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June 28, 2005
By popular demand: RSS
For those of you who prefer to learn about new posts by RSS and have been whining about where my feed is, here it is. There is also a link now affixed to the main page below the @#$*@# broken archive link.
A bonus to this setup is it will be easier to tell when I've posted something -- with this five-section layout you have to scroll down to see new things, I know, it's bad design and a pain in the ass. So the RSS feed will always put new posts at the top for you.
Cheers!
Posted by me at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)
Boob's back; mash-up needed
Just saw a news brief saying the new Atty General took down the drapes over the statue of Justice, and you can now see her b00b again. Hurray!
The brief also occasioned the replaying of "Let The Eagle Soar," that song of John Ashcroft's which I was so obsessed with. And I can't believe it didn't occur to me before:
it would not be difficult at all to do a mash-up or medley of that song with "Tomorrow Belongs To Me", the creepy Nazi anthem from Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. Even though "Tomorrow" is in 3/4. I would love to see this done... any takers?
And while you're at it, to my knowledge nobody has taken up my challenge to do a folk rendition of Biz Markie's "Just A Friend" yet. Hop to it, pplz!
Posted by me at 1:01 PM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2005
Warcraft Diary, Day 1
Started playing Worlds of Warcraft today. I don't know what Jim Gee's talking about when he talks about how you don't need the manual to start a game -- he sure wasn't talking about piloting those Night Elves of his!
The screen is bloody complicated and the mousing and clicking patterns I developed in other RPGs don't have the effects I want. Clearly, SOME games could use a little manual help, and besides, it's all about learning styles -- I'd rather have a reference book which didn't take up screen real-estate when I use it. Sadly, the manual as written doesn't make an excellent reference book... it is actually kind of linear, and I've had trouble dropping into the middle of it.
I surprised myself by choosing a female human priest character with a sweet, surprised face. I'm more willing to play females these days. After fourteen years in a body which is inescapably female, after a childhood feeling quite genderless, I guess I've gotten used to it. Human was a must -- they get horse steeds, and that's really the reason I'm here.
None of my friends were on tonight, so I just sort of dicked around on a roleplaying server in the abby I spawned near. I killed a rabbit, which was traumatic, and was even more chagrined when it proved to have nothing useful on its corpse. Killed a wolf, which took more time, and yielded some poor-quality material -- even more wrenching, as the wolf was marked as "young" and had put up a good fight. Then I killed a deer. Good god. I'd just wanted to talk to or charm these animals, but I guess this game doesn't work like Neverwinter Nights... It occurred to me that there must be a "cry" emote, so I sat by Bambi's corpse and sobbed for a while. This made the game experience infinitely more satisfying.
But I still wasn't making any progress towards my horse. Time to read the manual. I found that when I was reading the manual and my eyes were off the screen, I wanted my character sitting down someplace away from where people might bug her. I tried to arrange her in some way which had a story to it -- kneeling at an altar, or sitting by a fountain.
OK. First task was to find an NPC who could give me a small quest and pay me for it. Back to the abbey. I heard hoofbeats... here came a line of nights moving at a walk. One sat a chestnut pinto charger, one a black, one a grey. They were so beautiful! They were accompanied by swordsmen, and from time to time the leader called out "HOLD THE LINE, KNIGHTS!" They were headed somewhere... I whispered, "Where are you going?" "Follow us and see," one said.
They went into the abbey, gathering more neophytes along the way. "What are we doing?" I asked. They kept stringing me on. "Recruitment parade," someone hinted. But for what? The leader told us to stand in a circle around the walls of the main hall. Being told what to do without reason didn't exactly leave me feeling comfortable.
"KNIGHTS," boomed the leader.
An avatar named Deadhawt across the circle from me began to do pelvic thrusts.
"WE ARE MIGHTY," boomed the leader.
I thought about kids in Africa asked to tote AK-47s in exchange for safety. OK, it wasn't that bad. Still, my avatar had attained all of one level, no more than what she spawned with. She wore a white dress and looked surprised and I found myself typing the /cry emote again, and then "I WANT MY MAAAAAAAA!"
Here I was on a roleplaying server, and while I couldn't buy into the leader's exhortations -- his title read "Private (Imposingname)," I had no idea what he was blathering about, and people kept falling on him from the rafters while Deadhawt continued to thrust, now standing at his side -- I found myself immersed in playing out the total comedy of a world in which everything has been made so lifelike and still fails to convince, the exact same story I play every time I pop Grand Theft Auto in the PS2. I walked up to the leader for a moment, thinking I'd kneel in front of him for comic effect, then realized I had no idea if he could kill me if I did so. I returned to the wall and knelt there.
"omg rotfl do u like to RP?" Deadhawt asked nobody in particular. People started asking who this clown was. (Honestly, what do you expect if you recruit any layabout who follows your parade?!) Deadhawt shimmied and flashed. "BOGY DOWN *@#%*#!@ES!!!!!1" he yelled, and suddenly was booted from the guild.
Bereft of his presence, the guild played out a meeting as contentious and fruitless as any local Pacifica station in a crisis -- no action, just a lower-ranking member accusing the leader of making the guild into a bunch of assholes. No dancing. It was time to move on.
I didn't know how, though. Been jumped into a gang, no way out, no understanding of the situation. Could I just walk away? Would I be shunned for life if I left? Would the guild declare a fatwa? /cry again. A player named Lilyblack /comforted me, and thank god was kind enough to give me the jump ship command and a few gold pieces.
Giddy on the way out, I whispered to Deadhawt, "This was not the place for us. We should be on a beach somewhere, dancing and drinking Mai Tais." "omg lolol wtf??!@??!@$" he wrote, the last I saw of him.
I found a stream of other players from this guild approaching or lingering outside. Lightheaded from my escape, I began to shout at them all. "Swords of Legend!" I called out. "Your people are inside! They argue tirelessly! Come with me, and we will drink Mai Tais and dance on the beach!" No response. They filtered in, and I was left alone. /sigh.
Venturing too far from the spawn point, I was beset by a cutpurse, and, not knowing any of the attack or defense commands, soon found myself dead. It is an alarming thing, to be dead. As in most historical death scenarios, you wander around looking for your corpse and are unable to have an effect on anything. You'd hope you'd have the ability to communicate with animals, at least make 'em put up their hackles or something, but I went to the Crazy Cat Lady's house and the cats just wandered around as heedless of me as they were when I was alive.
Everything is silvery and colorless when you're dead, and the air throbs like sound muffled by a womb. Giant winged figures stand ready to restore you to your body at the price of some damage to your avatar. Not that I read the manual for this. I just wandered around feeling frantic. I was just that much farther from getting my horse.
Eventually I found my corpse, I guess. I got revived, anyway. All this probably just to abandon this avatar for a more carefully chosen one once I find myself on when my friends are. Virtual bodies are cheap.
Posted by me at 12:08 AM | Comments (4)
June 23, 2005
I said it first
Sarah has said she was going to quote me on her blog about the PBS fracas, but I am going to beat her to the punch. Here's my take: Cutting funds for Sesame Street simply cannot be a politically viable move in the eyes of history. How can the Republicans get away with this? It is like standing in the middle of the street, in full view of the public, and strangling puppies. Very tiny, blind, cuddly, helpless baby puppies.
That is all.
Posted by me at 1:26 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2005
W.o.W., a.k.a. A.B.D.
Soooo, I've taken the plunge. I've signed on to the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. And now I need to know where you all are. If you're a friend of mine and you are on a particular server let me know, so we can play together! I'm holding off on creating a character til I know who's where.
Posted by me at 9:13 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
All Points Bulletin
BACON!!!! I AM IN YOUR TOWN!!!! I am going crazy because I can't reach you; your voicemail is full up and as for email, who the hell knows. I am near campus and half tempted to go looking for you. Call, IM, or email me if you read this. Tomorrow will be too late! Though I do think we should go kayaking in the morning. CALL NOW WE HAVE CHEESE FRIES TO DO!
Posted by me at 7:38 PM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2005
Today's discussion topic
What would you do if you discovered that a person who had sexually harassed a young woman you knew and loved, and was quietly driven out of a university post for a pattern of similar activity, was now ensconced in a new university post and still involved with a website for teen/tween girls?
And what would you do if you suddenly realized that this person was now someone you were likely to run into at conferences, because you've become a scholar in this person's field? And if this person was working with another noted scholar in the field whose work and ideas you greatly respect?
I'm really not sure what to do, so I thought I'd open this up for public discussion.
Posted by me at 8:03 PM | Comments (5)
June 5, 2005
Not Business As Usual At Hooper's Store
Apparently Merrill Lynch has given $5 mil to Sesame Workshop to research and develop financial literacy materials for kids. Read carefully; there's some verrry interesting things going on between the lines. First of all, in the lede paragraph, it says this is "to help boost children's financial literacy and improve their awareness of global cultures" (emph mine). It's not clear whether these are supposed to be goals which can taught together. If they are, how is this fiscal globalism going to resemble or differ from Sesame's existing curriculum? Does this mean Merrill Lynch wants to acclimatize the next generation of kiddos before they grow up to reject unjust global business practices as some of their parents have?Second, they're talking interest rates, mortgages, and retirement plans... what AGE are they thinking about, here?! Sesame's main products have been moving to a younger and younger target audience...
Finally, SW head Gary Knell closes on a slightly different note: "Learning that you can't always get what you want is an important lesson in life." Classic Sesame sentiments, god bless 'im. I wonder how and whether these messages will end up apearing in this curriculum. And I can't help but wonder if this is the lesson that Merrill Lynch execs teach their kids and grandkids. Let's hear it for the inevitable progression of educational inequality.
Posted by me at 5:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2005
Naycher
I been explosed to lots a naycher over the past few weeks. I might could show yew some pitchers.
Posted by me at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2005
Adventures In Disorienteering
So the hiking trip went quite well, and I'm back in my room with Isaac, still unshowered, playing some rather vigorous minor-key chords on Katie's keyboard in the room next door... There's a story behind that, I think, but first I'll direct you to the photos I took over the past few weeks.
The hiking itself was enjoyable and well-needed, though more difficult than any I think I've ever done before. I realized pretty quickly that the hikes we'd done in school, while often over harsh terrain and incorporating many of the notorious features such as lack of showers and pooping in the wild, were generally not long treks with packs and were usually accomplished with the assistance of water trucks, camp cooks, and other niceties. This set in the first time the trail faded out and I realized I had no idea which way to go; I'd never been on a hike where someone else hadn't been interpreting the trail. Fortunately, Katie's Girl Scout experience had taught her to read trail blazes, and she taught me how to read the painted signs. She became the navigator for most of the trip, reading blazes and also interpreting the topo map, a tool I had a vague idea how to read but had never actually seen in action.
I say "vague idea how to read" and mean I knew that the wavy brown lines meant a steeper slope when denser, but I didn't know how steep, and apparently Katie and Isaac didn't either, for we found ourselves on the third day clinging to a steep face of rock overlooking the Palisades Parkway with a minimum of thirty pounds strapped to each of our backs. We later agreed there'd probably been something in a guidebook somewhere which we hadn't read which would indicate that that particular trail should not be climbed without a top rope. Such was the spirit of ad-hocracy of the trip.
For the most part, though, we were not so ad-hoc as to completely incapacitate us, and what we got to see for our risks was quite lovely -- the views from that face were incradible, and we really felt we'd accomplished something. Later on that trail we also saw three white-tailed deer and a mother pheasant who came rushing at us as if she was going to peck the hell out of our knees, then dashed in the opposite direction from her babies in a textbook example of mother bird behavior. We also saw a snake and some really awesome fungus (see pictures). After two and a half days of pounding our legs until they had no sensation left, we found ourselves at a green picnic ground scattered with buttercups and collapsed in time for sunset. All in all, the hike was great.
(takes a deep breath as she begins to tell the story which will make her father say, "I TOLD you always to check that before you go on a trip!!!!" and possibly have a seizure.)
It was the drive back which was almost catastrophic. We'd driven up in the lovely-though-battered white Cadillac Fleetwood which Isaac had been given by a generous member of his parish to ease the commute he has to make with his amps and other equipment up to their New Rochelle church. The car guzzled almost an entire American tankload of gas just getting Isaac from Brooklyn out of the city, and was definitely putting off some bad fumage as we made our way up the Palisades getting there. Cars passed us honking angrily. I'd tell you how slow the car went when Isaac floored it, but the spedometer was so broken the needle only left 5 MPH once, and that was to do some frantic waving in a lower-than-optimal range of the dial.
"Is this heap insured?" I asked Isaac. He made hurt noises, as if it was mean that I'd even questioned his ability to be responsible, so I didn't press the issue.
When we got back in the car this morning to make our way back, the car acted as Isaac said it sometimes did, refusing to shift out of neutral after he started it up. He floored it, and the engine raced. As we made our way out on the highway again, Katie and I speculated as to how the car might be tuned up. We agreed the idle was too high. I was hearing a high screech which also sounded really familiar at high speeds. I figured it was a belt of some sort. I was still getting some pretty heavy fumes, even in the backseat, but I decided not to say anything about that; Isaac was still acting wounded about our attempts to black-box his engine, and since the fumes weren't anything like the awful sulphur ones I got a dose of when the Vista Cruiser's battery boiled off one hot day in L.A., I decided not to say anything. It was just an old car. If anything, it smelled like a little oil was burning.
But no old car is just an old car; there's always something specifically wrong, and with some smarts it could be fixed. A childhood with my dad should have taught me that, at least.
As we neared the New York-New Jersey border outside Orangeville, the car gave up on accelerating on a slope. We coasted to a stop just past the state line. The wheelwells were smoking. While Katie made use of her mom's AAA card, I poked under the hood. The radiator fluid was fine; all the hoses and belts appeared to be in pretty good shape for their age. I tried the dipstick...
...promptly discovering that we'd made the same mistake I had six years ago on a cross country trip.
The dipstick was bone dry, even upon a second dipping. There wasn't a drop of oil in the engine. There was barely even any grime. It was a dead certainty the screeching which sounded so familiar was the music of an engine fusing into a hunk of solid steel crappitude.
And we were out of AAA's jurisdiction, so we were going to have to let the Palisades Police take care of us.
So we sat it out for a while. Isaac and Katie jammed on harmonica and tin whistle, and Isaac taught us both how to play the bones. I tried to remember how to sing "Carrickfergus," but it wasn't quite in the right key.
Eventually a New Jersey state trooper pulled up to investigate. At this point it was revealed that Isaac had just taken the plates, registration, and insurance of the last owner. Katie assured me he'd set the process in motion, but the point was moot, as the deadly serious trooper pointed out that the registration and insurance weren't even in the name of the nice old parishoner who'd given Isaac the car.
And the plates were coming up in the file system as "voluntarily surrendered."
And then, "stolen."
And then the trooper didn't like the looks of the fact that Katie had a Michigan driver's license when she was claiming to have grown up in Jersey and be living currently in New York.
And then he didn't like the looks of the bag of lemonade powder Katie had left on the dashboard when she went to freshen up her canteen.
"This isn't Hollywood," he barked when we insisted he just taste it. "We don't just go sticking our fingers into bags of powder and tasting them to see if they're cocaine!"
Two or three or four more officers, plus a tow truck, came and went. The Jersey officer looked us up in the computer system and wrote down all of our information. He didn't like it much that the only ID I had on me was a credit card, nor that I balked at giving him my social security number, which I mentioned I hadn't been asked about by cops before... which led him to give me the eye until I volunteered the information about the "parading without a permit" charge a few years back. All in all it was clear that even though we were filthy and smelly and relatively in posession of our senses, he thought our story about taking a gift car to go hiking didn't wash. He kept asking repeatedly how we'd come into possession of a stolen car. As he wrote down our information for what must have been the third time, he looked Isaac over and made some comment about how he couldn't be doing too badly, out alone with two women in the woods. Katie and I thought this was hilarious. The cop said he didn't see how any of this was funny. I don't see how he could possibly have been keeping a straight face; he was trying to process in a church organist in a funky old car given to him by a parishoner, and the car somehow was turning out to be stolen even though it was old and now broken beyond repair. It's so high-concept, someone has already bought the script rights out from under me.
After some negotiation over the radio it turned out we were in the New York state police's jurisdiction. They searched our pockets, finding nothing more scandalous than the pair of underwear I'd neglected to put on that morning in my eagerness to get back to civilization. However, as we were still apparently in posession of stolen property, they handcuffed us and put me and Katie in the back of a cruiser. Isaac got read his rights and went off in a K-9 unit van with another cop and a cantankerous Rottweiler we were told was nearing retirement and not in command of all of his senses.
Our cop, by contrast, was young and pleasant, and told us he liked to listen to just about any kind of music. "Except rap," I said. "Yeah," he said, sounding surprised that I'd guessed. I considered asking him if he knew anything about Clear Channel, but judged it better to go along, get along, and not to try to throw up any sort of obvious shibboleths.
When Katie and I walked into the state troopers' station, there was a scrawny Indian American kid in a Harvard sweatshirt and giant untied sneakers sitting inside, shackled to a bench and looking haggard as an officer questioned him.
"So why did you shoot the guy?" he asked the kid.
"I don't know," the kid responded.
"You just shot him for no reason."
"He was pissing me off, I guess."
"You're eighteen, right? Eighteen, and just shot a guy for no reason." The officer shook his head and wrote some stuff down. Katie exchanged a look and I made our way to another bench, to which we were handcuffed. I had all sorts of thoughts about how the criminal system exposes people wrongly charged to people who have committed heinous crimes -- we'd been singing earlier about litterers put in with father-r^pers -- until the officer asked him some more questions, and it became clear that the kid and some friends were simply in for reckless driving. He had, in fact, been chased right past us by the same officer just minutes before.
In the end, Isaac got three tickets -- one for driving without insurance, one for driving without registration, and one for driving in an uninspected car. The story behind the stolen plates was weirdly anticlimactic: a woman had given the elderly parishioner the car but failed to take off her plates. When she didn't manage to retrieve the plates (why wasn't clear), she apparently decided that the easiest thing to do was report the plates as stolen.
They held us for a while, eventually unshackling us and releasing us to the lobby, where we had a rollicking discussion about civil disobedience and whether the cops had actually had a right to search our backpacks as they did. Katie called an uncle to try to get a ride, much to Isaac's chagrin; this would be the first time he met any of her family. I called Chuck, who laughed heartily as I'd hoped, and he sent Rita to get us, bless both of their hearts. I owe them some piroshki.
Posted by me at 5:45 PM | Comments (2)