, "I WILL DEVOUR YOUR SOUL!" Cats get that look a lot.

Second, I just can't get over the "ghostly iPod Shuffle." It has little ghost eyes. So cute! And let's face it, most of us are never going to be able to knit a set of Yoda ears. But we can all make handkerchief (or napkin, if you're cheap and/or poor) iPod ghost costumes. And that's a good thing.

You're welcome.

Posted by reparent at 9:20 AM | Comments (4)

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 18, 2005

Special Bonus Sunday Post About Rhetorics!

This isn't another Katrina post. No-siree-bob! (Whatever that means.)

This is a post about visual and verbal rhetorics. Ooooooh! Aaaah!

This weekend, Josh Marshall challenged his billions of readers to paste together:

a copy of the Monday guitar image and then one from the speech last night. Caption one: 'When Lives Are at Stake.' Caption Two: 'When Politics Is at Stake.'

Here's one version of the resulting image/text mashup:

The text is different in the two versions (Josh's and the unnamed photoshopper's).

When lives are at stake. // When people are drowning.
When politics is at stake. // When politicians are drowning.

Now I know that many of you who read this blog are kinda academic-y. And the rest of you at least like looking at the colorful pictures. Which makes you all an ideal crowd to talk about this.

My question is this: which set of captions do you prefer and why? And for extra credit, what do you think about the background image?

Posted by reparent at 5:54 PM | Comments (2)

September 8, 2005

And Speaking of Photoshop...

...which I was mere days ago, Boing Boing links to a new Photoshop contest on Worth 1000 -- Extreme Rides!

Woo-hoo! Extreme! So extreme they're X-Treme!

If you aren't familiar with the genre, Worth 1000 will announce a contest topic -- in this case, "Bizarre Attractions," and then all of the industrious little Photoshoppers out there grab pictures of actual rides and merge them into strange new concoctions.

Like this one:

which is quite pretty. Obviously, the idea here is that the loop is sooooooooooooo ginormous that even commercial aircraft have to fly through it. I'm guessing the line for that one would be massive.

Then you've got more... original entries, like this one:

Not sure how long the line for this one would be, but it does seem to capture the contest theme pretty succinctly: this photo does indeed reveal a "bizarre attraction."

Not, I should hasten to add, that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.

Photoshop contests are all over the place. Worth 1000 hosts them all the time, as does Fark. Here's a fun Fark photo from their contest for posters for new movies based on old TV shows:

Supdog masterfully puts Bea Arthur in the tux and allows Estelle Getty to showcase her powerful athleticism.

In contrast to that earlier post in which I decried the death and irrelevancy of realism in photography, Photoshop contests reveal the playful possibilities of the technology. This playfulness, of course, is something that postmodern theorists have been insisting exists for decades now, although it's often been hard to spot it in postmodern lit.

In any case, I love these things. And I think that it's a slippery slope to solipcism. I'm complex.

(Via Cory at Boing Boing)

Posted by reparent at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)