« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »

June 26, 2006

Great Minds Think In The Same Space-Time Continuum

Around about the time we hit puberty, my friends and I decided we were going to film our own parody of our beloved Star Trek, presaging Paramount's own moves to some extent by including (stand-ins for) both Kirk and Picard. We were not, of course, alone; hundreds if not thousands of Trek fans have joyfully turned their efforts towards similar pursuits. And, as it turns out, among these fans is my friend and colleague Satu Helio (I think that's her on the left), who starred in a seven-years-in-the-making Finnish parody, full-length, Star Wreck. (I think that was our title too. It's kind of the obvious choice.)

Posted by me at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

Unsubtle Hints

Wow... Lynda Barry's selling off original art from One! Hundred! Demons! Including one of my favorite chapters, the one about headlice. And to think it's almost my birthday... hmmmm.

In other news, I still want a pony.

Posted by me at 1:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2006

Things That People I Know Are Doing

I have time to blog! So I will note some things! One is that my roommate Emily will be maintaining a blog as she goes to work with Burundian refugees in Tanzania this summer! OK! Also my cousins in the Berkeley area will finally be reunited with each other as their tribute bands -- tribute to The Who and The Yardbirds -- play at the British Invasion #2 concert! Not that I could identify music by either band! But they are both seriously talented musicians! Right on! You should go see them! Also! Totally missed Jacob's second, unfinished, Valentine possibility this year, but it involves Cthulhu and is way too dramatic and that makes it, like his previous Valentines, hilarious. Jacob will be at a number of comic cons in the next month so if you go to those look for him there and buy his mini-comics.

Posted by me at 1:29 AM | Comments (0)

All The Reporters' Data

Just got done watching All The President's Men on WNET, PBS's local affiliate... sounds like a quiet cry for help, if you listen just right ("Pleeeease! Our funnnding! Impeach the bastard! Helllllp us! Here, we'll even show you how it's done...") Anyway it was really nice to be watching just now, after a few weeks of studying for my certification exams; a little fantasia of Good Journalism viewed from an armchair in this department of communications I call home. I fantasize about being that good of a reporter. Dunno if Woodstein really strategized that way, but it was wicked cool if they did.

A couple of things popped out at me that just wouldn't have when I last saw the movie, in high school. One was the scene where the editorial board is weighing how dangerous the story is to the survival of the Post: it's a nice microcosm of some of Chomsky and Herman's observations about how self-censorship on the part of the press happens after weighing flak, the potential loss of support from government sources, and everyone's perception that you're just plain crazy for running a story which contradicts everyone's common agreement about the moral fiber of the President. Which, as Chomsky and Herman suggest, is probably much more likely to produce a chilling effect on a given day than, say, Rupert Murdoch calling an editor to tell her not to run a story he dislikes in the Post. Anyway, if you could convince high school students to sit still for a minute to watch that scene it would be a nice way to dramatize those patterns.

Another thing that just totally fascinated me was watching the dramatization of 1970s-era technology, which basically had a supporting role in the film. All those bulky CRT televisions with chrome knobs! The newsroom had typewriters everywhere, which make for easier-to-shoot typing scenes; imagine trying to frame both the bustle of the newsroom and Robert Redford typing intently when there's a monitor jammed in his face. Plus that artillerylike noise -- transitioning from a clip of the cannons saluting Nixon's inauguration -- as the final typewriter spells out the fates of the men who were indicted.

And then there's the research scenes: poring through stacks of phone books, library records, plane tickets, bank statements; the secretary arriving with manila envelopes of glossy photographs culled from the newspaper's morgue. All of which would be done from one desk, these days. And sure, they find ways to dramatize it; Minority Report, though it fantasizes about future technologies, still dramatizes that kind of informational movement in a way that feels right for our current moment. Those same scenes where Tom Cruise is dragging data around with his fingertips could be pulled off on one of today's flat-panels to similar effect. But seeing Redford lugging around phone books from Minnesota really gives you vertigo. Not only are we reminded how much data there is out there when you print it all out, but we're also reminded how small phone books could be at the time (how many phonebooks does the Washington Post need to get coverage of the state of Minnesota?!)

Finally, the headlines about McGovern's running mate, Lawrence Eagleburger, dropping out of the election race at the beginning of the movie reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson was looking at the same race, the same dirty tricks, and what he produced was so incredibly different. While Woodward and Bernstein polished their story until they had their facts clean enough for Ben Bradley, Thompson slashed his wrists and howled until he was dizzy. And I guess ultimately accomplished nothing. What must that have been like? You have a real palpable sense of his outrage at the debauchery of the Nixon team, but I wonder now too if that was exacerbated by a sense that he'd missed an opportunity to really do something about it. Did he feel hamstrung?

The result was a book whose sense of helplessness balmed my terror at the insanity of the 2000 election; the nation was clearly going through similar trials, and Thompson was there to record what it felt like. He was the hermeneut to Bradley's rational empiricist. We needed both, for different reasons.

Posted by me at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2006

Quartet, A Lullaby

Do you have any idea what this is?

It's an ecstasy I never dreamed possible.

On getting my new phone and discovering that ringtones are basically MIDI files -- a format I had a little familiarity with in the wake of hacking the player piano -- I went a little bit nuts. I found a site with a slew of game tunes lovingly re-created and remixed by fans (many of the original composers' names, which might otherwise be lost to history, are inscribed deep in the files) and downloaded as many as I could.

Most of them are too long to be used as ringtones if you don't want to be one of those awful people who interrupt meetings and moments of intimacy with jangly songs. I have, however, considered the possibilities of cranking the game music when confronted by some kid on the subway playing the latest 50 Cent song as loud as his tinny little Motorola speakers will bear. (A beatdown? Perhaps more thought is needed.) Anyway Austin pointed out that it probably wasn't too hard to edit MIDI files, so I looked into it.

Sure enough, you can drag and drop 'em right into Garage Band, and the tracks spread out across your screen in the green blocks above. The song pictured is an obscure one -- the first level music for the game Quartet, for the Sega Master System. We never had a Sega, but my cousins Peter and Emily did, and we'd play when we visited them in Sacramento, sitting on the cool floor in the living room of their old Mission house. We were young and uncoordinated, and we'd put the game down after a few tries. As a result this song, despite its macho Eighties noodling, holds a little more sadness for me than the game's story or the minor notes would warrant. This was a song we'd hear maybe two or three times a year.

But I'd play it back in my head all year long. It was full of cousin rambunction: secret code, parody songs, trips to the ice cream store and that incident with the giant lollipop; the half-wild animals at the Folsom Zoo and the rabbit skins we bought at Sutter's Fort just because they were soft; that time I erased Uncle Bob's entire hard drive playing Manhole. That time we showed up and an hour later someone ran over their cat, overshadowing the whole trip. The soporific heat of Downtown Sacramento in the summer, and the salvation of the live oak trees. Going back by way of older, more intimidating relatives' houses in San Francisco; a last stop for candied fruit slices at Fisherman's Wharf, and then a plunge back down through the Central Valley jammed in the brown velour backseat if you were unlucky and the air conditioning at full blast thank God as we passed by the feedlots, back down by the roads to camps I'd never go to again, by the amusement parks; back to the new-minted divorce. Back to my unease with myself, my gender, my parents all spilling over onto my waning relationship with my so-much-girlier cousin.

If you had ever told me that one day not only would posessing a copy of a game song be easier than holding my tape recorder up in front of the TV and shushing my sisters while we attempted to beat the level -- if you had told me I would be able to track down that song from my own living room, that I would with almost no effort take it onto a computer with a screen colored as vividly as a television -- more colorful than the game itself! -- and pull and snip and shape, with the movements of my hands rather than ones and zeros, those same notes...

I just had no idea this was coming, did you?

Look at them. In a written-out MIDI, the notes themselves look like a level. Think about Vib Ribbon and the Harmonix games and reconsider... there's got to be a way to build more of a world on the platforms made by the notes...

Garage Band can also write out the tablature:

and who thought my computer would ever do that for me? Forgetting the clef for a moment and looking at it with a violist's eyes, it's terrifying: they want me to WHAT with my fourth finger?! It's true. Those notes are impossibly high. They're to be played by unearthly instruments.

It's kind of cool to see them dignified in that old-fashioned calligraphy, so much less transparent than the MIDI file. A secret code of another kind. If I wanted, I could play the song on my accordion now. Well, maybe not THIS song; my fingerwork was never that fast. But I bet I could play some of the Mario music.

Posted by me at 2:02 AM | Comments (1)

June 2, 2006

Cerfimacashun!

So I'm studying for my certification exams. That's DOCTORAL certification exams, to you. No, I am NOT studying to be a teacher. Little known fact, Teachers College is especially well-known for its program in Organizational Leadership, and on top of training top-notch teachers it also has programs in counselling, health, cultural studies, cognitive research, and other subjects where doc students are likely to be a little touchy if you assume they're hard up for babysitting work. The papers I am about to get from TC do not authorize me to get anywhere near your children. At least as far as the NCLB crowd cares. Heaven forfend, I might suggest recess for the little darlings.

* * *

"Do you have a list of books you have to read?" Austin innocently asks as we're talking about the exam process in our respective departments. Well, no.

I don't have a required reading list. I did sit down with previous exam questions, though, and in practicing some arguments for them identified the books I thought I'd be relying on. I came up with two short stacks. These are pretty much the books which have been most important to my thinking to date:

In addition to these I have a list of the equally-important stray PDFs and printouts I need to track down for the exam. Extremely loosely, these are:

Deibert, Parchment-Printing-Hypermedia (ordered)
Alphabet piece from communications history
Telegraph piece by Gitlin
Manufacturing Consent chapter from Broughton
AERA UWisc piece on evoking sensation in games (author is Thompson?)
Taylor, Striated and smooth space in games
Konzack, 7 layer model (link is pdf, sorry)
Church, FADT
MDA analysis
DiGRA papers on references to ads in games (brief cite)
Leander or Lankshear, users make no distinction between virtual and real spaces
Adorno (Enlightenment)
Arendt (conformity)
Jameson (the usual)
other theory on scientization of culture
Larry Cuban (more pdf)
Howie's quote about blackboards
How People Learn
Steinkuehler
Squire (dissertation?)
Systems thinking articles
Transfer articles
Metacognition articles
piece on Trinidadians and the Net

Then there's an EndNote database I've been working up of things I've referred to frequently when presenting at conferences. Not reproducing it here, even though it would probably be more useful than that last paragraph of scribbles.

And finally, a short list of canonical authors, mostly from the political economy of media, whom I have taken in by osmosis and wish I'd had more exposure to, most of which I will use as sticks to beat myself with and probably won't read in time:
Gitlin
Chomsky
Bagdikian
McChesney
Goffman, frames, 1974
James Fallows, Breaking the News (ok, did this one cover to cover at Hampy)

* * *

So. Weird little list, huh? You'll notice there's not too much in there on video games, considering everyone thinks that's what I do. Conspicuously absent are anything by Jesper Juul, Espen Aarseth, Gonzalo Frasca, and Salen and Zimmerman's textbooks. Very little new game theory here, though I do think the industry-developed design tools pieces (FADT and MDA) will wow 'em.

Also, I expect I'll make significantly less use of the New Literacies canon than one might expect considering I spend a lot of mental time in that camp. I guess lately I've been moving away from their work... I've had a hard time recreating the linguistics argument which can be used to defend their claim that just about everything is "reading" until I recently went back to Jim Gee's Situated Language and Learning. Actually, that argument may not be my strength... I read the Labov piece defending Black English ("ebonics") in college, but haven't personally done a lot of the reading in sociolinguistics, just taken it in by proxy, so I feel like I mostly have secondhand texts to cite, and I don't always feel comfortable with that when outside of the protection of the lairs of my advisor and his colleagues and their conferences.

To some extent the unevenness of the list is due to the nature of the questions. It seems pretty certain I'll get a question about causality of social change and/or media effects; the books here make a lot of sense from that angle.

Some of these books bear more weight than others. The Deibert book is going to be absolutely indispensable, as are Diffusion of Innovations, Todd Gitlin's piece on the telegraph, and Science in Action I spent maybe equal time on that Latour book and on Henry Jenkins's book a few summers back, and Henry's was more revolutionary in my own thought, but again, it doesn't feel likely I'll be venturing into his arguments unless they throw me something very specifically on demographics and I decide to go off on the nerd rant. Which would be nice, actually, as that's what I WANT to be thinking about right now and don't have time to because of the studying. But the nerd rant is ultimately subcultural and thus peripheral to issues of economic equality and access which are more important to the people reading the paper... plus it's still sort of embryonic... so I should gloss it if anything. It does give me a chance to flaunt my Frankfurt School, though.

Overall, the list is heavy on recent theory, if any... highly phenomenological and specific research... some exceedingly entry-level cognition review... and a few popular texts for good measure.

*stops cold* Good lord... maybe that's all there IS to my "field."

Believe me, though... put all this together and it all makes sense to me. Want me to defend it? I can do it... I've been training... c'mon, lemme show you! Try to poke holes in my argument! *hardens abs and prepares to block*

* * *

Why don't we have a reading list? Because there is no reading list. Not in the sense of my game design professor who'd defend his sneak-attack syllabus ("OK read 180-page design doc and play Deus Ex for class tomorrow ready go! oh, it's midterms week?... um... booyah!") by saying there was no syllabus for game design yet. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, there is no Reading List. And more concretely, any reading list generated by my department could choke a sperm whale.(1) Here's a brief sampling of what the faculty in our program report about their intellectual interests and histories:

Mind you, this is the faculty in OUR PROGRAM -- as in the Communications, Computing, and Tech program OF the Math, Science, and Tech DEPARTMENT. There are separate programs for languages, international studies, religion, English literature, cognition, and mathematics. (The college was ruthlessly gerrymandered by some previous president looking to make his mark on the place. I was so unsettled by the idea of studying in a department with Mathematics in the title that I nearly didn't enroll. There really isn't another group of people I can imagine who would be less well-suited to close quarters with mathematicians. We're really only related to them in terms of funding allotments.)

And of course our department is in the Teachers College OF Columbia University, through whose halls we are permitted to run about as essentially intellectually undiapered as I was at Hampshire College, bare bottoms winking in the sunshine.(2)

God bless our faculty. As a group, they're exemplars of self-directed education. They encourage us to be the same -- their "required course list" is really just a few suggestions for those who don't get it yet; and seriously, just check out what Robbie has to say about being a doc student. They've got the theory AND empirical data to explain why having us do this is the best preparation for the work we'll need to do as scholars and practitioners. The terrifying burden of bringing all their ideas together is pretty much on us as students; still, I wouldn't trade 'em for anything.

* * *

I've totally found the perfect room to work in, too. It reminds me so much of a hotel suite that when a truck came rushing by just now on Amsterdam it took me a moment to remember where I was, that there wasn't a distant freeway out there with undeveloped fields and parking lots for buffer. Someday it'll really sink in that I work better the more sterile a space I'm in, and I'll stop cluttering my desks with pictures and toys and piles of crap.


(1) Those are the ones with the teeth, not the baleen ones.
(2) Thank you, Roald Dahl!

Posted by me at 2:45 AM | Comments (1)