Media Technology 2008

AMAZING animation that challenges media and also is part of Creative Commons.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Cheers.

After playing way too much Oblivion, someone expected this thing to have a health bar. But it didn’t. Because it’s a real spider.

Also, motiborders are fail.

Over breakfast this morning I read an article in “The Globe” that brought up some interesting issues about the fracturing of personal identity due to our large amounts of online personas–from simple usernames to blog identities to even who we are (albeit “anonymously”) on Midd Confessional.

Set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Someone may have posted this earlier in the semester, but relevance demands another look. Expresses some of the angst I think we are all feeling about Facebook.

In light of our discussion of SNSs…

see more crazy cat pics

See also Opacity Cats and Italics Cats.

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

Hey everyone, here‘s a link to a collection of fan-produced remix videos that obsessively record every utterance of a certain word or phrase in a certain movie or TV show. The most recent one of these that got widespread linkage was a video of Shia LeBeouf saying “No” about a hundred times. Enjoy.

I know people say that email and the internet are driving people apart. Well Conan O’Brian thinks differently…

No, this has little to no critical value for us, except that we might argue that YouTube gives us a great way to try to see our own faces in other people.

Anyway, I think this has been roving the vast series of tubes for a while, but I just found it this morning.

“I can’t walk, but I can belly laugh okay.”

So here’s something I’ve wanted to post since class this afternoon.

It’s a site called Encyclopedia Dramatica.

It’s formatted exactly like Wikipedia except that it specializes in internet memes and the like. Go here if you want to find out the real meaning of “shoop da whoop” or “over 9000!!”

I thought this was really interesting since the site has a much more relaxed feel to it than wikipedia, so it offers a different perspective about how a wiki can be used.

Oh, yeah, and I should warn you that some “mature” stuff is right on the front page. You’ve been warned.

And no, this is not a rick roll. 🙂

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.

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!

iGoogle

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:

Update: inspired by all of your Wikipedia-ing, I’ve created a page for DJ Earworm. Let’s see how it’s received…

Here’s a link to an interesting clip of renowned tech guru\analyst Walt Mossberg discussing how the US Government needs to get involved in bringing high-speed internet to the masses, as well as his thoughts on the future of internet multimedia…

Video Link

From the episode where he gets bogus negotiation tactics from Wikipedia…

Hilarious. I think this means the Wii interface works just fine…

Here’s the online pictionary game I mentioned in class: isketch. My top score is something like 107.

As I said, the art you see varies from very iconic to very realistic. Half the fun is puzzling out why someone drew what they did and (hopefully) how you figured out what they meant.

I spotted this while I was doing a brief morning browse through Facebook and I had to stop and laugh… even though I hadn’t yet had a needed dose of caffeine. I haven’t followed the link because I want to be able to continue pretending that the site you come to tries to sell you discount pharmaceuticals from El Salvador, and possibly strange, illegal aphrodisiacs poached from the wilds of Southeast Asia. Even the possibility of some kind of “love doctor” making money through snail-mail kits and tips is amusing, I suppose.

Anyway, it goes to show the breadth of small-time con artists trying to make a buck who are discovering the relatively cheap and presumably very effective form ad advertising available on everyone’s favorite social networking tool. Watch where you click.

It doesn’t strictly relate to new media, but I think there’s a connection between suspicion of computer voting and anxiety over internet communication\media. Plus, its hilarious.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Hi guys,

I don’t know how many of you have seen this video already, but I figured I’d post it since it offers a perspective on ownership, copyright, and videogames…from 1992. Yes, it shows. Painfully so.

Don’t Copy That Floppy was part of a campaign by the Software Publisher’s Association to discourage people from copying games, and it features the rap stylings of M.E. Hart as “MC Double Def DP” (the DP is for “disk protector”). It’s kind of interesting to be reminded that these issues have been around for quite a while and not just since the widespread adoption of the internet.

Enjoy.

Music isn’t just in our hearts, its docked to the ISS…

iPod Flies High

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.

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?

Another Trailer remix…

Its worth reading the comments on this. Here’s a gem posted 2 days ago: “wtf is wrong with this trailer. jeez ive only started the book and i know this is nothing like it.”