Collective Writing

While we are on the topic of collective writing of the Wiki–especially in light of the recent post about the blog novels, there will be an article coming out in “The Campus” this week about “Wu Ming,” a group of five writers who collaborate on novels. And in part of a “copyleft” movement, you can read their novel “54” online for free.
So check out the article this Thursday or you can wander around their site

Deviant Art in all of its glory.

So, it dawned on me that I haven’t read any posts commenting on Deviant Art: the online artist domain where artists of all types can post their work.

www.deviantart.com

The great thing about DA is that it doesn’t really matter what sort of artist you are. Writers, painters, poets, and even filmmakers are all welcome to upload high quality versions of their work. Whats more, DA also has a system where you can sell prints of your work.

Pertaining to something we covered in class about copyrights, DA has a really neat system to make sure your copyrights over your work are kept and held secure.

I highly advise anyone interest in art of any kind check it out. It’s a great resource and there are many a talented person on there.

My site is http://ryougasaotome.deviantart.com/

Check it out. =)

-E.

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.

korean Myspace

I thought this was an interesting (and brief) article about the launching of a Myspace page for Koreans. The process of “localizing” media is interesting because so many popular items on the internet can be enjoyed by those who don’t speak English (or whatever the media’s original language). I have heard that the “History of Dance” youtube video (the most popular youtube video of all time) is so popular, in part because there is no language barrier. Additionally, i know that a large portion of World of Warcraft players are Korean, and the article here describes South Korea as “one of the world’s most wired and tech savvy nations”

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Korea.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

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

The Man who wrote 200,000 books!

Hey Guys, This is a really cool article from NYT. Phillip M. Parker uses a team of computers to compile public information from the net. He then frames all the pertinent stuff into books for consumers. This seems to be one of the more important changes to the way that we link to together information and is certainly a function of the “wealth of networks.”

“Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was ‘deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated’.”

Wikipeding on Facebook Chat II

So I put the changes back in. I had an incredibly frustrating time getting the citations to look right and the second one still isn’t right, but Ross Dining is closing for lunch in fourteen minutes. Could someone try to fix the second citation? I’m really curious to know what I’m doing wrong.

Let’s see what happens now…

Update: Citation formatting was fixed.

George and Kyle’s Game Analysis

So Kyle and I got a little caught up in what we where doing and we made this…. 10 minutes of video game analysis.

I cut down what we had to around five minutes and this version is what we want to show in class tomorrow (or I guess today by now). Watch the ten minute version only if you have way too much time on your hands.

[youtube eHgZujoOgR4]

Enjoy.

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.

Flash Help

I’ve posted the step-by-step instructions for creating the Flash movie on the Flash Interface page. In addition, there are instructions on how to publish the flash object in a webpage.

Please feel free to bounce ideas for your project off of me! There is more than one way to accomplish the same goal, and I can show you which one will give you the least amount of headaches.

Polarization of Networks

A more non-political example of Benkler’s argument concerning the audience-orientation of certain media is this Levi’s jeans commerical that alludes to a homosexual couple. From my experience, this commercial was only shown on the more liberal, youth-orientated stations such as Bravo and MTV. I don’t know if most of you have seen this, but I thought I would post it anways.

[youtube bB90Vkyqrts]