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?