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May 30, 2005
Ode to Hampshire Students
Been doing a little fooling around on a dating site which has a mathematical algorithm which matches you to people who answer questions similarly. It works surprisingly well.
Without my telling it anything about my affiliations, and very little about my interests, it has matched me with one Teachers College student, one guy who says his favorite books are the series I have been deeply engrossed in for the past month, and two Hampshire students. The Hampshire students seemed very interesting well before I knew where they were from. They have clarified for me what it is about Hampshire students that makes me willing to volunteer to spend time with Hampshire grads I have not even met before.
Oh, Hampshire students. They go about the world with their ears pricked up. You can see them! They are the rabbits listening for danger and the cats about to poke their noses where they probably oughtn't. They are the pointing hounds and the collies figuring the best place for the sheep to go next. They are the robins standing stock still, eyeing the ground. They are paying very, very close attention to everything. Either they are very emotionally attentive to the people around them, or they are about to take apart every machine in the vicinity to see how it works; they are looking for flaws in your argument or trying to see a pattern in the trees and their leaves. God love 'em. You will not find a more inquisitive, sensitive people anywhere.
Posted by me at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
Isaac's New Car; Around New York
Peripatetic pictures and anecdotes from around the city over the past month, as well as pictures from Isaac's party Saturday, and his new Cadillac (red leather seats!!!)
Posted by me at 1:49 AM | Comments (1)
May 12, 2005
NY Gets the LA Treatment
Returned home after a department picnic today to find Fort Washington Ave. absolutely crawling with cops -- cars parked diagonally the whole block from 179th to 182nd, tactical trucks, the whole nine yards. If you're watching the news, yes, that retaining wall that collapsed is right in my neighborhood, right around the corner from me. I'm still having a hard time placing it on my mental map, but I am pretty sure part of my favorite running route goes along the edge at the top.
It's nice, actually -- you see that many cop cars around a big monument like the George Washington Bridge and you're pretty sure you'll be evacuating your apartment for the forseeable future. But no, it was the kind of event that happens all the time back home -- things falling down, going up in flames, blowing over, getting flooded. Nature taking over and reminding us no matter how big the things we build are, they're coming down eventually. Reassuring, actually. And it even appears no one was hurt.
Posted by me at 8:16 PM | Comments (0)
May 5, 2005
Eureka! Why I procrastinate!
Finals week -- or as we like to call it, Procrastination Week -- is upon us. (Actually, it's more or less supposed to be done for me today, though I won't present one project til Friday and I am STILL having a beeyotch of a time finding people under 18 who can play Grand Theft Auto for my other final paper-- if you KNOW any, have them CALL me!!!!1)
Tonight, having procrastinated every possible way I know how, but still having finished a presentable draft of a paper due Monday well before I thought I would, and even turned it in to both TA and instructor of the class, I was smote heavily with a blinding flash at 2 a.m. with the sudden realization of why I procrastinate.
Basically, it's the only safety valve I have. I can't finish anything until the end, until the very last minute. If I didn't push everything back until the very last minutes possible (ok, I'm not as bad as some -- I've never written a paper cold starting at 4 a.m. or anything), I would be inclined to revise it and revise it, and over-research sections of piddling importance, and fail to give myself any un-agonized free time until the paper was out of my hands. The burnout I'd suffer would be a hundred times worse.
For some reason in the past I've conceived of procrastination only as "stealing time from myself" -- acknowledging that I'm horribly obsessive about these things, but yet still framing procrastination as something which was bound to hurt me. I hadn't thought of it as a safety mechanism. Hmm.
Posted by me at 2:01 AM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2005
Exchange in the hall outside the EGGPLANT Lab
Scene: Thorndike basement. I am padding down the hall barefoot, as is my wont, in commemoration of the days when my mother used to give me detention for doing the same on my high school campus and Frank, the old Lakota maintenance guy, used to shout, "Put some shoes on, hippie!" at me.
From the opposite end of the hall, a man is stumping crookedly along in that knock-kneed way that indicates some disease whose name I don't know. I drop my eyes, unusure as usual about the social requirements of passing someone you don't know.
Him: That's a luxury I can never have.
Me: (taken completely off-guard) Awwwww! I'm sorry!
Him: it's all right. (unintelligible.)
Posted by me at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)
May 3, 2005
500 Greyhounds At Risk
Just got mail that the Dakin Animal Shelter, where I used to work my first year of Hampshire, is helping place some of 500 greyhound dogs which risk being killed because a track in Connecticut is closing. Of course I plan to do my part! I called Dakin to ask about fostering and was told to find a shelter closer to me which may also be placing the dogs. I hope some of you can help rescue dogs too! We have until May 14th.
Posted by me at 5:06 PM | Comments (0)
Detritus: Interlude: Morning is the Long Way Home
Two thoughts for today: Is anyone else out there feeling like it's been years since they ever really *accomplished* anything over email? Like even had a really important long letter exchange with someone. I just feel like I've devolved to using the medium for business communication and other trivia. I don't send or receive forwards anymore for the most part (thank god); I've more or less shut down any account that was getting spam; and I am off most of the exceedingly high-traffic political lists I used to be on; so while I think these factors initially led to my pushing the medium away from me in fear of how overwhelmed it made me feel, I can't blame them for how I continue to trivialize my email use.
* * *
To this day I feel as swoony about Leo Kottke's song "Morning is the Long Way Home" as I did when it was on the car stereo as we drove to Mount Wilson or a Twelve O'Clock Players show or to the Muirheads' as a kid. Other songs and albums from that part of my life still have heavy nostalgia, but this one is different somehow. I think it's because the lyrics still make as little sense to me now as they did then. Adulthood is about many things becoming transparent. The things which remain opaque retain a certain mysterious power, don't you think?
Posted by me at 2:06 AM | Comments (1)
May 2, 2005
EGGPLANT meeting notes, May 2, 2005
We just finished up one of our meetings for the Spencer EGGPLANT games research group, and it occurs to me it might be a good idea to start posting some notes online. Having feedback from various and sundry, including faculty who are away at conferences, might be useful, and we're developing categories and going through processes of revision which I think might be useful to other academics studying video games. Heaven knows it's freaking ridiculous how little of a common language we seem to have. So here's the first batch of notes; hopefully this will become a regular feature.
Thursday we had our first participant come in for the Grand Theft Auto study. The original idea was to have experienced players do talk-alouds about their goals and strategies as they worked their way from a designated save-state, but the trial run suggested this might be problematic, for the following reasons:
- The participant had a hard time talking aloud. Whether this was because of his age, the fact that he was an expert player whose knowledge of the game had become routinized and was no longer explicit, or simply that he's not that kind of player, was not clear.
- The save state proved to offer fewer options for different things to do within the game than we'd hoped. I think we need a save state with more money and cars in garages so players have more of a choice of what to do.
- Despite the fact that we keep saying we want to study the relation of motivations, goals, and strategies, we didn't bother to ask the participant explicitly what his goals were, and hence we didn't really find that out.
- Chuck has suggested strategy may change based on experience, not just motivation, which is quite likely and so obvious I can't believe I didn't think about it before. It looked as if this participant's strategy was shaped by his GTA experience -- playing at friends' houses, where I'm guessing he didn't have much time to poke around and see what was possible in the game. He was very mission-focused. We're going to have to take the experience factor into account -- I believe our next step will be to take data on someone who's never played the game before and compare it to experienced players.
The participant tended to not be able to say much about what he was doing when he was just driving around (though he had enough attention available at those points to talk about his strategies in general) leading Jess and I and Zhou to a little consideration today of what it is in a game there is to think and talk aloudabout. Jess began to categorize these as "challenges." At the time I was fixated on developing some more specific categories and brushed off this generalization, but in retrospect I think it's a good way of explaining what, overall, might be occupying a player's attention and figuring into their strategies. Here's some basic categories of challenges:
- Physical environment. Some parts of this require more attention than others -- a particularly hard leap in a platformer; a particularly difficult corner to steer around in GTA.
- Enemies. Spawning singularly or in groups.
- Plot points at which you are given more information about the story of the game and where you're supposed to go next.
- Items: deciding which to collect, in what quantity, how, and where.
One of the things we're figuring about GTA is it's not particularly challenge-dense if you're just playing through the missions. You go to a plot point, and then there's a lot of driving until you hit the next one -- that is, unless you are super concerned about the condition and make of your car, running down every/no pedestrian, avoiding the cops at all costs and keeping a low wanted level, and so forth. None of those things are really vital to finishing the main plotline of the game. I think we may eventually end up deciding we want to use a more challenge-dense game in order to get more data.
Anyway, what do you think, sirs?
Posted by me at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)
Haircut
I think it's New Haircut Time. I can't stand the snarls anymore, or the way it sticks to my face. Any suggestions?
I had been thinking I would keep it long, though if anyone can make a really good case for Classic Gus (circa Hampshire College short hair), I might listen. I have been rather deeply irked that I finally found what looks like a decent place to get a short haircut in NYC just as I was deciding to grow mine out. However, I would like to do something interesting and long. The only thing I've been really inspired by, though, was when I was flipping through one of Jacob's Furi Kuri mangas and shrieked "This one is perfect!" about a very chunky haircut belonging to one of the characters. I think it was this one. Jacob said it was impossible; I mean, it was a manga. Well... we'll see.
Posted by me at 1:18 AM | Comments (1)