Category: General Geekery

another last supper

In response to Steve’s post, here is another Last Supper image, constructed as a part of the marketing for the current season of Battlestar Galactica. The fun thing is that it plays off the same kind of world of fandom that sparked the creation of the Star Wars Last Supper image, but it’s from the show’s creators and has its own symbology. Very cool. This site gives hints for interpreting the image… Only one true spoiler here, though I doubt that many of you are fans.

Creepy much?

After our “Twitter” discussion, I remembered an interesting iPhone app (available only to those who hack their phones) called Twinkle. It adds the ability to Geo-locate your twitter feed via the phone’s built-in cell tower triangulation GPS system, and the ability to map people whose Twitter feeds indicate they are nearby. I don’t want to call this creepy…but i just did.

Article Link

Bulwer-Lytton deadline is today!

That’s right, everyone! The deadline for the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is TODAY, TAX DAY, April 15! I highly recommend that everyone in this class submit entries. I’ve been stockpiling sentences for about a year and a half, and I just submitted them. Then I’m going to write more.

We took on Wikipedia aficionados and won… How about Bulwer-Lytton?

Edit:
Per request from Professor Mittel, here are my favorite (the most awful?) of my entries…

  • The moral of this story, children, which you must keep in mind whilst you read, is that the Bear ought not have stolen the Honey from the Bees, but also that the Bees ought not have pursued their vendetta against the Bear, and that they ought to particularly have paid attention to the Finger-Post, and that the whole situation might have been greatly improved had not all Participants been the direst sort of Heathens.
  • Wandering amid the headstones of her departed ancestors, Delia pulled her gossamer cape closer about her fair young shoulders, wondering if the handsome Lord Tripp would note her décolletage with favor once she made it to the ball—assuming she managed to avoid the vampire (who had once been her uncle Hubert) lurking beside the mausoleum, of course.
  • The woman sat there, sipping water as though she hadn’t a nerve in her, though Troy knew she had, because she was there to see him about the intense pain in her upper back.

blog your novel

I have long harbored a dream that I would write the great American novel… or “young adult” fantasy novel… or surreal cyberpunk mind-bender… I’ve always wanted to get one of the many stories in my head out in a complete text. My thesis, in its glorious quantity, has quite sadly given me hope.

Some people are exploring the artistic and aesthetic options provided by the web as they output their creativity. Writing novels in diary form is reasonably fashionable, and for good reason: they provide ready access to the character’s mind as he or she divulges his or her private thoughts, and the reader doesn’t have to deal with the intercession of some snarky narrator. One of the more notable blog-novels is Tropic/of/Cubicle by Roderick Maclean. I’ve read bits and pieces of it, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Ever heard of Na-No-Wri-Mo? It’s moved on to the blogs, too… somewhere. Sadly can’t find a good link for you all.

There’s also, of course, my original exposure to a version of this concept (and you’ve probably all seen these a million times because they are, as Anonymous says, “old as the internets”): The Very Secret Diaries, which you may read here or in their original milieu here.

Edit:
Blog Your Novel Month

Import Video Clips into iMovie

Someone just let me know that it took 4 hours to import their footage into iMovie. iMovie wants to convert any video it uses into raw dv, and this process can take a huge amount of time.

But there is a way to get around it.

  1. Create an iMovie project, if you haven’t already.
  2. Close iMovie.
  3. Right-click on the project file and choose “Show Package Contents.”
  4. Browse to the Media folder.
  5. Place your clips in the folder.
  6. Open your iMovie project.
  7. Click the VIEW TRASH button.
  8. Drag your clips to the clips pane.

I’ve been able to do this with .mov, .dv and .mpg.

Ikariam game

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.

adventure!

I referenced old-fashioned text adventures in my response post, but I’d just like to point everyone a little more explicitly to Scott Adams’ adventures, available, as far as I know, free for download at his website and several other places. It makes me a pretty hopeless geek to know the name Scott Adams as related to this archaic gaming style, but they’re actually surprisingly fun, and definitely challenging. I’m dreadful at them, so I only play with them once every three years or so, but just as the popularity of weird things like radio drama is on the rise, so is the popularity of the text adventure (also known as interactive fiction) as an art form and story-telling device. Not really unlike Choose Your Own Adventure, but with some more possibilities, and less dying… usually. Not with this game, though.

Ownership and video games

http://games.asobrain.com/index.html

Hi everyone. The above links to a site with a few java games (which, I’m sorry to say, require free registration), most of which I have never heard of or seen. One of the games, however, is entitled “Xplorers” and to those in the know is a blatant copy of the German board game Settlers of Catan designed by Klaus Teuber. There’s even a disclaimer at the bottom of the site that states that “Xplorers” has “no connection” with “The Settlers of Catan” or Klaus Teuber.

This obviously ties in with our discussion in previous classes of “legitimate” authorship and ownership, and highlights the fact that video games are subject to the same kinds of issues that surround digital music and video remixing. In this particular case, at least, AsoBrain (the site that runs the game) does not seem to be obviously making any kind of profit off of The Settlers of Catan, and may in fact be stimulating increased interest in the board game. In terms of connectivity, I can now play Settlers of Catan (which is a wonderful game if you ever have the chance to check it out) with my little brothers back home…and I’ll probably end up getting them expansions or variations of the game for birthday or Christmas presents.

That having been said, are there any ethical issues that arise in making “clones” of video games (without modifying or critiquing those games)? Does anyone else know of specific instances where there might be “questionable” authorship and ownership of video games?

I’m on YouTube!

So a year and a half ago I was only using my computer for email, AIM, and TextTwist. My sister actually made a Facebook account for me and then gave me the password. Now I’m blogging with you guys, running Firefox, and uploading video to stream on the net. Woohoo! What a rush.

YouTube was surprisingly easy to join and use. Easier than, say… navigating a Mac! (I run Windows… and I LIKE IT! You can all jump out of the shadows and eat me now.)

I only have one video up so far, my final project for Sight and Sound I, and I don’t know if it counts as remix culture. It certainly borrows from other media and even has something to say about it, and I’d like to know what you guys think.

Is it sad that I take extremely nerdy glee from being able to embed videos in this blog thing?

[youtube 37pi39U2NEk]

On the subject of robots…

Alright, so my titles need work. But this is a webcomic that I read, which I’m pretty sure no one else does. Thus I shall enlighten you as you have enlightened me. Most of them are single panels or short multipanel comics, with continuity stemming from the Transformers franchise. It’s a commentary on the whole picture, from Generation 1 to the fandom to mistakes Michael Bay hasn’t even made yet. The latest edition is of the latter category, and it updates every Monday.

Matt Moylan’s Lilformers

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series

Yeah. I posted it. I capitalized and punctuated correctly. I have two decks stashed away in my desk somewhere if anyone else on the planet still knows how to play.

Moving on.

This is definitely more of a traditional remix than Haloid. It’s a series of episodes- each cut down to about ten minutes and completely dubbed over by one very talented man- and it’s absolutely hilarious. Whether you love, hate, or have never heard of children’s card games, this will probably make you laugh. Littlekuriboh got millions of hits per episode before having his videos taken down and being repeatedly banned from YouTube. I believe his episodes fall under fair use- but you can judge for yourselves. Now he has his own website.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series

And if you liked the funny subtitles of the Beni Lava video, he does something similar for the opening and ending themes of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Other Abridged Movie right here! Sadly, it will probably be ripped off of YouTube once ‘they’ find it.

[youtube pBhUWjQAJYE]

Haloid

This is possibly the best example of borrowed media I have ever witnessed. It was choreographed and animated by one guy. If the characters were not borrowed, it would be original media, and impressive original media at that. The lengths fans go to appreciate their favorite games for free is astounding, though I’m sure this produced a different kind of return. It is, of course, available for download in ridiculous quality. Fanservice alert: If you are deeply attached to the manly mystique of Master Chief, you may want to keep a defibrillator handy.

[youtube K9sYixr2miY]

Read this…it’s free!

Hi guys,

Check out this article at Wired.com about the economics of free commodities in the digital age. It’s really spectacular. Essentially, it explores what will happen once the price of processor power, memory, and bandwidth reaches zero (or so small as to approximate zero) for the single user, which seems to be happening. The article uses a great metaphor, that of electricity being “too cheap to meter,” which at one point many believed would happen. The result…an end to water shortages, electric cars, virtually no globe-warming emissions, etc. Perhaps a bit of a Utopian vision, but it’s hard to argue that the world isn’t headed for some sort of economic breakthrough of one kind or another.