harder than it looks

so many things in life turn out to be harder than they seem to be--or harder that one expects them to be. being an adult for instance. or writing. or maintaining a blog. all tough stuff at times. easy to slip out of the habit with such things.
like this blog. weeks pass and i don't have much to say here because i'm busy saying it in other places. teaching, doing service work, it all takes something out of you.
as does the turn to darker, colder, less green weather. lately i've been listening to rilo kiley a lot. there is a great lyric in one song about the "slow fade of love," which goes something like--
"He said the slow fade of love
And its mist might choke you
It's my gradual descent
Into a life I never meant
It's the slow fade of love"
sometimes i think that is what adulthood is all about--a gradual descent into a life i never meant. usually i like being a grown up. but every so often i miss being, oh, say, 27. when i was 27 i had wild hair and loud clothes and fewer responsibilities. and i lived by the ocean and drove my podcar. i was much more interesting then. now i live in the midwest, walk dogs, drive a different car and wear clothes in neutral shades to go with my neutral hair. how i miss my old world sometimes...with all its pain and imperfection.

yet, what else goes on these days? i am in TV-love with Veronica Mars--what an amazing show. wedding planning proceeds at a steady pace. i'm sure we'll figure out the key details eventually. i've been buried in grading for weeks now--not fun. students should learn how to use commas one of these days.

and still...the book. i had a good writing day yesterday. hopefully will have another one today. am getting ready to send stuff to publishers (very intimidating).

what it takes to blog

Lately I've been wondering about what is required to produce a good blog. There is a certain labor--a willingness to spend time in the trenches reading and responding and writing. Javi clearly does this and his blog has launched a fan base. Colin's blog is intricate and clearly in conversation with other bloggers--academic computing types, photography people, arbor-bloggers.
And yet, I wonder where I might find the time to develop good blog habits. It reminds me a bit of when I used to read Usenet some time (was that really 11 years ago?) ago. If one read a group regularly then it was easy to keep up and follow the conversations there. But if one even let a day slip by it would take much, much longer to find the way back.
So is there such a way to be a casual blogger? A reader and writer who sneaks in and out of the blog slipstream at will?

and you thought this would be interesting, right?

all my deepest darkest secrets were revealed long ago. If I were to reveal them anew I'm not certain I'd chose to do so online. Instead I meant this blog to be a place for mostly rambling prewriting. It is a trial-and-error effort.
Just like actual writing.

Yet I find my own personal stuff--the people I care about, places I love, images I want to retain--imprint themselves upon my writing even if I intend it to be academic. Why is this? Why can't I separate the personal from the professional or are those distinctions blurry for a reason?

I think it is interesting that we go along looking for something interesting in other people's lives, no matter how boring they are.

better photos

of the ring and the ring-giver...

now it's real

i know it is blurry but this is my left hand wearing the new ring that Stephen gave me. It comes with a long-term commitment and some kind of ceremony but I am not too worried about those details just yet.
yay for me and Jasper and Winston! Who thought someone would want to marry us, what with the bathroom accidents, barking and constant worrying?!

showtunes = torture

it turns out that traveling is generally more time-consuming and interesting than blogging. perhaps it has an intangible instant gratification that writing a really good post lacks?
July turned into a busy month. Lots of writing, seeing people, crashing a car, getting engaged, etc. i'm hoping that august proves to be less eventful. although next week i have to drive to erie to have dinner with my dad and "hawaiian brother" (only i would go to erie to eat with someone who lives in hawaii.
che sera sera.
or whatever.

am still writing on mobility and gaming and also working on the 70s game console chapter. The esteemed Anne F. thinks I should be sending it to publishers so that is another goal for this month.

Stephen just killed a bat that got into the house, was terrorized by the cats and injured by one cat. i contributed by acting like a lunatic and turning on all the lights and the showtunes digital radio channel from cable.
i mean, if andrew lloyd webber can't disrupt sonar, who can?

left coast

i've been working on my handheld gaming article and also on the 1970s home gaming book chapter.
i've also been getting lots of sun, checking out new places (or new to me) and seeing old friends here in laguna beach and other southern california places.
i'm also trying to get things started for my fall courses and for videogame class too. i may try and get an interview at Blizzard Entertainment, the world of warcraft people. i figure they owe me one boyfriend at the very least.
i think that's about it for this morning. except maybe for a photograph.

back on track

so the blog here has been quiet for good reasons. mainly it is because i moved and, in packing up my worldy belongings (again) and that makes me cry a lot and get completely overwhelmed.
this kind of thing rarely leads to solid writing or research. now i'm enjoying my reward and, as luck would have it, the writing is happening again. i think it is one of those things you have to be careful with and take care of. It is so easy to stop writing and, once stopped, painful to start again. but now, i'm in california--laguna beach--and writing again while looking at the ocean and being in the sun and being near friends. it is amazing how huge a difference those things make.
i began to think that perhaps the reason i find ann arbor unsatisfying is because i don't find it intellectually stimulating. maybe i am not in the right loop there. but i miss art and popular culture and good local radio. and a world that is bright and moving at a brisk clip.
and yes, i feel that energy in orange county and i feel faster, lighter. i breathe more deeply despite the haze and smog. i smell the ocean. and know i'm home.
or in the place that most feels like home even though i don't live here anymore.

and the book progresses at its own pace. but at least its back on pace.

blog politics

I heard a story last night on radio (The World) about censorship and blogs. I guess MSN's blogging service, MSN Space, is complying with Chinese government censors to block blog posts with titles that contain words like freedom, democracy, Taiwan, Falun Gong, etc. Boing Boing has a good article on it (can't believe that Boing Boing is still around!). I think one of the more frightening aspects of this trend, in which corporations like Microsoft and Google cooperate with local governments, is how local "community standards" are impacting the globally published writing that happens on blogs. Who sets those standards? Governments? Does it matter when the government setting the standard is not democratic and its constituents don't have a voice in setting those standards? Besides that, how "smart" is the software that monitors blog posts? Maybe our panoptics are a bit off?

My best flowery windowbox

My best flowery windowbox,
originally uploaded by scmy.

Container garden

Container garden,
originally uploaded by scmy.

Side Garden

Side Garden,
originally uploaded by scmy.

hummingbirds

Did you know that a hummingbird consumes half its weight in nectar every day? I learned this when I got my feeder yesterday. It seems that the garden I have been working so hard on lately actually attracts hummingbirds. This is more by chance than by design. I'm waging a war against weeds too in the most organic way possible, but that's another story involving too much shade, burrs and mosquitos. Here are some photos from the garden--or links to a Flick'r album of photographs of my garden.

Writing went well yesterday--I got a lot done. We took dinner over to Jennifer's and Brian's place and Stephen got to meet the baby. Today I meet with the college computer folks and I hope to resolve yet more laptop problems. Then more writing and trying to keep up the pace.

production, distribution, exhibition

I'm thinking this might be one way of organizing the Digital Theory course. I already have 8 major points of significance in new media--stuff like...
• Do it yourself, document yourself
• Wireless/WiFi
• Surveillance
• Distance/proximity
• Ubiquitous computing
• Gaming
• Cryptography
• Audio/Video & peer-to-peer

But if I add in a layer that organizes things around production, distribution, exhibition I might be able to emphasize continuities with traditional media industries as well as point out the new of new media. I was thinking the other day that it might be fun to write something called "When New Media was New"--a play upon Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New.
I went to Erie this weekend. Visited with Dad and Grandma. She's pretty active for a 91 year old. Had a few moments while driving where I wished I was writing b/c such good stuff pops into the brain while in the car. Erie is the same as always--I saw some kind of fire in the woods on Saturday night and that was interesting. I brought back a big chunk of the birch tree from my father's front yard. It fell down in a storm a few months ago. As a child I used to sit up in this tree, which had three trunks. Now I have all that is left of one of the trunks. I hope to seal it and make a stool from it.
This week the goal is to make some serious progress on my chapter and also move forward with my Unlimited Minutes essay. That one is due to the anthology editors in July. Today is a writing/research day.

miracle of life (high speed version)

So I doubt I'm going to get much writing done tomorrow--Jennifer had her baby tonight! And let me just say it loud: My friend is Brave, Strong and Amazing! I saw her go through contractions for a couple of hours and she barely batted an eyelash.
I got the call to come over and stay with Auggie (her three year old) at 4:30. I got here a bit after 5pm. Jennifer and Brian left for the hospital shortly after 7pm. Brian called at 9:41 to say the baby was born at 9:25 pm. It's now 12:30 am and I'm expecting to hear more soon (like a name, birth weight, when they'll be home, etc.). But it is exciting. Steve came with me for the first several hours. We even left for about 45 minutes to get dinner across the street! But Jennifer was cool as a cucumber through it all. I'm guessing most women would have been at the hospital hours earlier.
so there it is. and it has nothing to do with the book.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Zoning Out

Okay, this post is going to start off-topic just a little bit. I've been thinking about "zoning out" a lot lately. Stick with me here. What I mean is that I'm interesting in how willful suspension of disbelief, in tandem with a willful suspension of critical/intellectual engagement actually produces a kind of media knowledge.
Say you go see a movie that is more of a ride than a film (see Bukatman, Matters of Gravity). The narrative and plot are virtually non-existent. Yet the experience is thrilling on a sensory and bodily level (see Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts). Isn't this a kind of knowledge? Moreover, this knowledge is specifically related to visuality and to experiences that address the subject as a body that sees, hears, feels.

It's traditional in critical humanities work for zoning out and for texts that call for it (i.e., The entire Matrix cycle of films, video games, certain genres that rely heavily on special effects and huge leaps of logic, experiences with a specific and diffuse notion of the gaze) to be looked down upon or disregarded as undeserving of critical inquiry. Yet perhaps this new aesthetic and specific reception experience requires a more kinesthetic approach? But I'd also argue that zoning out is linked to zoning in--that such an engagement enables one to develop a critical perspective linked to bodily experiences and sensations. And perhaps this more "base" is necessary for understanding these sorts of media experiences? I'm thinking here of Krauss and Bois' arguments about formlessness and the need to understand the horizontal aspects of modernist art history. Perhaps zoning out resituates how we zone back in?

Tunneling In

So I'm changing my work schedule into one hour work blocks rather than trying to work for three hours at a stretch. Hopefully I'll be more successful at this schedule than the last one.
As I do this I'm reminded of that horrible movie "The Core," which Steve and I watched back in February. In it, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart and a bunch of disposable science-types (Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo) get in this frighteningly phallic ship to tunnel to the Earth's core in order to reset the planet's orbit (or some other equally improbable task). Of course on the way to the Core, the phallic ship encounters problems and needs repairs and disposable scientists die left and right. Then Hilary and Aaron save the planet and (aww) find true love. It's all very ridiculous in a blunt metaphor kind of way. If one goes in deeper and deeper, one gets to the middle of things and finds what is needed. Either that or some disturbing ride inside a giant penis that is penetrating the planet, layer by layer. South Park used the plot in the episode where Cartman saves the town from hippies. Same ship and everything.

So maybe writing is kind of like the movie? I just need to dig in, full tilt and not worry about huge gaps in logic or structure, just keep digging, at least for the time being.
Today's dig is another archaelogical expedition--more on TV and early game systems. Very 1970s.

M is for Meltdown

Yesterday I realized that it is possibly, perhaps even likely, that people might read this blog. Frankly it kind of freaked me out. With the exception of Moose-L (which has absolutely nothing to do with mooses, except that Tom is from New Hampshire), I am the kind of Internet user who rarely speaks up and makes her presence known. On Moose I am a bit of a loudmouth on occasion, rambling on about my personal and professional dramas. Then again, I know many of the moosers in person and have for some time. Even though I don't read everything posted and haven't for some time, even seeing a moose message is a welcome distraction from the rest of my work-related email. But I digress.
I almost panicked and took the blog down but then I forced myself not to do it. I mean, if the whole point is to de-lurk, don't I have to give that a bit of a shot? So if you are reading this I hope you aren't terribly bored or wondering where the funny is. It comes and goes.

Back to the M is for Meltdown bit. I am beginning to wonder if there is some deeper meaning to the portentious technological failures is my life. I seem to have a knack for destroying laptops, usually at times when having a laptop would be handy, useful or downright key to my productivity. And since I'm more of a girl than a geek I tend to only own one computer at a time, not having a working laptop poses problems. Two weeks ago I was typing away at a list of places I want to make sure I see when I am in southern California (like the Margaret Herrick, La Sirena, Pulp, Larchmont Beauty Center, MOCA, etc.). I decided I would go work in my office and be a productive person so I put the computer to sleep (as is my custom). As soon as I did I noticed a distinctive burnt metal smell and extra-hot laptop sensation. Of course when I tried to restart it, nothing happened, except me swearing and panicking a bit. Then I took the computer to the folks as LS&A IT, who immediately commented on its distinct aroma. They were actually quite great about fixing it, especially after the staff from CRLT called them on my behalf because the Teaching with Technology Institute was starting and I had a) no computer b) no access to any of my files b/c they were not backed up. Before you go clicking your tongue at my foolish lack of backups, please note that almost all my files had been moved to a folder named "May 2005 backup" and I was planning to pick up my new flash drive that had just arrived so I could perform the aforementioned backup.
Anyway, the IT people gave me an ibook loaner, which I had for most of the Teaching with Tech Institute thing. Then I got it back on the second to last day and I had to transfer everything as best I could from one laptop to another. Blah. This is hard to do when you only have access to one laptop at a time and when you have been importing movie files for several days in a row.

When I got my computer back it was like it had undergone some kind of computer sex change. Or personality change. Or something. It has a new case, new screen, new processor. The only way I could tell that it was my computer was that it had my greasy, food-trapped-underneath-in-unseemly-way keyboard. Even my kickass Rockstar sparkly sticker is gone. But at least it still runs and it is probably running better and happier now than it was before. I'm trying to be more careful with it and I'm going to order one of those venting laptop trays for it.
So why do I suspect that I suffer a Curse of Ill-Timed Laptop Death? My first laptop was a nifty and unexpected Powerbook Duo that Tom rescued for me and gave to me for Christmas sometime in the late 1990s. About a week after he gave it to me I tripped and stepped on its screen while grading finals.
Then there is my iBook, a lovely orange and white creamsicle of the computer that sits dormant on my desk at home. Steve just called it the Laptop of Fire, which it was one day in early 2003 when the AC adapter connection to the laptop caught on fire while I was using it. This was quite alarming. Unsuprisingly the computer itself stubbornly failed shortly after that and I still need to recover its hard drive since it holds pretty much all my grad school work and rough dissertation drafts (and I'm absolutely sure those will come in handy some day, right?) I just got a class action settlement thing from Apple the other day b/c I qualify to get some of the money I shelled out for AC adapters for my clamshell ibook back.
So, gentle reader, do laptops hate me? do they fail when I need them most? Is this a black pox upon my project?
ugh. whatever.

outsourcing research tasks

today i'm meeting with my student Stephanie. I think she will eventually be graduate school bound. For now though I hope to discuss with her some research assistant opportunities. Maybe should could help me compile bibliographic materials? Or put together an archive of popular articles on gamers in sources like the NY TImes, Wall Street Journal, LA Times--tracing out what the characterizations are and when certain terms come into standard use.

If I can hire her I want to use her time wisely so it benefits the project and keep it compelling for her at the same time.

multitasker

today is day three of Teaching with Technology and I'm already feeling like I'm both catching up and hopelessly behind.

Been thinking I need to clarify the connection between lurking and gaming. Obviously it is the user and the user's body but how can I theorize these two modes? Passivity and Interactivity, each is shot through the other? Both are kinesthetic and require specific bodily orientations. I need to trace out the history of interactive media a bit, maybe using Wilson's book and create a timeline that links passivity and interactivity together.
yes, that's the ticket. need to do some of my own writing this week, despite other obligations.

My Video Game Class Project

Last week I attended a special seminar with Brenda Laurel. I'm still processing it. This week I go to the Teaching with Technology Institute. I'm upgrading my course materials with new course websites, new Powerpoint skills and figuring out all about grabbing media feeds and digitizing them.
The ultimate goal is to create an archive of video game examples that emphasize formal elements but do not contain gameplay from a set of key examples. Don't even get me started on what examples I'll use (games that are key and groundbreaking, games from a range of platforms and genres, games written about by academics, games key to gamers' histories of the medium, etc.). I want to build a DVD with still images, walkthroughs, advertising imagery, gameplay demos, etc. It won't be interactive but it will be a way to allow non-gamers and gamers to discuss concepts without macho posing and hyperopinionated, hyperverbal asocial behaviors to dominate the class.

I hope to duplicate some of these strategies for my other classes, especially Digital Media Theory and Intro to Digital Media.
We'll see what happens.

Thing I fear (#1): When good TV goes bad

As it is sweeps, much is happening in TVland. Right now I totally fear that the following strong new shows will go bad come season 2.
Veronica Mars: I was late to this party but I've seen roughly half the episodes now. What will happen now that all the season 1 mysteries are resolved? Will the show have the same weight when Veronica isn't pondering her own paternity or best friend's murder or sexual assault?

Lost: A few weeks ago I remembered that horrible Felicity episode with Meghan's box, aka the "Twilight Zone" episode. Lost seems to be more and more overt about its sci-fi origins and Outer Limits/Twilight Zone tone. I just don't want any plot twists like "they are all dead" or "the island is some pys-ops testing ground" or "this is an elaborate simulation." I like to pretend I have some agency in this one, since Javi is the supervising producer and all that (and he keeps visiting Ann Arbor, which is nice for a successful tv writer to do when he could be working on his comic book or something more exciting). But since I told him I wanted to be spoiler-free, my pretensions towards agency are totally unwarranted.

Medium: I like this show. Smart dialogue and a very good depiction of a couple/family.

all of which is all the more reason to be excited that BBC-Am is showing Second Sight again this week! Thank God for TiVo!

Smash Ups and movie reviews

i saw Crash on Friday and Unleashed on Saturday. Crash was like a race-only version of a Robert Altman film (specifically Short Cuts). Interesting cast, earnest attempt at racial melodrama, ultimately disappointing.

Yesterday we went to see Unleashed. Once again I was struck by how Western directors cannot shoot a good hand-to-hand combat scene to save their lives. Long shots! Not just fast paced medium shots with a long shot here or there. But the rest was interesting. Nurture or nature? Operant conditioning. Jet Li, Morgan Fairchild and Bob Hoskins were all good. Set in Glasgow. I still think Luc Besson is kind of overrated but I enjoyed the movie.

Tivo grabbed some weird shows off of AZN, the Asian American network. One is a smash up thing called King Faux--hip hop and kung fu footage together in a pop up video format.

Internet Temporality

Yesterday I attended an event on instructional technology. One part featured an instructor who does web-based research assignments in his class. This intrigued me because it is something I'd like to do. But his students' web-projects were quaint, almost picturesque uses of web technology. They followed a strict, text heavy design template and few sites linked to outside material. It was like watching a Hypercard presentation!

So here's the thing--time moves quickly online and the timeline of web styles moves even faster. So what does epitomize good web design, circa 2005? Is it blog-based content, lots of links? flash animation? e-commerce that is elegant? Is it the minimalist style of Google with its intentional use of blank space and a "clean" looking site? How does one uncover the key formal elements of something so deeply in flux?

It reminds me a bit of Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois' book Formless, about how the narrative of modernism needed to be shifted to a more horizontal and scatalogical orientation in order to be a more inclusive and accurate story. If something is formless, talking about its form is a challenge, is it not?

Yet certain web forms and formalities have already become dominant--one recognizes the sign for a link or how to approach a form or even what kind of content to search for. We are no longer simply boolean. Or perhaps we are more deeply boolean since our brains operate in search terms?

Back in, um, 1997, I remember a disagreement I had with Mark Poster about the pre and post e-commerce Internet. Because claims about one might not apply to another. Today I'd say there is no one Internet, just many networks with many points of entry, some permutations intersecting with one another. The Internet is like the kind of stuff you hear about in physics, a million emergent possible realities, all layered amongst each other, each waiting to emerge.

I've been toying with this whole blog thing for awhile. It seems like an obvious fit--I need to write, I need to archive a wide range of web stuff and I am trying to think through a gordion knot or two about digital media and living in the digital. I use to post stuff a lot about a decade ago when Usenet was the stuff. Since then I've used the usenet concept of lurking to think through how people use and are addressed by digital technologies. When you lurk you sit back and perform passive surveillance over a scene being played out before you. You aren't just watching, as one would with cinema. You aren't performing much in the way of physical interaction or engagement but a lurker is always already poised to de-lurk, to enter into the fray. Computers and networks empty out the process of acting, interacting, spectating. And yet, and yet, we still sit in chairs and type away, clicking through movies, animations, text, stumbling through the web, unweaving it as we go, reworking our way through.

So blog away. Remember before blogs? When sites like Suck.com were the ur-blog? Witty, fast-paced, updating regularly, containg the trademark geek humor, cynicism, satire and sweetly mean illustrations?