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July 28, 2004
You Knew It...
Michael Ho has a blog. You wanted to know what he was up to, didn't you? He seems to be insanely fond of Harper's Index-style lists.
Posted by me at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)
Death, Taxes, and Advertising
OK, so it's not like I learned nothing in that horrible NYU class I took last semester. It's just that the teacher's claims to expertise were totally suspect. When I was doing my own research I think I learned a great deal.
One of the things which really stuck with me was the panic of advertisers over the flight of 18-to-34-year-old males from broadcast television. One of the main culprits fingered in this exodus was video gaming. Well, fret no more, dear advertisers -- some a$$holes are hell-bent on saturating our virtual worlds with advertising, too (and that's not counting the saturation which was built in from day one to non-gaming, often female-oriented virtual spaces like There or Second Life). You'll get all the docile, consumptive young men you want. Let's just pray some of them read both Adbusters and 2600... (Thanks to Terranova.)
Posted by me at 12:34 PM | Comments (1)
July 27, 2004
The Dark Side of Structures of Attention
Another idea highlighted in the Lankshear and Knobel book I have been reading is that of "structures of attention," which is originally from Lanham's speech on the attention economy.
The idea is that in an attention economy, where scarcity lies in human attention rather than material goods, attention structures frame and focus attention so that participants in the economy are not overwhelmed by the torrent of information. L & K do a good job of describing how Amazon, eBay, Plastic, online banking outfits and other players make good use of attention structures.
What I have *not* heard them talk about is attention structures which are having a harmful effect on people's understanding of the world around them -- a topic which, if the new literacies folk cross-pollinated with media critics or departments of communication more often, might prove fertile. I'd put many of the tricks of the public relations and advertising trades in this category. For example: talking points. You know who's doing a sledgehammer analysis of this particular attention structure? Jon Stewart, that's who. (Yes, that is a RealPlayer link. Do it because you love me.)
Maybe you don't want to consider talking points on their own as attention structures, fine by me. But when, as Stewart demonstrates, they're repeated across dozens of news shows?...
So attention structures can be used for good as well as evil. What are the ramifications for teaching literacy?
(Gus is frantically waving her hand in the air in the back of the class, but, tragically, the teacher's attention is elsewhere.)
Posted by me at 12:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 24, 2004
Kicking Republicans
I have played way too much Chocobo Dungeon 2 over the past few days. I don't know how I pick such obscure games to obsess over, but it seems to have a lot to do with roleplaying adorable chickens.
The music runs through my head nonstop, my thinking is reduced to point-a-to-point-b-with-least-energy-drain logic, and everything seems way too routine, like killing monsters over and over for a marginal energy gain. You need a special tag to open the door to my company's floor of the building. You get the tag from a formidable-looking character on the 22nd floor. It's dim in here -- natural light doesn't seem to penetrate, even though there's windows. Once you're on the floor it's a featureless maze of cubicles and throughways, some of which are useful to you, some of which contain important items (the printer, the coffeemaker). It's up to you to make this programmed-looking space work for you. Sadly, unlike in Chocobo Dungeon, you can't explode the cubicle barriers to get from point A to point B. Someone should talk to the building manager about doing something to make this space more engaging.
Another difference between Chocobo Dungeon and my office building, however, is that all the monsters are on one floor instead of on every floor, and I never go to that floor. Sometimes you see them in the elevators, too. They are recognizeable by their uniform haircuts, high-quality clothing, red-white-and-blue badges, and tendency to talk about who they know from their Ivy League school.
Did I mention our office shares the building with the headquarters of the Republican National Convention? Mmmyeahp. Headquarters, and then downstairs is Madison Square Garden, where the convention itself will be. Penn Station, where a number of New York subway lines, the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, and Amtrak meet, is also downstairs. As I make my way through the crowded station every morning, I am not unaware that, to those bent on lethal jihad, this space might represent a potential level up in the eyes of Allah.
My boss told me when I started that I should plan to not be at work that week. She didn't tell me that anyone at McGraw-Hill who needed to come into work that week would need to ask their boss for special clearance to do so. In fact, if I remember correctly, you need a special pass just to get into a buffer zone of a few blocks around the convention that week. I don't think much of anyone plans to come in; this place will be like a ghost ship. From the talk I hear around the office, this is no small inconvenience for the company; September, after all, is when school starts, so August is bound to be a busy month for a textbook company.
I have to be careful not to let myself get caught up in gaming reverie when the elevator doors open on the 18th floor and a stream of Oxford-shirted young dudes come in and start talking about the world as if it holds nothing but summer homes and promotions and Hammacher Schlemmler gadgets for everyone. The action you spend the most time doing in Chocobo Dungeon is kicking. Kicking with sharp-- nasty-- little-- claws. Kweeh!
Posted by me at 2:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 22, 2004
New! Special puzzling.org tee!
At the request of Mary of puzzling.org, I have created a new shirt! Isn't Internet life splendid? Play the game of seeing if you can figure out which one it is!
Posted by me at 9:21 PM | Comments (2)
Video Game Literacy
The other day we had our first games hour at school. Three people showed up, including me. I only had half my ass in gear, so instead of being smart and having us take turns playing, I panicked that we only had two games in the school's nascent "library" which could be played by more than one person at a time. And I set us up playing Super Smash Brothers Melee, the Mario fighting title.
Big mistake. Both of the other two people had showed up to learn about video games. One of them apparently hadn't played much at all. Anyone who's played Smash Brothers knows the game has a prodigious number of moves to master for each character, and there are dozens of characters. Not to mention beneficial and harmful items on the screen, and battlefields with a range of advantages and disadvantages. The game, despite its candy-coated look, is far too difficult for beginners. (One of my more skilled peers, when I told him I'd tried to start with this game, said something on the order of Are you kidding? In that game I routinely have my ass handed to me on a platter.)
As I watched the less-experienced of my two classmates spend five minutes trying to jump over a low wall while struggling with a stream of relatively slow-moving enemies, I realized what a long way we were going to have to go to bring many academics up to speed on gaming. In terms of video games, this person was functionally illiterate, and she's not the only one in the department.
What is video game literacy? James Gee gave a surprisingly savvy description, for an outsider, in his book (d00d that is totally in teh paperback now). It was very general, and I think properly so in light of the way the field of literacy is heading, with an undertanding that the vast bulk of meaning signified by humans is relative.
But knowing that isn't really going to help the average person pick up a video game and play it. There are conventions which have evolved for gameplay. They largely differ from genre to genre, but there are some universals, I think, and certainly within genres (which Gee might identify as semiotic domains -- or sub-domains within the larger domain of gaming) there are well-established conventions. (These might even be mapped out against the multilayered model established by Lawrence Konzack and elaborated on by Nick Montfort.)
As I pondered the progress of my slow-moving classmate, I began to tick off a list of basic gaming skills and understandings in my head. I figure if you agree with most of the following statements, you can consider yourself video game literate at least in the sub-genre of adventure games on console gaming systems (GameCube, Playstation, etc):
I can play games with a keyboard
I can play games with a mouse
I can play games with a joystick
I can play games with a simple controller (directional buttons, A, B)
I can play games with a complicated controller (directional buttons, joysticks, camera angle buttons, A,B,X,Y or Playstation shape equivalents)
I can play games with a footpad or other non-conventional controller
I can identify where my character is on the screen
I can identify what effect my button presses have on the screen/my character
I can identify enemies as distinct from myself and status items
I can identify items which will affect my status as distinct from enemies and myself
I can identify the meaning of directional cues
I can identify if going in a given direction will automatically kill or hurt my character
I can read meters onscreen
I can find my way through a menu
I know what the start button generally does on my preferred platform
I know what the A button generally does on my preferred platform
I know what the B button generally does on my preferred platform
I can keep track of the function of more than five buttons at once
I know what a heart will do to my character
I know what a fireball will do to my character
I know what a weapon I can pick up is likely to look like
I know what “1UP” means and what an extra man/life is
I know what a miniboss and a boss are
I can perform combos in a fighting game
I know the difference between magic and physical attacks/powers
I can aim and fire a weapon in a first-person environment
I can distinguish between perspective and weapon aim
I am accurate with targets in rhythm games
I can distinguish between short and long beats
I can customize the look of my character when possible
I can customize menus, backgrounds, or other strictly visual elements
I can customize/equip my character’s abilities
I can customize game speed or difficulty
I know how to save my game
I know how to pause my game
I know the secret code that will get me to…
I know how to unlock...
I can use a Game Shark and know when it is acceptable to do so
I know how to hack this game
I have created my own levels or step files
I have remixed game music or manipulated still or moving game images
I have produced my own machinema
I know where to find game tips and walkthroughs online
I know where to find emulators and ROMs online
I know where to find warez online
I know where to find comics about video games online
I know you are dumb/lame if you play X
I know you are cool if you can beat X
I know you are cool if you can perform trick X in game Y
I am familiar with the Mario franchise
I am familiar with the Zelda franchise
I am familiar with the Final Fantasy franchise
I am familiar with the Pokemon franchise
I am familiar with the Grand Theft Auto franchise
I am familiar with Starcraft, Warcraft, etc
or, conversely,
I will be baffled by a new game
Video games are violent
Video games are a waste of time
I don't understand why people spend so much time playing video games
Caveats, caveats, caveats:
This listing should probably be broader, and I welcome additions and revisions, especially for other genres. Also, I don't have much game jargon down, so I may be using linguistic workarounds or misnomers here and there; please let me know where I've done so.
Though this reads like the standards that are being written for academic content (Grade 1, Standard 2A: "Student recognizes that words are made up of phonemes and can sound them out"), for the love of god, people, don't try to use them for instructional purposes. Kids don't need to be taught to play video games. OMMFG. It would suck the ever-living joy out of a game to try to use this listing for instruction. I could see maybe using these to assess how literate someone is with games, but hands-on, just-in-time, in-game learning is the essence of the domain. Better to assess players by their playing. I just wrote these out so the academic n00bs might get a better sense of what this literacy consists of.
Other notes:
I tried to attend to the point made by Lankshear and Knobel (and others) that new literacies are much more multisensory than older literacies. Frankly, it wasn't hard, as someone who's played video games since she was six. It's second nature to us that you need to attend to graphics as well as text. Dad used to tell us to play with the sound off; it was never obvious to him that part of the meaning we were getting out of the game was the sound and music cues, but it was our extra lives on the line, so you'd better believe we were aware of them.
I went back to James Gee's video game literacy book yesterday to see if there was precedent for my categorizations, whether most of them would hold. And, of course, many do not. Getting specific about the meaning of symbols like hammers, fireballs, and pieces of cake is problematic. As Gee reminds, all meaning is situational. It is dependent on context. While a fireball might harm Mario, it will not harm your fire-type Pokemon, or your RPG party if you have fire-protective charms equipped.
There are more general rubrics of symbol-reading which might prove useful here. For starters, being able to read the symbol or symbols on the screen which react most directly to your button pressing as "my character" is pretty much central in any game with some sort of avatar. Then there's the understanding that symbols resting on the ground, hanging in the air, or shimmering are less likely to do you damage than symbols lying partially submerged, following you, or walking back and forth. In side-scrollers and their progeny, the former tends to be the convention for "beneficial element" and the latter for "enemy." Obviously, there's lots and lots of exceptions, and the context of an individual game is key. But I am guessing that people familiar with non-puzzle games will most likely proceed based on these gestalts of movement, responsiveness, and light and color cues; they will not suffer irreparable damage as a result, and will thus begin any game from a position of greater success than those who do not play games.
The ultimate test of video game literacy is this: Are you willing to die? The video game literate generally are (within a virtual world, mind you; I'm not interested in providing fodder for any more of these stupid media-effects claims about violence and the media). They'll try any button until they figure out what works. They will walk over the shimmering circle which may be a land mine, may be a warp portal; they will chase after the bouncing ball which may turn out to be a health restorative, may turn out to be a bomb. They'll try anything once. If it proves to be lethal, they'll try not to do it again.
I guess Gee discussed this, but the generous room for error is a defining feature of the semantic domain of video games. So video game literacy is where scientific trial and error meet reading and writing.
Those who do not play video games are afraid to screw up, because they don't know how slight the consequences are. When asked by my classmate who was having trouble negotiating the brick wall, I assumed the jump button was either B or A. I kept telling her to try those. She did exactly what I said. But the jump button in this case was actually Y. She kept pressing A and B and didn't even seem to get frustrated when she didn't make any progress. My guess is she wasn't reading the effects of her button-presses that well-- where was her character? What was it doing? And then she failed to experiment with the controller.
Me, I would have systematically mashed each button until I saw each potential move and considered its ramifications. Because I didn't play too many fighting games as a kid, though, I probably would have pressed only one button at a time to judge effects. I am still not proficient at "reading" (observing) and "writing" (performing) combo moves.
Posted by me at 4:02 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 20, 2004
batman
im not goin to be hiding sh!t all over the house like batman --fabiolaPosted by me at 11:24 PM
July 15, 2004
hooker economics
yeah it teaches kids a simple fact of economics: that if you kill the hooker after you pay her, you get an instant refund for the services --loin legend, on the lessons learned from Grand Theft AutoPosted by me at 1:33 PM
July 13, 2004
Digital Debutante
I've made my first (overdue) foray into commenting over at Terranova, one of the academic gaming sites. I'm a little cowed and have already had my argument methodically picked apart, but oddly, I feel like I finally understand what they mean when they say knowledge is generated in discussion rather than transferred from on high.
Posted by me at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
What's not to understand? Hey Steve's mouth exploded the universe,
I swear something is up over at Homestar Runner.... the writing for this week's quintuple-feature is much, much faster than their usual pace. And they are genuinely at the peak of their form in all of them. Could the rumor I heard this weekend that they're signed for a TV chow be true? Is this a bunch of pilot pitch bits? Hmm...
ADDENDUM: In case you didn't find it hidden in the Shorts section, the music video that the Homestar creators did for They Might Be Giants is up. I don't enjoy the song too much -- it's the usual post-Flood pop -- but it's nice to see these guys working together.
Posted by me at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2004
From The Vaults: Poetry Jar
For far too long now I've had a recycled salsa jar about 1/3 full of small slips of paper kicking around my room. At some point earlier in my life I had decided this system of writing down and randomly choosing ideas would be my means of staying fresh as a writer, of staying disciplined and busy. I had thought I'd started the jar in my late high-school years, but judging by the content of the slips I'd say this was contemporaneous with my late Martin Espada phase and my time at Bread Loaf. Say, six years ago.
I never made use of the jar -- aside from putting things in, I don't think I ever cracked it open. Systems like that have a way of frightening me off once I devise them. So I'm getting rid of it now, but I thought I'd post the contents for the sake of posterity and a good laugh.
Some of the ideas seem laughably dumb as writing topics from this vantage point. "Elegy for a grey Chihuahua" was going to be about a dog I became particularly attached to at the Humane Society, and it wouldn't have been anything but maudlin. Except that these were the Espada years, so it would also have been political (even worse). "An Excuse to Eat Butter" was something Martin once said about lobsters, a one-off joke -- I can't imagine what I was going to say about that. The "puppies on the beach" poem would not have been worth revising. It only meant anything to me and a few high school friends. And I should clarify I don't have any kind of authority to write half those ruined love poems.
Some are just mysteries. What did I want to write about Jake and Javier? Who was Doug? (oh, no, now I remember.) What was it I wanted to say about the incident where a kid got kicked out of my junior high school? What was Last Resort?
Others I actually did write about, even though I hadn't opened the jar. The Florist's Daughter got mostly written; it was a piece of fiction. So did the poem about minnows, blow jobs, and the spa, which I still remember fondly although I imagine if I went back to re-read it now I'd find it hopelessly jejeune. One or two things I think got written about in some form on the blog: the rubber hamburger incident, and the sunflower seeds, which got written about twice as they're a rather formative experience in my life as an educator. I guess this is a good thing: the jar never worked, but the blog certainly has been impetus enough to keep me excercising my writing.
ghazal
Doug leaving
The Florist's Daughter
Jake
accidental celibacy
Ode to Sivvy, incl. the line "thinking myself born into the world/ an androgynous leaf-bud"
revise an old one
day of seven dead squirrels
Walking with Caruso
Check the last few pages of your Norton Poetry
Robert's hand
Javier
Returning to Maine for the 1st time + learning you live where you are/ you're from where you've been
Ruined love poem: Distance
Ruined love poem: Abusiveness
What comes down from the teachers is...
Last Resort
Rework the puppies-on-the-beach poem
Ruined love poem: Revulsion
The Cliff's Notes for...
Ruined love poem: Emotional drift.
those sunflower seeds
revise an old one
Miki, Ben, and other boys who left ****
Will sd: each prof thinks his own field best. Writers have best of all worlds: expert so long as we speak well
narcissism
elegy for a grey chihuahua
Ruined love poem: Married men.
An Excuse to Eat Butter
You could write about Greg I**** and the rubber hamburger... maybe not a poem?
minnows, blow jobs, + the spa
Ruined love poem: Gay men.
Ruined love poem: Lutte des idees.
revise
progress had the decency to fix what it broke: distance/travel/email
looking for a father
one thing (a story w/o lists + ands)
sestina
ars politica
Ruined love poem: Jealousy
Rework an old poem
ode to ink
Prufrock parody
walking around wearing breasts and a skirt
Posted by me at 12:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 7, 2004
Ugly Rumors About Hampshire
I met a current Hampshire student this past weekend who didn't look too stoned and told me there was a movement afoot to institute grades at Hampshire. This of course has sparked some student unrest, protests, manifestos in the Omen, etc. My trust of his claim was somewhat undermined by his additional claim that said movement was being run by Steve Weisler, who I wouldn't think would be up to something like this. I have been unable to confirm or deny -- there is some limited detritus on various school websites which alludes to the protests, and one of the manifestos is apparently up online but the link is broken. Noting that these kids are calling this a "re-radicalization movement," and that they've mispelled their own damn email address, makes me wonder if this isn't just a return of the Kawecki Poltergeist ("we'll learn about film by smelling the camera!") If other rumors are true, though, some good things might be coming of all this -- the student I talked to said the leader of the movement was getting The Making of a College reprinted and distributed to all incoming students. I'll believe it all when I see it.
Posted by me at 12:50 PM | Comments (6)
Post Scoops Times -- In Alternate Dimension!
I woke up yesterday morning in Vermont to Jessamyn announcing that Kerry had picked Edwards as a running mate. My sense of reality was somewhat shaken when I returned to New York to find a copy of the New York Post in a subway station whose headline implied that Kerry had in fact chosen Gephardt. Who to believe? Well, never the paper which ran pictures of the UN with ferrets Photoshopped in over the blazing headline "AXIS OF WEASELS" when the UN refused to support Bush's declaration of war... but who could have guessed they would actually make such a Dewey-Wins-size error in this day and age? Neil tells me he watched them take the stuff down quietly off the site -- he says he did not see a retraction. So, what really happened here? They say someone sent them a bum email, but this made it to headline news -- it should have been checked at least three times over. You have to wonder. Were they trying to somehow cast doubt on the announcement? Introduce disinformation which might swing voters? naah, too little, too early in the race. Did the person sending them the info want to see egg on the Post's face? Hmmm....
Posted by me at 11:58 AM | Comments (2)
Fourth (but actually my third)
A very mellow Fourth at Jessamyn's this year, aside from my stomach, which has put up a warning it will not have the wherewithal to digest anything more until late September. Sarah became entranced with the pastoral details and has pictures. Jessamyn's is well on its way to becoming Don DeLillo's proverbial barn.
Posted by me at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)
New Literacies: A Review
Reading the Lankshear and Knobel book titled New Literacies, having heard it referenced all semester. I'm a little disappointed.
Basically, coming from a tradition of literacy training (which, as far as I've been able to get a bead on it, means "writing about reading and writing from a sociological and linguistic and sometimes cognitive perspective," though it once meant simply "reading and writing in an educational setting"), they're writing about memes, Adbusters, search engines, web design, and other subjects. These connections are obviously due if not overdue to come up, and they do a good job of explaining how a lot of computer instruction at schools doesn't address these new literacies well. That's good.
However, they're frequently vague. Memes are dealt with in a pretty perfunctory, mostly definitional way (so far -- I'm maybe 2/3 through -- but the sketchy index implies they won't be addressed again); they don't really explore what an understanding of memes would do if it was brought into a classroom. The lack of concreteness is frustrating, although I suppose the book leaves such matters up to other scholars. (more for me, yay!)
Same with adbusting, if not more so -- they don't do a good job of explaining what it is and really don't explain how it's a literacy (perhaps leaving that up to your willingness to go read Kalle Lasn's book and the Adbusters website). They don't describe the reading of advertisements which adbusters do -- taking information about corporate abuses from "alternative" texts (the Nation? Counterpunch? Indymedia? NGO stat sheets? Government data? What texts are adbusters reading, and are these available to teachers and students? Does that change how adbusting could be incorporated in schools?) to rewrite the superficial messages in advertisements, creating a new text in the hopes of causing others to reconsider power relationships.
Lankshear and Knobel don't address the power dynamics inherent in adbusting. They don't mention the fact that most people involved in Adbusters are at least college age if not older, and frequently have professional-grade graphic design (writing) skills which enable them to recreate existing ads down to the kerning. Adbusters are people with highly privileged skills. How would the practice of adbusting be different if brought into a low-income, rural high school classroom? An adult literacy classroom? Is there reason to bring adbusting into those classrooms at all, and what is it?
It could be said that afterschool and community media literacy programs in which students produce public service announcements or ad parodies are concrete examples. But part of the power of adbusting the way Adbusters does it is the producers' abilities to make their parodies look professional, just like the real thing. The quality of media produced by youth media producers has different connotations. Kids know it; adults do too. How would lower-quality production value impact the kind of messages Adbusters attempts to convey? I'm bothered that I have yet to find an explanation by community/radical media organizations of how to re-frame the meanings that low-quality media production carries to keep people from dismissing it as unimportant, uninformed, or uncool. ("We're working for a better world in which production value doesn't matter" is a crappy explanation which makes the fundamental mistake of not addressing the existing knowledge and beliefs of those you're trying to educate.)
* * *
'Kay. So that's a beef. Other than that there's much in the way of useful here. I intend to go read Lanham's piece on structures of attention which they discuss at length.
I'd written something yesterday about a covert allusion in the book to Maslow's hierarchy of human needs (from basic to elevated: food, shelter, security, love/affection/belongingness, esteem, self-actualization) in the context of a discussion of three founding thoughtlines of the idea of the "attention economy." The implication of the attention economy is basically that in an "information society" (service-based postmodern economy, whatever you want to call it) scarcity is largely not material, but temporal and cognitive: all these highly educated people making up the society have only so much time and attention to pay to your advertisement, website, television show, video game, what have you.
A number of things had already caused me to consider the ways in which media thus compete with community, civic, and recreational activities. Advertisers, magazine editors, and television execs are positively frantic about the ways in which they feel they're losing their market share of attention to youth soccer, family vacations, cel phone text messaging and the Internet, and talk about it a lot. Bowling Alone, of course, discusses how family, community, and civic participation initially lost their share of attention to TV (among other factors).
But this quote expands the competition for attention and situates it right in Maslow's hierarchy:
"When our material desires are more or less satisfied, says Goldhaber [link mine]... such that we do not experience scarcity of material necessities like food and shelter, we are increasingly driven by 'desires of a less strictly material kind'... [they go on to quote Goldhaber again] 'Since all meaning is ultimately conferred by society, one must have the attention of others if there is to be any chance that one's life is meaningful.'" (Lankshear and Knobel, p 118)
In an attention economy, these three authors are implying, the time we spend taking in media information competes not only with the group social activities we otherwise engage in, but also our development of individual relationships, of feelings of self-worth, and even of love. Attention is wrapped up in all three of those processes.
If you're about to tell me "Oh, come on-- I watch movies and television and read magazines and it's not like it makes me some antisocial freak who never takes time to talk to his friends -- hell, watching movies is what we DO together," keep in mind that it's not the movie that builds the relationship with someone else; it's the conversation you have about it. It's part of why going to the movies alone feels a little weird, right?
Considering only the way time gets allocated in the movie-and-discussion-with-your-friend event, the creators of the movie end up with more time to make meaning than you and your buddy do. (Lankshear and Knobel later bring up another model of attention economics which discusses the imbalance in celebrity-fan relationships -- fans pay real attention, and a lot of it, feeling satisfied with their celebrity relationships even though celebrities only pay "illusory" attention -- responding to questions on their websites, sending out mass-autographed photos, making eye contact with the camera or a concertgoer, etc.)
so -- if the game board were to be reorganized, with media competing with love for attention, should we alter our strategies; how.
* * *
Dammit, I didn't want to get that far into that trope. It basically ends up as an argument that attention to Hollywood keeps us from loving our families and friends well, and most people are likely to regard that as so much crazytalk.
[preachy screed deleted]
Obviously I have a really hard time balancing critical consciousness (and depression) with a sense of humor, an ability to relax, and some ability to communicate with my non-ivory-tower neighbors, but it's not like I think the latter three aren't important. I've spent large chunks of the last five years living with this tenuous balance in a very central part of my life. As a result, I'm a little tetchy about any implication that I and other media literacy advocates are just trying to suck the fun out of everything. It's a cheap argument; it only serves to corner me and make me even less fun to talk to, and I find it generally involves putting the other arguer in a position where they have no room to agree that the world is fucked up and the media do, in fact, have something to do with it.
* * *
Oh yeah, and Jessamyn gets cited in the book by way of another citation in another book. Cool!
* * *
James, I saw your ma on News Hour last night! Congratulations to her! That brings the number of people I know who have been quoted on public radio or TV over the past month to four (me, Jessamyn, Jessamyn's landlady, James's ma -- did I miss anyone?) Journalistic objectivity, anyone? I'm seeing a preponderance of well-educated upper-middle-class white people getting quoted, here...
Posted by me at 12:25 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 2, 2004
No Phone
FYI, I am on my way to Vermont this weekend via Greyhound, and I have stupidly left my phone at home. (Not so big a problem-- there is almost no cel reception at Jessamyn's anyway.) I should have email access to all accounts, but it will be sporadic.
Posted by me at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
July 1, 2004
DSWJ Character Shirts!
I noticed the other day that CafePress has added new shirt types to their lineup, so I've created new Dancing Sausage Character Shirts, in ringer and camisole styles! (Not that it will probably change the fact that there hasn't been a single sale since I opened the store :D how's that for really making me feel like blogging is a ridiculous pastime. I feel like Entertainment Marlys.) I do think the character shirts look better than the header-bar shirts, though. The ringer comes in three colors, but I can only do one design on it at a time. So here's what I'll do: I'm running each character for a few weeks, and then I'll retire it. The soft-shoe sausage is the current ringer style. I'll continue to run the flamenco sausage on the camisole unless anyone has other requests. Now that they have tighty-girly-shorts I think LHOOQ shorts and thongs are in order. mmyeah. Look for those later today.
Posted by me at 5:33 PM | Comments (5)
Detritus: Meme-linky Madness!
Today Kottke apparently found Christine's selections from the "ways the terrorists can know they've won" generator she commissioned Fuz to make, and all hell broke loose. The number of phrases in the random pot more than doubled, and Fuz got thousands of hits. They took the opportunity to give Brooke and Fuz's new bet-when-the-Bushies-will-bring-out-Osama widget, OsamaFinder, a boost, but it doesn't seem to have caught on as hotly. I think it's a neat idea, though. It will be interesting to see the extent to which either of these memes catch on more broadly over the next few days, and if so, where.
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It's nice being back in some kind of job which has me scrambling around the garbage heaps of the Internet. I found a page today which should win a prize for being the loudest goddamn thing out there, both in the sense of "if-I-wanted-your-website-to-make-noise-I'd-lick-my-finger-and-rub-it-across-the-screen" and in the sense of visual noise. FAIR WARNING: It has an autoloading MIDI of "Wind Beneath My Wings." Dig deeper and you'll find one of "School Days," which at least makes some sense, along with a playlist of seemingly random pop hits -- is there some special connection between fourth grade and the Goo Goo Dolls's "Iris" ("When everything's made to be broken/ I just want you to know who I am") that I'm forgetting?
This monstrosity is a school's website, which one can only hope will eventually bring about a lawsuit when some poor child with epilepsy attempts to access her homework and the roadhouse-like flashing nav buttons cause her to seize. Ope-- wait -- sorry, there's nothing anywhere that useful on the teachers' own personal sections of the site -- just falling petal sprites and charming illustrations of smirking chickadees. The teachers' pages are all animated and noisy, and yet they uniformly have "Under Construction" signs up.
The irony of this beaut? It's made by a design company named Whisper's Web Works. And the terror? The designer appears to have won numerous awards.
Oh, I need to settle myself. Obviously this is the result of a very, very different aesthetic than Zeldman's (although you wonder how this person got an education contract without any apparent heed to Bobby standards). Actually, having recently read an ethnography which describes literacy practices revolving around a Tupperware-party-like interior decorating catalog, I see some similarities... the author described a scene in which a design advisor told women to place as many things as they liked on the wall, with up to seven different colors of wood, all of them a hand's-breadth apart. Maybe that's the aesthetic we're dealing with here.
Regardless, if you want an example of what NOT to do with educational technology, I recommend you bookmark that one. It's a keeper.
More happily, I came across a nonprofit which seeks to encourage free thought about religion through schools. Also an ugly and mostly resource-free website, with its own tendency to come off as (secular humanist) dogmatic but the basic principle of the org seems necessary in these times, and one of the educators involved is apparently highly recognized for his work.
And then somehow, through a link off Dog Toy or Marital Aid?, I finally found someone writing about My Little Ponies who isn't completely regressing to self-soothing babytalk fanfic.
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I just heard my first fireworks outside, little whistle-and-pop ones; they must have had no more than one. But I won't be in town this Fourth and will miss the big displays here -- I'll be going to Jessamyn's again, which is good because I have yet to have any decent strawberries this year, or to see a single firefly. Jessamyn's place is a little remote from fireworks -- the nearest ones are over a ridge -- so fireflies are the entertainment there, a whole field of them blinking erratically up to the hills in the distance. It's the most incredible sight.
Actually, I saw my first fireworks the other day, not lit ones, but sodden remains on a beach in Boston where I knew I had been before, on a less beautiful but no less loved day, a ferocious rain coming down on me and my man and making illegible the windows of the car we were in. This time it was a different man, a different ex, a moving van, a brassy day recently polished by a June rain. Itamar worried about getting sand all over the van and not returning it on time, but I really didn't care. I haven't had any beach yet this summer and it's not right. I went wading and got my legs numb. There were tiny white hermit crabs. They moved less quickly than I would have expected underwater, only a little faster than flotsam even when they were terrified I was a crane. I picked them up, but I put them back. Itamar called them the spiders of the sea. He got his shorts wet because they were longer than mine, and he laughed through the curls he is letting overgrow his face when I told the crabs they were awesome.
Then we went and played a fourteen-person game of Halo with his new roommates.
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Mr. Code Gardener and Mr. Six: There. Are you happy now? At this point not blogging is not just a matter of not wanting to overtax my willingness to write, it's actually a matter of not messing up my body -- I jammed my left index finger (one of my hunt-and-peck fingers) last Friday and even though nothing shows on the X-rays and the doctor didn't see anything drastic, the pain has not subsided and the digit is getting rather stiff. I'm going to have to really take a break this weekend, I'm worried I'll damage myself permanently. I should get my hands insured like Jennifer Lopez has her a$s insured. maybe I should get my ass insured too while I'm at it. it's not so bad, for a white girl's ass.
ugh. blog overdose. I could swear I used to write better. I swear I used to write better. I used to. I swear. (hey, you said you wanted archives...)
Posted by me at 1:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack