I started out being unsure of what to edit, but by interest and research through certain wikis, I found that there was an interesting topic with barely any information at all. It was a page on a professional skateboarder named Eric Koston. So, I went ahead and beefed up the page from being merely a few sentences of facts to what it is now. Check it out if you like:
I tried to look for Wikipedia pages I thought I might be able to make a significant change to, but it wasn’t until I looked at the page for Twelfth Night that I actually found something. Maybe it’s just because I’m writing my thesis (due… soon) on that play, as well as on The Merchant of Venice and on As You Like It that I automatically assume that Wikipedia’s knowledge will be boundless. Oh well.
So I made some changes to tidy up, then added a MUCH-NEEDED critical response section, which is where I tried to enter an unbiased and abbreviated version of my chapter on Viola. We’ll see if it sticks.
Jessie sent me this link to a browser game called Ikariam, wherein you take charge of an ancient Greek town and (very) gradually build it into an empire, Civilization-style. It’s still in the beta stage, but I’ve been playing it literally non-stop for the past four days, and when I say literally, I mean that one primary feature of the game is that it proceeds in real time, so that you never technically stop playing unless you deactivate your account. Researching something like “wine press” or “expansion” takes up to two days, but the research continues even if you leave your computer (which, thankfully, I do occasionally). Sending supply ships to other cities in your empire also takes minutes or even hours, depending on how far away they are. I have yet to engage in warfare in the game, but apparently it functions the same way. This seems to be a new genre of sorts, one that is hard to define. It’s a strategy game that takes place in real time, but it’s not an “RTS” (real-time strategy) in the sense that we have come to define the term.
Oh, and your economic and military competitors are other players with accounts in the game. You can “engage in diplomacy” (i.e. communicate) with them via the game’s messaging system to request certain types of goods, declare war, or just chat. The rhetoric of the game seems to emphasize commerce and trade so far, but I’m waiting for that to change as soon as I progress further. The fact that Ikariam is a browser game seems to encourage casual play.
Stepping back from the lovely animation and the overtly Canadian narrator (yay Canada), this is a really interesting little piece. I think its message can be applied to the communities forged within the media spaces we’ve been studying in this course. Fortunately, a third party is not a rare commodity on the intarwebz. It manages to be self-policing… in a dysfunctional kind of way.
[youtube eGo0UWNe2nU]
Since Thompson is a musician and I love editing, we decided to make a music video about RockBand. We both play guitar and find that there is absolutely no correlation between playing real guitar and playing RockBand, and that’s pretty much the theme of our song. Hope you enjoy it!
[youtube ZHc12QfC-a8]
So over break my friend introduced me to iGoogle. I didn’t really know what it was until I started using it, and now I’m spreading the word to anyone else who doesn’t know.
For the few of you who don’t, iGoogle is Google’s new way of slowly controlling your life. But this homepage comes with neat graphics and junk! For example, I chose a theme called “Tea Time” which shows a little Asian fox at the top of my page doing various activities depending on the time of day (at this very moment he is sitting on the dock watching paper boats in the pond). I have my page filled with stuff like my horoscope, daily reminders, a random art slideshow customized to use Google search to find images of the ocean, daily fitness tips, random “how to’s”, the weather, and most importantly, my top visited sites.
At this point I always have iGoogle open in one tab and navigate my entire internet life from there. I’ve become completely addicted to it. It’s sort of like using a social networking site in that I can personalize it to the extreme, but without having to deal with other people sending me invites to useless groups and things like that. Just when I thought that I couldn’t possibly streamline my internet experience any more, something like iGoogle appears and allows me to multi-task in such a way that makes my head spin.
Curious? Go ahead and check it out!
i wanted to write on wikipedia about a poet that i really like. the problem is that he has the same name as a chilean soccer player. so what do i do in that case? do i edit the soccer player site, adding that there is another person with that name? or should i make a completely new entry?
Exhibit A proving my own techno-geekery: I saw a Twitter fed through a friend’s Facebook status update that highlighted a website of a mashup artist, DJ Earworm, which I then proceeded to bookmark via del.icio.us (which then feeds to my own Facebook page) and am now blogging about it. So while that proves that I’m a geek, it might also prove that I’m musically out-of-touch, as DJ Earworm seems to be well-known in mashup circles (although not on Wikipedia!).
Definitely check out his site if you have a taste for mashups & haven’t heard his work – my favorites are “Together as One” (Beatles + U2 + more), “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven” (Dolly Parton covering Led Zepplin with a bunch of other stuff from Queen to Pat Benatar), and “Over the Confluence of Giants” (tons of sources). More conceptually, “United State of Pop” took the Billboard Top 25 songs for 2007 and remixed them all – the mashup has become a hit on its own, hitting radio top 100 lists for March! I’ve embedded “Together as One” for your listening pleasure:
[audio:http://www.djearworm.lunarpages.com/together_as_one.mp3]Update: inspired by all of your Wikipedia-ing, I’ve created a page for DJ Earworm. Let’s see how it’s received…
I edited the wikipedia page on the “Spanish” Influenza of 1918, since that’s what I wrote my senior history thesis on. I wrote the section labeled “Cultural Impact” and added it Saturday, and it hasn’t been edited or removed yet.
A couple groups have tries to record footage to dvd, only to find that the disc seems to be empty. Before you toss it, try finalizing the disc back in the machine you recorded from.
Once it is on the dvd, you will need to use MPEG Streamclip, SnapZ or Hanbrake to extract the footage and use it in iMovie or Final Cut.
In one of their best (in my opinion) segments to date, The Daily Show w/Jon Stewart looks at Al-Jazeera English and tries to give them a helping hand by “americanizing” the broadcast by adding graphics, banter and new music.
A Federal court in Boston just ruled that it is not a violation of copyright law to make available copyrighted works.