Experimental Progress

Biblophile: Canadiana

2012-01-29T12:02:00.003-05:00

I feel like I've already used the "judging a book by its cover" tagline, but that's really what we're doing here in a nutshell. So sit back and get into the zone for another edition of Bibliophile.

The library's received an influx of 8000 books this week--I'm guessing someone's added a new digital archive. And yeah, we're going to be glossing over some of that.

We have never been postmodern : theory at the speed of light / Steve Redhead. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2011.
It's probably somewhat telling that my first reaction on seeing this book's title was to wax nostalgic: "Aw, a book on postmodernism! I haven't seen one of those in forever!". But that just supports Redhead's point: the moment we're in now is not postmodernism, and perhaps never was. Rather, it's MANC--Mobile Accelerated Nonpostmodern Culture. That probably won't catch on as a term, but I can see the advantage of being able to refer to the world as particularly "MANC-y." Seriously, it may be worth wondering why postmodernism has fallen out of favor. Is it a matter of academic fads passing elsewhere, has postmodernism failed to pass, or is it so obviously here it's not worth talking about anymore? (Incidentally, this is a book to see in a library setting; it's currently weighing in at $98.24 for 192 pages at Amazon.ca. Yikes.)

In your face : the new science of human attraction / David Perret. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Good title. The book is an in-depth study of the face, and what attracts us to one. On a tangential note, it reminds me of William Sleator's YA sci-fi book, The Boy Who Reversed Himself. One its plot points was that people could move between dimensions (and I'm talking dimensions in the 2-D, 3-D sense), but the process meant reversing yourself, turning yourself into your mirror image. And for us 3-D humans, that meant a change that people noticed, but couldn't quite place. Also, the reversed form of ketchup was an intoxicant.

Why people cooperate : the role of social motivations / Tom R. Tyler. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2011.
Payback : why we retaliate, redirect aggression, and take revenge / David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton. New York : Oxford University Press, c2011.
I love that these two books were side by side.

Gay, straight, and the reason why : the science of sexual orientation / Simon LeVay. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
This, um, sounds like it might be contentious. (Understatement.) For what it's worth, LeVay is leaning to the "born that way" argument, with his claim that scientific evidence points in its favor. I could go into a long discussion of my own view here, but let's just say I'm of the opinion that two consenting adults can do whatever they want with their body parts, and I'll leave the philosophizing about why to others. Now, to further dodge the issue, have you ever thought about how "content" means satisfied with the current situation, but "contentious" means something more like unsatisfied? Where's the scientific study on that?

The "E" section contained about 100 items on First Nation issues; I think I just found one of the new databases.

Look of Catholics : portrayals in popular culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War / Anthony Burke Smith. Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas, c2010.
This book may be vaguely interesting. I come from a small town where Catholics were the majority, and I was in one of the half dozen or so Protestant minorities. Thus, my default view of Catholics is this exclusive club that everyone talked about that I wasn't a member of. Confession, exclusively male priests, and Latin chanting all seem simultaneously mysterious and ridiculous to me. The book itself seems to cover the major points its subject matter would suggest; obviously, the Kennedys loom large.

Lake Titicaca : legend, myth and science / Charles Stanish. Los Angeles : Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, c2011.
Snicker.

Lords of the rinks : the emergence of the National Hockey League, 1875-1936 / John Chi-Kit Wong. Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, c2005.
Like lord of the dance, but with more slapshots. For those hockey fans among my academic acquaintances, I'll note that we've received an influx of ice-sports related books this week.

Disneyland and culture [electronic resource] : essays on the parks and their influence / edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West. Jefferson, N.C. ; London : McFarland & Co., c2011.

Saving babies : the efficacy and cost of recent expansions of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women / Janet Currie, Jonathan Gruber. Cambridge, MA : National Bureau of Economic Research, 1994.
And that is how you give an economic paper a politically loaded title. All right, being fair, medical aid for pregnant women *is* and should be a politically loaded issue, and the case could be made that ignoring that aspect would be as much a political move as foregrounding it.

Okay, we've reached the true source of the mysterious influx of items: a few thousand new electronic entries, all on the social and economic status of Canada. I hope you'll excuse the indiscretion, but I think I'll skip over the full analysis of such page-gripping titles as "Gateways and Clusters: the government of Canada’s experience with client-centred single-window electronic service delivery, report on year 1 of research conducted by the Public Policy Forum on behalf of the Research Consortium on Information in the Public Sector." (Although this particular entry is a bad example, because it misspelled "clusters" as "custers" which makes me think it's either a report on the delivery of pies, or the delivery of generals who had famous last stands.

Coming back 5000 some entries later, we have:
Popular music and television in Britain [electronic resource] / [edited by] Ian Inglis.
Off the top of my head, my familiarity on this topic begins and ends with music competitions and Dr Who. If pressed, I might add the Beatles and Monty Python. The actual subject matter is focused on the intersection of music and television, and so we have such topics as the musicology of Life on Mars (I wouldn't mind reading that one) and the ubiquity of the Beatles in their day. So I was almost right, then.

The cat : 3500 years of the cat in art. By Caroline Bugler.
If this doesn't culminate in Garfield and the LOLcats, something has gone terribly wrong.

Good servant, bad master? : electronic media and the family / Arlene Moscovitch. Ottawa, Ont. : The Vanier Institute of the Family, 2007.
The conclusion of the 23 page report is "There is so much we do not know." As a conclusion, it hits honesty, but kind of makes the preceding redundant.

Hyperbole in English : a corpus-based study of exaggeration / Claudia Claridge. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
This is the best idea for a book I've ever heard of. We might as well stop all English studies here and now, because it's achieved a pinnacle that may never be surmounted. Throughout history, this work will stand as a beacon, a monument, a tribute to all that humankind may aspire towards--but also a solemn mockery, as each person must in their own way come to terms with the fact that we will never reach such lofty heights again.

Hypertext and the female imaginary / Jaishree K. Odin. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2010.
Despite being in the digital humanities, I've never read a scholarly work specifically on hypertext, per se. But I like the idea that there are still people doing it.

Television culture / John Fiske. 2nd ed. London ; New York : Routledge, 2011.
Subjects include realism, psychoanalysis, audience participation, oral culture, genre, intertexuality, and chapters on gender, the quiz show, and the news program. It's very clearly a book written for undergraduate courses, not that there's anything wrong with that. The overview is written by Henry Jenkins, one of those scholars who's managed to transcend their position and become "personalities," in part by virtue of showing up everywhere. Seriously, I've seen work by this guy on comic book studies, television studies, fan-based behavior, and video games. He's the go-to guy for pop culture studies.

Trickster in contemporary film / Helena Bassil-Morozow. Hove, East Sussex ; New York : Routledge, 2012.
I'm focusing on this one because I wanted to do a search to see what films Bassil-Morozow was talking about. Incidentally, this book shows up on Amazon in the categories Social science, humor & entertainment (which make sense) and Health, Fitness & Dieting (which does not). All the basic report of the book will tell me is that it features trickster comedians (Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

Twilight mystique : critical essays on the novels and films / edited by Amy M. Clarke and Marijane Osborn. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co., c2010.
I can't think of a subject in pop culture studies I would be less interested in. Give me a book on knitting. I'd read that first. A book on the NHL. Sure, pile it on. But Twilight? No thank you, sir.

In other worlds : SF and the human imagination / Margaret Atwood. 1st U.S. ed. New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, c2011
Wait, Margaret Atwood wrote a book on SF theory last year? I feel as if I should have known this already. This feels like big news. Is it big news? According to the info I can find, it seems to be a written compilation of some of her 2010 lectures on the subject, and other essays, so I'm not so sure if it quite counts as anything she's done recently, but it may be required reading for anyone looking at sci-fi literature in a Canadian context.

Past the literature section, we're back in the new Canadian database, with ebook after ebook on the Canadian environment. "Effects of hypoxia on scope-for-activity of lake trout: defining a new dissolved oxygen criterion for protection of lake trout habitat" by David O. Evans and other exciting topics. And I still have just under 2000 titles to go.

World wide mind : the coming integration of humanity, machines and the internet / Michael Chorost. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York : Free Press, 2011.
It's 2012. Do you know where your Singularity is?

And then we're into healthcare for the next 1000 or so entries. That means titles like "Dare to dream [electronic resource] : reflections on a national workshop on women and primary health care, February 5-7, 2004, Clarion Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba," "Legislating for health and human rights [electronic resource] : model law on drug use and HIV/AIDS prisons. Toronto, Ont. : Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, 2006," and "Healthy balance: a summary report on a national roundtable on caregiving policy in Canada / Judi Varga-Toth. Ottawa, Ont. : Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2005." Important topics, but not really anything that I have either the ability or interest to understand.

And then we're back to Canadian environment again, with such gems as "A consultation-based review of the Harvester Support Programs of the Government of Nunavut and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc : final report." And "The Great Lakes Sewage Report Card." And who could forget "Radon: The Unfamiliar Killer."

Able seamen : the lower deck of the Royal Navy 1850-1939 / Brian Lavery. London : Conway, 2011.
Snicker.

Murder Game! / by Dan Ross ; directed by Brian Rintoul, 1983 - production photos. 1983
It's the exclamation point that really sells it. They thought they were playing just another tabletop... little did they know that they had just picked tokens for... The Murder Game!

Tough cookies [electronic resource] : leadership lessons from 100 years of the Girl Scouts / Kathy Cloninger ; with Fiona Soltes. Hoboken : Wiley, 2011.
Good title.

And that brings us to another end of Bibliophile. The thing about all the Canadian stuff is that, my mockery aside, I know that almost any given title summarizes research that is as important, and often more important, than the research I'm doing. But being important is not really the same as being interesting. Sad, but true.

Later days.

Friday Quotations: Equally Dumb?

2012-01-27T07:15:00.002-05:00

"You must not go towards equality, but must start from equality. Starting from equality does not presuppose that everyone in the world has equal opportunities to learn, to express their capacities. That's not the point. The point is that you have to start from the minimum equality that is given. The normal pedagogic logic says that people are ignorant, they don't know how to get out of ignorance to learn, so we have to make some kind of an itinerary to move from ignorance to knowledge, starting from the difference between the one who knows and the one who does not know."
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

Sorry for the relative silence this week--it hasn't been particularly newsworthy. I'll start livening things up with a movie or book review over the weekend.

Later Days.

Watch Me Work: Travel Games

2012-01-23T16:35:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me that the "copy and paste" reading notes method that I've used previously is a nice way to do a blog post with minimal effort. Depending on how interesting the things I read turn out, I might make it a regular thing. For now, here's my summary and thoughts of Chapter 6: Transit in Ian Bogost's "How to Do Things with Games":

Bogost argues that videogames potentially address the lost experience of travel elided by modern transportation technology. He starts by establishing the pattern: with the widespread adoption of the train, spatial travel lost its “aura,” and emphasized the separation from the outside world, and the experience of being between two points. The solution then was to replace the experience with surrogate experience, in the form of travel books and panoramas. Now, we have the same travel loss thanks to planes and automobiles, and Bogost argues that the new surrogate is videogames. Games require continuous movment and experience, demanding the player acts (GTA). As they play, they get a sense of how the space between points functions (Animal Crossing). More than just random local wandering, they allow an experience of the unknown, an aspect of exploring that players come to understand by traveling through. (Final example: Train Simulator.)

I really liked this one. It addresses the spatial aspect and value of videogames quite nicely. He could have gone further into the exploration aspect—it certainly gets some attention when people talk about the imperial side of gameplay, and there is an aspect not just of inhabitation but domination in how players are conditioned to respond to game space. And the notion of the autotravel changes things as well; you travel there once, and then you never go that route again. It means never quite experiencing the same organic connection as the Animal Crossing example—you don’t know that character x wanders down this path every day, because you don’t cross it yourself ever. But it does preserve that initial discovery sense. Likewise, the automap really captures that exploration process, as you get a visual rendition of your exploratory efforts. It feels much more participatory than games that come with a map that you just travel around. And again, there’s some form of visual dominance at play. I like the medial connections he’s drawing, as we don’t often think of transportation as a medium, but it should be considered one. Further, I think there’s an irony that he doesn’t address; thanks to mobile games, they don’t just offer surrogate experiences of spatial exploration, they detract from it, somewhat. Admittedly, he doesn’t address it because he’s talking about positive sides of gaming, but it’s still an issue. You can’t discuss travel and exploration without discussing escapism. This is a nice easy topic to put to a wide application—essentially any game that involves extensive travel can be thought of in these terms.

You know it's a productive essay to think with when the commentary is longer than the summary. It's a good book; please don't recall it on me.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: pop culture and nine year old taste tests

2012-01-22T02:36:00.004-05:00

The shelves burst with books. Each shuffles to the front, yearning with every inch of its papery heart to be named, examined, discussed. Which will be chosen this week? Find out, on a very special episode of Bibliophile.

Tickle Your Catastrophe! : imagining catastrophe in art, architecture and philosophy / edited by Frederick Le Roy, ... [et al.]. Gent : Academia Press, 2011.
I was unaware that "tickle your catastrophe" was a Shakespeare reference, King Henry the Fourth part II, by Falstaff, to be precise. Clearly, I need to turn in my English diplomas. Sections include the ruin motif in art and urban planning, catatrophism in general, catastrophe in media form in visual arts and film, and scenario thinking in public policy and artistic intervention.

Zen women : beyond tea ladies, iron maidens, and macho masters / Grace Jill Schireson ; foreword by Miriam Levering. Boston : Wisdom Publications, c2009.
I hear "zen master," I think "ninja." It's not my fault. It's television. And comic books. And so forth. The book attempts to provide exemplary Buddhist conduct by examining the historical roles of Buddhist women.

Why god won't go away : is the new atheism running on empty? / Alister McGrath. Nashville, Tenn. : Thomas Nelson, c2010.
I picture the Atheist-mobile, running on pure fumes and Hitchens juice. McGrath states that modern aetheism debates center around religion defending itself against charges; McGrath would like to flip that around, and attack the tenets of atheism. Reviewers praise the book particularly for its outlining of the modern atheist arguments, particularly those of Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.

Better off dead : the evolution of the zombie as post-human / edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro. 1st ed. New York : Fordham University Press, 2011.
An anthology of everyone's favorite undead. After Vampires. And werewolves, generally. And personally, I prefer ghouls. And ghosts. But then it's zombies. Essay topics include Haitian rituals, zombies in radio dramas, zombies and cannibalism, postmodern cinema, the dawn of the dead series, performance art. I actually think the zombie fervor is dying down a bit, temporarily at least. Sure, shows like Walking Dead are still doing brisk business, but a few years ago, there was everything from Marvel Zombies to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. I suppose vampires took some of the limelight, but even that's dying down (sorry). But in light of the upcoming Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter, perhaps that's premature. If I had to explain it, I'd say that the key thing about the zombie is that it represents humanity reduced to its basic needs. In comparison, the human survivors in such a story always explore what it means to be human, because, in contrast, they demonstrate what it is to be a human beyond this immediate needs. Or something. It's not something I've really thought about, yet.

How to do things with videogames / Ian Bogost. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2011.
I've already signed this one out. I'm a little torn on Bogost, to be honest. I think his books are generally well-written, and he clearly is a man who knows his area and a lot more besides. But I also find his public persona (especially his online persona) a little grating. It's over the top confrontational. From his tweets to his personal blog, it seems geared at confrontation, not because the confrontation will force important discussion, but because it'll generate him more hits. (This would be hypocritical if I was using Bogost's name here to get more hits myself, but let's be honest--if I was blogging for the hits, I would have retired long ago, for meager performance.) This book looks at videogames as they enter a maturing phase, and get applied in a variety of different ways. I have a feeling I need to read this immediately, and not just because it'll probably be at the top of the recall list.

Digital condition : class and culture in the information network / Rob Wilkie. 1st ed. New York : Fordham University Press, 2011.
Wilkie argues that the digital realm is increasing class difference and widening the gap between rich and poor. As might be expected from that description, he's taking a particularly Marxist view of the situation. It struck me as I was reading his introduction (available at amazon) that while the premise itself (digital worsens rich/poor gap) isn't new, Marxism in general isn't widely applied to digital economy--at least, not as anything more than the starting point. And that's part of his point; Wilkie argues that digital economy scholarship, with its emphasis on the nuances of subject positioning and turmoil, has emptied the word "class" so that it doesn't refer to the large disparities Marx saw, but to multifaceted aspects of society. Wilkie wants to return the word to its Marxist roots. If this sort of thing is your sort of thing, it might be worth looking at.

Strategies for achieving equity and prosperity in Saskatchewan / by Rick August. Ottawa, Ont. : Caledon Institute of Social Policy, c2006.
Noted for the mention of my home province. Although frankly, given traditional political sentiment, if you want Saskatchewanians to take your policies seriously, getting published in Ontario is probably not a good first step. On the other hand, the policy promotes reducing welfare and expanding employment, which is probably not going to get a lot of objections. I don't really have the background to argue economic policy (surprise) but I have to say, I'm suspicious of an economic policy that believes that financial social responsibility should be in the hands of citizens rather than government--first, because it rhetorically forgets that government is composed of citizens, and second, the free market isn't really known for its social responsibility. To his credit, August is addressing that issue somewhat, but I still have my doubts.

Performing sex : the making and unmaking of women's erotic lives / Breanne Fahs. Albany : State University of New York, Albany, c2011.
Fahs looks into whether women are really liberated, not from common perspectives of economic status or political prominence, but from sex itself: "half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as "sexually dysfunctional." I would like to note that the Amazon suggestion engine pairs this book with "Read My Lips: A Complete Guide to the Vagina and Vulva" by Debby Herbenick. Now THAT's a title.

Teen TV : genre, consumption, identity / edited by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson. London : BFI Pub., 2004.
Another day, another anthology. Considering the book was published 8 years ago, it's a little odd to see it added now; if nothing else, anyone who was a teen when these essays were written certainly isn't now. I can't seem to find any information about it other than the fact that it covers "Dawson's Creek", "Roswell", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Australia's "Heartbreak High"--all of which have been off the air a long time now. Given that I'm in the digital media field, I try to resist the constant pressure for something new, but I'm still somewhat dubious as to the point of adding this book to the university shelves now.

Performing American masculinities : the 21st-century man in popular culture / edited by Elwood Watson & Marc E. Shaw. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c2011.
Here, on the other hand, is a pop culture anthology hot off the presses. Subjects include Seinfeld, OJ, Obama, "A Boy Named Sue," the metrosexual and advertising, and masculinity in dating. Hmmm. Okay, given this book's focus on past and current events,I take back my comments above; a book's relevance is not measured by its publication date.

Bytes and backbeats : repurposing music in the digital age / Steve Savage. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Press, c2011.
I think I've mentioned before how incredibly little I know about music. And adding digital theory to the mix does not make it any better. Still, this book's opening chapter is on Rock Band, and if that doesn't help, nothing will.

Archabet : an architectural alphabet : photographs / by Balthazar Korab.
Highlighted because I like the cut of that portmanteau jib. "Archabet." It's just a cool word. "A is for Arris, B is for Baluster..."

Alphabet and the algorithm / Mario Carpo. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011.
Continuing the Alphabet focus, here's Carpo's book. He argues that we're shifting from a period of mass production of identical goods to one of mass customization, via the digital. And we're also continuing the architectural focus, as his argument is particularly about how our architectural design changes under this shift.

Media, popular culture, and the American century / edited by Kingsley Bolton and Jan Olsson. Stockholm : National Library of Sweden, c2010
There's a lot of pop culture anthologies this time round. And still, nothing on Gossip Girl. Shameful. As may be perhaps guessed from the juxtaposition of the title and the publishing location, this book is on the effect that American pop culture has had globally in the 20th century. The book seems to focus mainly on film influence, though there's some mention of television and digital stuff as well. It seems more media and genre based than specific pop culture artifacts, which is probably a good idea, all things considered.

Reading Derrida's of grammatology / edited by Sean Gaston and Ian Maclachlan.
I was in a graduate course where we read "Of Grammatology" to explain the political philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rosseau. To put that into perspective for the non-deconstructionists out there, that's like using a book on Freudian interpretations of child psychology to understand the plot of a Dr Seuss book.

Is that a fish in your ear? : translation and the meaning of everything / David Bellos. 1st American ed. New York : Faber and Faber, 2011.
I really hope this is a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.

TARDISbound : navigating the universes of Doctor Who / Piers D. Britton. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2011.
Mentioned to satisfy my inner sci-fi geek, which is a very large part of me. The book addresses the basic Dr Whovian issues: transmedia, sexuality, role of the companion, Doctor and the notion of evil. I would add an examination of the show's Britishness to the list of essential Who topics, but, well, it's not my book.

Politics of insects : David Cronenberg's cinema of confrontation / Scott Wilson. New York : Continuum, c2011.
I should watch more Cronenberg. So far, all I've seen is his Fly remake (deeply disturbing) and his eXistenZ (also very disturbing, but slightly less so).

Middle age spread : a For better or for worse collection / by Lynn Johnston. Kansas City [Mo.] : Andrews and McMeel, c1998.
Three For Better or For Worse collections are the sole contribution to the library's graphic novel section this week. With no ill will towards Johnston, I have to say, I think we can do better.

Particular sadness of lemon cake : a novel / Aimee Bender.
A 9 year old girl discovers that when she eats food, she can taste the emotional state of the people who cooked it--starting with her birthday cake, made by her mother. No one should ever be fully aware of the emotional state of their mothers, 9 year old girls included. I may check this one out; it strikes me as a more serious take on the same area examined in the comic book series Chew.

Conversations with Michael Crichton / edited by Robert Golla. Jackson : Univerhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsity Press of Mississippi, c2011.
This reminds me of the gag on a later Simpsons episode where the family meets "the world's foremost John Grisham scholar," who plays selections of soundtrack from the Client when hosting dinner parties. I realize there's a bit of a discrepancy here, in that I'm the one who got excited about a book of interviews concerning Joss Whedon. Chrichton probably has a much better claim for relevance in general, given the influence he's had on pop culture, from Jurassic Park to ER.

These children who come at you with knives, and other fairy tales / Jim Knipfel. 1st Simon & Schuster pbk. ed. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2010.
I actually took this book out, based mostly on the title and my interest in fairy tales. The basic idea is that it's modern fairy tale stories. And I don't think I'll be finishing it. I've discussed this issue in great length in my of the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. There's this desire to revisit fantasy subjects and deliver a treatment that's more realistic and less "magic kingdom of wonder." And that's fine. But too often, the result is not so much realism as a kind of melodramatic fatalism that's not just as unbelievable as the fantasy tendencies it's reacting to, but also really depressing to boot. And that's what we're getting here. Knipfel's style leads me to believe he's a good writer, but the stories are so unpleasant, I don't know if I'll ever come back to him.

All flesh is grass [electronic resource] : plant-animal interrelationships / edited by Joseph Seckbach and Zvy Dubinsky.
This title strikes me as deeply disturbing, for reasons I can't fully articulate. (which at this point in the Bibliophile, translates to "for reasons I can't be bothered with, because I really want to wrap things up.")

And on that lazy note, let's call an end to this session of Bibliophile.

Later days.

Cleanliness is next to Fanaticism

2012-01-22T00:27:00.003-05:00

Here's an image from the Atari 2600 manual for the game Plaque Attack. And yes, that is a terrified bon-bon, its only life line attached to the corpse of an ice cream cone with a toothbrush embedded in its chest. Activision is serious about fighting tooth decay.

Also, I clearly still don't understand how to make pictures.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Passive Aggressive Computers Make the Best Divas

2012-01-20T08:33:00.004-05:00

I really love this song.

Later Days.

Hallways and Computers: A Classy Segue It Ain't

2012-01-19T15:07:00.002-05:00

I learned something about myself today. When entering a place where I'm going to take off my shoes and/or coat, I don't come in and do that immediately. Instead, I traipse in, take a few steps forward, and just sort of idle for a moment. I've become aware of this behavior for a while, but it's just today that I figured out why. When I was growing up, whenever I came home, it would be in someone's company. And in the childhood home, our hallway was pretty narrow. Since I was often one of the first in, I'd move forward as quickly as possible, to make room for the next person. And then I'd fidget a bit, so I wouldn't have to compete with them for reaching into the closet to hang things up. And this habit, apparently, has stuck with me, even after more than one year where I've lived alone. I'm not saying this particularly fascinating, or revealing, or even mildly interesting. I wonder, however, how many other habits I've perpetuated that I don't even notice.

And speaking of habit-forming activities, my laptop's back! Hurray! To the shop and back, in less than a week! Hurray! Wiped clean of all the data and information that I've put on it! Hurr---aw, nuts. I'm reasonably tranquil about this, because I've taken to backing up all my school stuff on Dropbox, a"a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud storage to enable users to store and share files and folders with others." (Thank you, Wikipedia.) And anything before September of 2011 is backed up on external hard drives and my tabletop computer. The only thing that may be inevitably lost, then, is the data from the course I taught in the fall term on digital media. I sent the students and myself a list of their marks on every assignment before the course ended, so I still have those notes. And my own lectures were all written on looseleaf, and the course blog still exists. But a lot of my copies of the students' presentations may be gone for good. Still, that's a lot better than it could be. At least I didn't lose any research.

I also lost about 150 hours of play on Skyrim and Shining Force II. Not going to be getting those back in a hurry. I guess the cheesy accented Norses'll have to save themselves from the dragons.

Later Days.

My writing isn't constrained, it's tortuous.

2012-01-16T18:45:00.006-05:00

This might wind up being a long 'un. To give you a taste of what you're in for, and let you judge whether you should bail now, here's some of the bullet points: blogging ethics, constrained writing, Christian Bök, installation art, the TV show Community, cliched sayings, consumer good vs. creative work, academia, and student projects. (Good God, am I writing a blog post or a dissertation chapter?)

Still here? Good. I had a conversation with two friends today about constrained writing, writing wherein the author deliberately puts some sort of restriction on the writing. And by "had a conversation" I mean, I walked in on them discussing the issue, and quickly picked a side. Our discussion went on for a bit, but it wasn't until I went for a run a little while later that what I should have said came to mind.

You may have noticed that I don't summarize conversations I had with friends very often here--or if I do, it's a deliberately one-sided account that minimizes everyone else's participation. That one-sidedness is only mostly because of my tremendous ego. The other part is that I feel that I don't have any right to speak for others, even in summary--at least, not in a public, semi-permanent forum like this blog. That puts me in a bit of a conundrum when I get into a discussion I want to blog about. If I was being really fair, I'd probably take these ideas back to the friends in question, we'd hash out some concept over a long discussion, agree to write the blog post together, and slowly let it collapse due to the difficulty in coordinating for such a length of time for such a minor result. Instead, I opted for expediency. I'm stretching my non-involvement of others rule to its limits here, and I acknowledge that, and apologize in advance for misrepresenting anyone. (It's also ironic, for reasons that will become apparent later, that I'm testing limits with this post. But more on that later.)

Constrained writing--and here's my first paraphrasing, since it was the term one of the friends came up with--is simply when an author places some sort of constraint on themselves in their writing. It could be that short story Carol Shields does where she doesn't use the letter "e." It could be something as simple as a poem where every other line rhymes. The best example, I think, is another one purloined from the original conversation: Christian Bök's Eunoia, a book of poetry wherein each of the five chapters is composed of poems whose words contain only one of the five vowels. So the "e" chapter has a lot of words like "eke" and "seen" and so forth. And Bök places other rules on himself("borrowed," this time, from Wikipedia):
Each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing.
Each of the chapters have "to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage."
All the sentences have to have an "accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism."
The text has to include as many possible words in it as it can.
The text must avoid repeating words as much as possible.
The letter "Y" is to be avoided.

Bok's book is perfect, because it encapsulates both sides of the argument: the obvious challenge of the endeavor, and seeming pointlessness of it. And that, paraphrasing villainously, was my other friend's argument against constrained writing, one that I agreed with: at the end of the day, it seems to fail the question of "why bother?". You place all these rules and restrictions--albeit very interesting rules and restrictions--on the writing process, and the result is a subpar poem that doesn't make a lot of sense.

When I got thinking more and more about it, I realized that my issue with the constrained poetry was similar to my issue with nonrepresentational art, mostly in terms of installation art, but also abstract as well (and if the reference to abstract makes you think I'm basing this on the chapter from the W. J. T. Mitchell book I read a little while ago, you wouldn't be far off.). Namely, that even if the end result is interesting, and I'll fully acknowledge that installation art can come up with some pretty damn interesting end results, the original idea is more interesting to me than than those results. With Eunoia, for example, the poems are mildly amusing, but ultimately rather banal. It's the original idea and constraints that are worth talking about. Why bother, then, with the final product, if it's just a mediocre, pale instantiation? Why not leave an interesting thought experiment as an interesting thought experiment?

Well, you can't put a thought experiment in a gallery, for one thing--or show it on TV. I think that's one of the albatrosses that were weighing on the neck of the show formerly known as Community. It had clever ideas. It had more clever ideas than it knew what to do with (or, more importantly, than the audience knew what to do with). Create a flashback episode filled with flashbacks that never happened? Clever idea. Do an episode where there's a conspiracy theory about the class on conspiracy theory? Clever idea. Construct an episode around an elaborate mash-up of Pulp Fiction and My Dinner with Andre that uses Cougar Town as the basis of a discussion of what it means to be a genuine human? That's so clever you're going to need an extra bucket to mop up the cleverness that's slopping over the side. And that's the problem. The show is so busy with its high concepts sometimes that it forgets to put similar effort into the execution. (Compare it to Modern Family, which has the opposite problem--the high quality writing and cast performances have to do everything they can to distract the audience from the fact that the actual plots are derivative, utterly cliche, and tired.) And as much as I love this show--and I do love it, every Cougar Town bit of it--I have to admit that, sometimes, its big idea is the main attraction, and the episode itself should have stayed at home.

So the direction I appear to be flailing toward, then, is keep the idea and lose the product. But that equation is missing an important step, maybe the most step. To return to the original discussion, the pro-constraint friend argued that by placing such constraints on language, you push it to its limits, and it's at the limits that things get interesting. I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I've written under constraints, whether it's creative writing (thanks NaNoWriMo) or poetry or whatever, the process is infinitely rewarding. And I imagine it's the same for the constrained writers, the poets, the installation artists, all the way down to Community's noble cast and crew. The process is the most important part of a constrained work, or perhaps any work. Creation under such restrictive conditions becomes a process of personal revelation and amazement--at least, for the artist.

For the audience, the response can range from a similar fascination (especially if you're familiar with the artist, the idea, and the method), to a sort of confused boredom, to, at worst, a feeling that you're being excluded. There's nothing quite so unfunny as a joke you think might be on you. And that's a problem, one that goes all the way from modernist art to the Neilsen demographics: sometimes, the work of art seems like nothing but a joke that you're not in on. How good is a poem from Eunoia if you don't have the list of constraints he's operating from? To me, the most interesting part of these constrained, experimental practices isn't the final product, but the process and emotional responses that lead to it. I'd much rather watch a documentary on Jackson Pollock than go to one of his galleries.

For what it's worth, I think one of the best solutions, in the classroom, at least, to the process/product problem is the one routinely exercised by a professor I took a course from in the first year of my doctorate. He has his students do their final project, and encourages them to be creative and innovative--that is, baffling, as the end result often winds up being. But he also has them write an essay explaining both the project and the process of creating the project, and how both sprang from and contributed to an overarching idea. If po-mo artists had to stand next to their work and cite sources, I'd be a lot happier. (This method particularly fails when it comes to Community, I'll admit, unless you happen to be a viewer with Joel McHale on speed dial.)

But there's one more side of this process-product-constrained writing thing I want to consider. I'm sure everyone here's familiar with the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey." The thing is, for most people, after a day's work, they don't give a brass monkey about the journey(ie. process); they want the destination (product), thanks. There's a whole heap of problems with this view, as you can sweep a lot of inhuman practices under the rug by ignoring how a product gets to the hands of the consumer. But in a mass production society, it's the product that matters. Two and Half Men is a terrible, terrible show, but it is what is says on the tin: it's a comedy. Make 22 episodes a year, run it until it becomes completely unprofitable, then milk it in syndication for another five years. Put it to pasture for a few more, and you can bring it back out--as retro nostalgia. A well marketed mass-produced television product never dies, it just temporarily depreciates.

And here, if anywhere, is the place to champion constrained writing and all its ilk and brethren. Because if there's anything constrained writing needs to be, it's unique. Once it's reached the point of convention, it ceases to be constraint at all and becomes another genre. Constrained writing's uniqueness, however, is not in the final product, as a perusal of my personal scapegoat Bok will tell you. It comes from the big idea, and it comes from the process of making that idea from something abstract to something tangible. The process is the best part, and it's where installation art meets folk art, where Community meets stand-up.

And that's not to say that my divisions are absolute either--there's usually at least a glimmer of interesting nuggets even in the most soulless of corporate products, and constrained writing fits into mass economy just like everything else. Sometimes I want a box of Kraft Dinner, and sometimes I want a meal I made from scratch (okay, with me personally, the weight's on the former's side, but the metaphor stands.) To grossly paraphrase my friend's early point, the interesting stuff is found when you push something to its limits, but the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

And as for constraints--I bet you didn't realize this, but I wrote a WHOLE POST WITHOUT USING FRENCH! It's true! Sacre bleu!

....Awwwwww nuts.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: The Truth is Out There. Or Not. Whatever.

2012-01-15T11:33:00.004-05:00

Take a page from my book by looking at the books on my page. Webpage, that is. It's time for Bibliophile.

Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics : theory, subjectivity, and duration / Tamsin Lorraine. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2011.
And here's this week's Deleuze and Guattari number. From what I can tell from the press description, Lorraine is arguing that Deleuze and Guattari's work can be applied to everyday life, ethical living, and, in particular, feminist approaches. Sounds fine, if that's your cup of tea.

Curious visions of modernity : enchantment, magic, and the sacred / David L. Martin. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011.
Martin looks at the various artifacts collected in and by figures of modernity, and argues that these artifacts show a slippage from the rationalist, Enlightenment view towards a fascination with magic and wonder. I don't really think that this is an unexpected finding; a lot of science is about pushing its edges to see what comes out. And something like rationalist thinking requires an opposite number to oppose it to. But the artifacts themselves would probably make for a pretty interesting discussion.

On London / Dickens. London : Hesperus Press, c2010.
Apparently, it's a collection of all the various things Dickens wrote about London. A number of years ago now, I was in a graduate course on Kent (the place) and spatial theory; I was assigned Dickens' "Great Expectations" and given the assignment to write on how Dickens uses space in general and London in particular. This book may have been helpful. If only there was some way to get it to 2006 Person of Con. I'll admit, call number wise, it's a little odd that it's in the history section rather than the literary section.

Sparta at war : strategy, tactics, and campaigns, 550-362 BC / Scott M. Rusch. Barnsley : Frontline Books, 2011.
Is this book about madness? No... THIS.... BOOK... IS.... ABOUT... SPARTA!

Conspiracy rising : conspiracy thinking and American public life / Martha F. Lee. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger, c2011.
I like the concept here. Going from the table of contents, topics will include the Free Masons and 9-11. But what about the Kennedy assassination? Elvis sightings? Area 51? The Birthers? When you think about it, the history of the USA is really one big long list of conspiracy theories. It doesn't look like the book is big on theory, but if "you want to believe" or really, really don't, it might be worth reading.

Decade of dark humor : how comedy, irony, and satire shaped post-9/11 America / edited by Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, c2011.
Continuing on depressing American topics, we have this book. Topics include The Daily Show, The Onion, The Colbert Report, Boondocks, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, The Boondocks, Rescue Me, Farenheit 9/11, and South Park. You know, all the sources I use instead of actual news. (And while I'm not opposed to the message, let's admit it: the phrase "the temperature where freedom burns" is pretty much nonsense.)

Why should anyone buy from you? : earn customer trust to drive business success / Justin Basini. Harlow, England ; New York : Financial Times/Prentice Hall Pearson, 2011.
I originally read this title as "Why Should Anyone Buy You?" and imagined a how-to guide for indentured servitude.

Face-to-face communication over the internet : emotions in a web of culture, language and technology / [edited by] Arvid Kappas, Nicole C. Krämer. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
I always feel obligated to add at least one digital media-related study. The book includes chapters on visual, face-to-face based internet technology (think Skype), avatar communication, and emotional and visual cues in HCI (Human Computer Interaction). I suspect it's more social sciences oriented than I'm interested in, but it's one of those "I'm glad someone's doing it" sort of books for me.

Among the truthers : a journey through America's growing conspiracist underground / Jonathan Kay. 1st ed. New York : Harper, c2011.
Two American conspiracy books in one week. Perhaps it's part of some sinister retail plan. Kay's study is both more focused (looking at a single conspiracy theory, albeit a very broad one) and more personal than Lee's, as it's Kay's personal accounts after attending numerous Truther conferences, and conducting many interviews. The Globe and Mail review argues that the focus on how the Internet aided the spread of these messages is missing the point, and if we want to assess how the Truthers have changed discourse, "Look to yourself, not the Web, for the answer." Well, as any good McLuhanite could tell you, the form a message takes is important, and while it's easy to imagine the 9/11 conspiracy perpetuating without the Net to spread it (again, see the Kennedy assassination theories), it certainly wouldn't have unfolded in the same way. And the opposition between "real people" and "the Internet" is one of those mildly technophobic binaries that's bread and butter for the digital scholar.

Lazier murder : Prince Edward County, 1884. Sharpe, Robert J.
That's the 1884 murder of Peter Lazier, not a book on the lazy murdering techniques of the late 19th century. "Oh, I wanted to kill him, but his house is a half hour's ride by carriage, so I just strangled one of the servants instead."

Analyzing Mad men : critical essays on the television series / edited by Scott F. Stoddart. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2011.
Just in time for season 5! Essays cover such topics as the show's subversion of classical American mythology and loyalty and conflict in the organization; melodrama and utopia; Every Woman is a Jackie or a Marilyn, and the Problematics of Nostalgia; Surface Realism and Deliberate Anachronism. If theoretical analysis of modern day interpretations of the 60s is your bag, then this book... fits in that bag? I never really got that metaphor.

Media mediocrity : waging war against science : how the television makes us stoopid! / Richard Zurawski. Black Point, N.S. : Fernwood Pub., c2011.
One of my pet peeves is how, from Big Bang Theory to Sherlock, Western pop culture continually seems to have this anti-intellectual bent. Unfortunately, it's a thin line between pet peeve and snobbish intellectual elitism. I try, dammit. And apparently, I've gotten up on my soapbox for nothing, because what the book is actually about is how television presents misleading or outright wrong scientific information.

Conspiracy films : a tour of dark places in the American conscious / Barna William Donovan. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2011.
Seriously, there's a lot of conspiracy-based books out this week. Donovan adopts a decade-by-decade approach, covering The Manchurian Candidate, JFK, the Matrix, and the Da Vinci Code, to look at how entertainment capitalizes on our fascination with paranoia.

Galaxy is rated G : essays on children's science fiction film and television / edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2011.
Here's one that I'd find personally interesting. Topics include deviant bodies in Lilo & Stitch and Monsters Inc; Feminist Consciousness Raising in Monsters vs. Aliens (?); performing gender and romance in WALL-E; Buzz Lightyear and the refusal to believe; failure of utopia in Star Wars; Pluralistic discourse in Transformers; false nostalgia in Iron Giant; Dr. Who as British; Jetsons and patriarchy; Lost in Space and the Space Race. So yeah, a wide variety of topics and issues. Personally, I would have preferred to see a few more shows I'm familiar with, say Ben 10 (identity and transformation), or Gargoyles (portrayals of magic and science), but it's a good list.

From social butterfly to engaged citizen : urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing, and mobile technology to support citizen engagement / edited by Marcus Foth ... [et al.] ; epilogue by Judith Donath.
That's a mouthful of a title. Humanities scholarship in general seems to have an abiding interest in how digital technology can support "citizen engagement" so this collection definitely has an audience. Topics include social networking, locative-based interaction narratives, mobile phone use, and open-source possibilities. Interesting, if decidedly a touch utopian. It's particularly interesting that this book is placed with the technology section, rather than the digital, social section earlier.

Gröbner bases in commutative algebra / Viviana Ene, Jürgen Herzog. Providence, R.I. : American Mathematical Society, c2012.
My 2004 undergraduate research project was on Grobner bases. (Invariant Grobner bases, to be specific.) I couldn't tell you a single thing about them now. Such is the price of 7 years in the humanities. So it goes.

Cake couture : modern sugar-craft for the stylish baker. Buffalo, N.Y.. : Firefly Books, 2011. Dam, Annie.
This is listed between a book on vacuum deposition on films and a book on the nuclear arms race. I really don't understand how the Library of Congress classification works in the "T" section.

Casual game design [electronic resource] : designing play for the gamer in all of us / Gregory Trefry.
Game stuff always gets mentioned. Even if it's casual game design, a topic which prompts me to emit a preemptive derisive sigh. Actually, browsing through the table of contents, it looks like Trefry knows his stuff. We've got design principles, a history of casual gaming, and a stamp from IGDA, the International Game Developers' Assocation. I like that he seperates casual gaming genres into game mechanic principles. There's matching (Bejewelled, Snood), Sorting (Klondike and Spider Solitaire), Sorting (Mystery Case Files, Azada), Managing (Dinner Dash, Cake Mania), Hitting (Whack-A-Mole, Wii Tennis), Constructing (Tetris, Crayon Physics), Stacking (World of Goo, Jenga) and socializing (Rock Band, Guitar Hero). Even if the subject's not my favorite, I do appreciate the nuances he's bringing to the table and the recognition that not all casual games are created equal.

Leve[up arrow] up! [electronic resource] : the guide to great video game design / Scott Rogers.
All right, this doesn't leave me with a lot of enthusiasm for another video game design book, even a "great" one. An extremely cursory perusal suggests that the book is a handbook, designed to supplement readings in an undergraduate course on game design. It's extremely user-friendly (perhaps to the point of being dumbed down) and it certainly gets its point across.

What philosophy can tell you about your cat [electronic resource] / edited by Steven D. Hales.
If we weren't at the end of the list and I wasn't facing blogger's fatigue, I'd be all over this. As it is, best essay title goes to "Many Ways to Skin a Cat." I'm reasonably sure no cats were actually skinned in researching the essay.

And on that note, we've reached the end.
Later Days.

The $1300 lesson in self-esteem

2012-01-14T15:49:00.003-05:00

Exactly where things began to go wrong... well, there are a few theories on that. There was a warning sign of sorts a few days ago, where my audio started to get periodically choppy--was this the sign of larger problems, or just a momentary blip? Or it may have happened yesterday, when I slipped on some ice and went ass over heels flat on my back, landing largely on the artifact in question. Whatever the cause, my very expensive, very still new laptop's hard drive decided it had enough of this vale of tears, and shuffled off the electronic coil last night.

My computer froze last night, and upon turning it back on, I received the message that it detected no bootable drive. I then spent a few hours in my office running diagnostics routines (the only programs that still functihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifoned), a few more hours downstairs in the computer lab verifying that the results meant what I thought they meant, and finally a few more hours in my office on the phone with Dell tech support. Not the best way to spend a Friday night. (Not my worst, though, which is depressing in a different way.) The first guy on tech support was less than helpful; since I said the final freeze had happened while I was playing a game, he insisted that my problem was with the game manufacturers. I was not particularly displeased when ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifur call was cut off (or, possibly, he got sick of me and hung up). The second response was much more helpful, identifying the problem and coming up with the same answer I did, the faulty hard drive. So they're sending out a self-addressed box for me to ship the thing back out to them for repairs. I figure it'll be about a month or so before we're back up to full business.

The interesting thing in the whole affair (besides the lesson in dealing with overworked, underpaid tech people) and probably the only positive note is my own reaction. Years ago, I did , discussing how I'd feel personally guilty when something went wrong with my computer. This time--well, I'm annoyed, and not thrilled about the work setbacks and readjustments. But I'm not really blaming myself. Could I have been more careful with the laptop? Well, maybe, and I'll certainly take more care when I get it back. But it's not like I was overly negligent, either. I bought it for my computer needs and used it accordingly. I like to think my lack of guilt is part of the new outlook I'm trying to move toward. Essentially, bad things happen; just because they happen to you doesn't make you a bad person. And good thing happen too; the key is to face both the good and bad with grace. It's nice to know that wherever my self-esteem is these days, it isn't tied up in things I can't control, or in second-guessing myself. It would have been even nicer to know that without the cost in efficiency, time, and dollar signs, but, well, live and learn, I guess.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Apparently, He Didn't Believe in Worshiping Celebratory Figures Either

2012-01-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

"The fact that Kennedy was a howling little shit doesn't prove that there wasn't a plot to do him in. Indeed, like many a godfather before him, he may have been slain by precisely the same forces that he himself set in motion." --Christopher Hitchens, 1992.

I love the personality that comes through in this quotation. Here's a guy who refused to acknowledge any idol, in multiple senses of the word.

Later Days.

Videogame Cosplay: Easy Post Topic, or Lazy Post Topic?

2012-01-12T13:00:00.005-05:00

Can't it be both? Let's continue where we left off with yesterday's list.

I tried to look up cosplay instances for the videogame Centipede, but all I got was Human Centipede cosplay. ...I would recommend not looking up centipede cosplay. Ever.

Missile Command doesn't have cosplay, but it does have this nifty skirt--which is, frankly, better graphics than the actual game:

I'm pretty sure that the guy in this costume didn't have "Oscar's Trash Race" in mind when he donned it, but I am not picky. It counts.

(The manual for "Oscar's Trash Race," incidentally, is streets ahead of any other for the Atari that I've looked at. Its user-friendly, kid-friendly approach makes it much different from virtually all other contenders. Plus, the second half is a straight up coloring book.)

There's actually a fair bit of cosplay out there for Pac-Man, but I went with this image, just because the ghosts seemed like they were having fun.

Here's something worth seeing. Or at least something you'll never forget. In honor of the 1982 Atari game Raiders of the Lost Ark, here's someone cosplaying the face-melting scene. Oh, and, um, spoiler alert.

Next: Wile E. Coyote cosplay, in tribute to the Road Runner game. No Road Runner cosplay, though. The absence of Road Runner probably increases Coyote's quality of life.

...That's enough for now.
Later days.

Videogame Cosplay: More than Just Boobs

2012-01-12T00:26:00.003-05:00

It's past midnight, and I'm doing real, honest-to-gosh work for once, so while I read game instruction manuals made before I was born, I thought I'd scour the Net for cosplay images related to the game I was looking at. For the unaware, cosplay is a portmanteau for costume play, and in this case, notes dressing up as a videogame character (though it could just as easily be an anime, comic book, or TV character). Let's kick it off with some of the bizarre:

These people are dressed up as characters from Joust, the 1983 game wherein two knights astride ostriches joust at each other, and other things, because... well, you can't just let those buzzard riders win.

I'm pretty sure people already know who these two are, although the Mario Bros. Atari manual manages to mess it up, by referring to Mario as a carpenter who fixes pipes.

That's it for now. Apparently, the Atari game Millipede doesn't have cosplay, which is probably for the better.

Later Days.

Book Review: Picture Theory by WJT Mitchell

2012-01-09T19:07:00.003-05:00

“the ability to differentiate and connect the trivial and the tragic, the insignificant and the monumental, is precisely what is at issue in the critique of art, violence, and the public sphere. Above all, the relations of literal and figurative violence, of violence by and against persons, and violence by and against images, can only be measured at the risk of trivializing the monumental and vise versa.” ---W. J. T. Mitchell.

We are, once again, at that most boring of blog activities, the review of the theory-based textbook. To the many, many readers/lurkers who state their favor of the blog but confess to skipping all such posts, I can merely offer an apology for dashing hopes and wasting time, and a promise that there will be something about comic books or comical misadventures in the near future. The theory-based book review is honestly something that's generally more for my own purposes; after spending weeks doggedly plowing through this book's 400+ pages, I want to step back and take stock, and see if I actually learned anything. Standard theory book review outline: introduction, outline, response, tangential relation to videogame theory. Fun!

One of the goodreads reviews (okay, the only goodreads review) likens reading the book to walking in on a conversation that's already in progress, where both people are deliberately trying to exclude you from the conversation with "hoity-toity", art-ridden discussions. Ignoring the second half of that statement for the moment, the "conversation in progress" part is pretty spot-on. In fact, Mitchell is basically having a conversation with the arguments his past self made in his previous book, Iconology. Where Iconology is all about how the image/text difference is used to further ideological perspectives, Picture Theory is more generally about the way pictures and images can be used to produce theory. (As you might have guessed from the title.) He pursues this goal through five sections: Picture Theory, Textual Pictures, Pictorial Texts, Pictures and Power, and Pictures and the Public Sphere.

Picture Theory is the most theory-laden section, as it introduces Mitchell's general argument. The first essay compares totalizing art theory ala Erwin Panofsky to totalizing interpolation theory ala Althusser, in a way that at least manages to suggest that the two have something to offer each other. The second essay, "Metapictures" gets right into the thick of things, with six examples of pictures that somehow refer to pictures, the examples ranging from MAD magazine to Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego. It does a lot better job demonstrating how the picture theory thing works than the other chapter, to be honest. The third essay of the section, "Beyond Comparison," argues that this picture theory approach is superior to the comparative method, and that the correct term for the objects of study is imagetext, since all texts involve images, and all images text, even if the connection is just figure-heavy. It's a nice blend of the two previous essays, combining the first's theory-laden approach with some examples, as in the second.

The second section is about the appearance of pictures in text. Thus the first essay "Visual Language: Blake's Art of Writing" is all about how Blake approaches the issue of image and text, in terms of his representations of scrolls and books, and the role of writing. Good for Blake scholars, though personally I found it a little more difficult to judge its merits. Chapter 5 looks at Ekphrasis as a figure of Otherness. For those less poetically inclined, Ekphrasis refers to the textual description of a image. Mitchell argues that approaching the image in textual description turns it into a dangerous, feminine other, and demonstrates with Shelley's poem, "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci." Next is "Narrative, Memory, and Slavery," an essay that argues that the American Slave Narrative is an attempt to place into memory that which can't be entirely articulated, or even entirely remembered. His big text here is Toni Morrison's Beloved, and, honestly, I couldn't help thinking that a fictional account of dealing with the moral detritus of slavery is not quite the same thing as a slave narrative. It still makes some good points, though.

Section Three focuses on image media, and their representation in theory. The first chapter of the section looks at modernist abstract painting, and how, despite being supposedly beyond words, they relied on academic and art discourse to situate and grant their contextual meaning. Interesting, but a bit too far out of my realm of expertise to really engage me. Next, we move into postmodern art and the installation pieces (among other things) of Robert Morris. Morris is especially distrustful of the way the label acts on and limits a work of art, and Mitchell argues that what Morris' work is really doing is opening a space for people to argue over the meaning of the work--it participates in a language game, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein. And Chapter 9 looks at the photoessay, and how it establishes a relationship between photography and the journalistic essay. It used four pieces: Agee and Evans' And Now We Will Praise Famous Men, Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, Malek Alloula's Colonial Harem, and Said and Moht's Exile and Return. I really liked the essay; perhaps more than any other, it got me thinking about what the juxtaposition of image and text has to offer a critic, in terms of composition, if not as primary source. It did suffer a bit from the topics being so disparate; Mitchell has to jump from the colonial south to mother depictions to colonialism to Palestine. (All right, the jump between the last two isn't particularly far.)

Section IV brings the notion of image and power directly on to the table, and introduces a new set of distinctions. Ch 10 is "Illusion: Looking at Animals Looking." Mitchell discusses accounts of animals being fooled into thinking human pictures are real. "Illusion" is the term he uses for being fooled into mistaking something false for reality; "illusionism" is the term for the general capacity of images to create the illusion. Ch 11 is about realism, which he defines as the capacity of images to show something purported to be true; he argues here against Nelson Goodman, whom he characterizes as being about irrealism--the view that it is impossible to depict reality--to a fault.

And that, at long last, brings us to the final section. It looks at pictures in the public sphere. Chapter 12 looks at violence and the public art piece, in the context of the goddess statue constructed on Tinanamen Square, and Spike Lee's movie "Do the Right Thing." The final chapter looks at the blend of spectacle and paranoia in the media's portrayal of the Gulf War and in Oliver Stone's JFK movie. And then we get a nice wrap-up.

what did I think? The book settles into this odd place between the anthology and the single-author book. It's not quite focused enough to build to any sort of conclusion, theory-wise. But at the same time, there's enough connections between chapters that it couldn't really be called a collection of 13 disparate essays either. There's also a lot of underlying themes here; race comes into the foreground in some essays (especially the Spike Lee one) but is usually content to simmer on the backburner, and the sexuality issue gets mentioned a lot, but never quite takes center stage. A lot of the essays feel stretched too thin, and in general, there seems to be more breadth than depth. I suspect that this is exactly what Mitchell wanted; breadth shows the potential extent of his image-focused basis.

In terms of what's useful for me, a lot of the later essays in particular are too specific to their topic to really be transferable to a videogame discussion. I feel like the single most useful concept (or at least most interesting) is ekphrasis, but only if stretched to its absolute extreme definition, as a description of actions or images. In that case, my study of Lost Odyssey in particular can be cast in a very different light. The chapter on photography as a truth-telling device can be applied to my study of photography in videogames, although it's not really shedding anything relevatory on the subject. And the terminology in the latter sections may be a good thing for videogame discussion--the difference Mitchell draws between illusionism and realism in particular adds a bit of nuance to the graphics realism question. I particularly liked the comparison he drew that prompted my quotation. In context, he's responding to the imagined complaint that comparing a Spike Lee movie to Tinanmen Square trivializes the people who died at the latter, but the point is clearly meant to apply to his endeavor at large, his frequent mixing of classically high and low media subjects. Mitchell essentially argues that to dismiss the trivial from the monumental and vice versa is to do an injustice to both by segregating them to separate fields of human behavior. As a videogame studies scholar, I support an argument calling for the study and inclusion of what may seem, on an initial glance, to be trivial. Monument or trivium, both are just reflections of the meanings humans place in them.

Final verdict, then: its scattered lack of focus and its breadth over depth approach make it a little more disappointing (and a bit more of a slog) than its predecessor book Iconology, but Picture Theory is still a must-read for those doing anything in the visual rhetoric field.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Nothing to see here

2012-01-08T16:33:00.002-05:00

It's time for another edition of Bibliophile. Or rather, it would be, normally. Sadly, my university library received no new books this week. An error on the website? The delayed New Years break? We may never know.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: True Gaming Sluts We Were

2012-01-06T10:34:00.000-05:00

"Any time I hear a modern gamer say, "That's not my sort of thing," I end up sighing. Back then, it was all our sort of things. True gaming sluts, we were up for anything." --Kieron Gillen, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_118/2318-Sensible-Soccer

Later Days.

Answers to Questions No One Asked

2012-01-05T15:27:00.005-05:00

People ask me exactly what it is I do. At least, they used to. There's a lesson for you: if you reply to any question with a sufficiently detailed answer, you tend to decrease the number of future questions. At any rate, when they used to ask me, I gave a rather vague description, at best. So I thought I'd settle this past question once and for all with a visual demonstration. I did two big things today: I prepared my lecture for the class I'm teaching tomorrow ("Introduction to Rhetorical Theory," super exciting.), and I read and took notes on a section of Mitchell's book, "Picture Theory." In general, my note method is to go from ridiculously detailed, to summary, to response to summary. I'll spare you the first step, and show just the results. Here's my summary and response to Mitchell's essay on the use of image and text in photo-essays:
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Mitchell uses the photoessay to approach the image-text problem, delving into the issues of gender, collaboration, and race through the examination of four photoessays. He frames the chapter with a series of questions and answers, which essentially say that the photograpic essay is a dramatization, a materialization, of the power struggle and value negotiation between photo and text. / There are essentially two views of photography—first, that it is a message without a code, separate from langauge, and second, that it can be put into a language of signs. (Barthes represents the first.) The second has tended to win out, but it doesn't explain the persistence of the first. Barthes, he notes, examines this disparity, and hew wants to as well. / In the photoessay, the text appears to dominate, even suppress the images. But in the photoessay, the two forms share much in common, as well—the notion that both are somehow “serious,” that both are real and nonfiction; both often involve something very personal about their creator; both have a sense of incompleteness, that they have failed to grasp everything of significance about their subject. That brings us to his four case studies.

/ First up, Agee and Evans. They introduce the basic three traits of the photoessay, that the photos and text be equal, independent, and collaborative, despite the apparent contradictions these qualifications. In their case, it ccame from the complete separation of photo from text, a separation Mitchell understands as an aesthetic, ethical choice, but one that depends on each part standing in witness and vigilance against the veracity of the other. / The second one to examine is Barthes' Camera Lucida, which mixes photography with text, but in such a way that the photos tend to speak more to punctum than studium, creating a visual set that seems to belie the theory at work. And then there's the issue of Barthes' mother, who seems to be at the emotional core of the text. Mitchell argues that the motif for the essay is the labyrinth, with the photos as a labyrinth, and the text Barthes' personal attempt to push through.

/ Next is Malek Alloula's essay on the French colonialist postcards sexualizing Algerian women. Here, Mitchell's figure is voyeurism and exorcism; that is, the goal of the essay is that the text appears to liberate the women from their image-based debasement, to exorcise the images of the colonial presence and attack. It's a gender issue, and a colonial issue, and Mitchell concludes with his own personal reaction to the pictures, one of guilt. / Finally, he looks at Said and Mohr's photoessay on the Palestinians. Here, the figure is one of exile and return. The photos attempt to create a people, one that requires acknowledgment from the global community, but also from the subjects themselves. It's an ambiguous essay, as its photos and text promote return from exile, but also the accept that there is no full return, that the utopic return is a fantasy. He concludes with a statement that far from being formless or having no exact genre of form, it's the form of the photoessay that grants it is collaborative force between author and reader, and its contextual significance.

I certainly wrote a lot there, didn't I? I didn't think I was that interested in this essay, but there you go. I wish I had read it five years ago when I was trying to get students to write photo-essays. I wonder how much of it could be applied to powerpoint presentations—they're certainly the most common form of academic combination of image and text these days. At that point, it's not about the permanence of the text, so I'd think that the image would tend to take center-stage, as it's better at grabbing attention quickly. But then there's also the issue of how the verbal competes with writing and image. Complicated, yes? I also wish I'd read this essay while reading Agee and Evans; I don't think it would have made me like Agee any more, but the context would make me better appreciate what they were doing. It even makes me appreciate Barthes' book more, and I appreciated the hell out of that as it was. Beyond that, there's some connection to the videogame stuff. Obviously, a videogame that uses the camera is very, very little like a photoessay. But it is combining media forms. The difference is that in the game's case, the form is all about subordinating the photograph in favor of the gameplay. There's very little on the third essay—why is that? Is it just of less interest? And while Mitchell is big on focusing on gender issues in these essays, I note that he didn't select any with female authors, though he does mention one at length in the Agee and Evans section. Given the female = image tendency he seems to be drawing out, an attempt to see things differently might have been nice. The punctum/studium issue reminds me of the mind/body split—the idea that there's something about the body and the mind so that neither can be entirely placed in the other. That's only to be expected I guess; if it wasn't the case, then one would be encompassed by the other entirely. The last section really got me thinking about exile. I've played a few games where exile has played a role, but I guess where it really comes out in videogames is in a metagame fashion—the real exile is the one left out of the discussion, because he or she doesn't have the relevant hardware or hasn't played the game—or hasn't played it properly. Can exile be used in gaming? The player is almost always the outsider, so to feel the exile, they'd have to be made the insider first. Maybe FFX-2; the way the characters had moved on without me, the way the blitzball minigame had been altered to make it feel more like you were observing than acting. Is there more to exile than a sense of separation to something you were once close to? Does there have to be?
******************************
In case it wasn't clear, the last paragraph is my response. You'll note it's very rambling, even more so than my average blog piece. The ideas tend to jump around a lot, here ranging from powerpoint rhetoric to videogame exile. That's in part because when I'm writing notes for myself, I tend not to explain the references, or even the reasons for switching topics suddenly. But moreover, it's because that's my method; I jot down running ideas in the response, and I either build connections when I try to mesh everything together in my own essays, or I forgot it forever. (Alternatively, I read it years later, and revel in my own forgotten genius/idiocy.) At any rate, that's what I do. Today, at least. I'll leave it to you to decide whether such doings has any value or not.

Later Days.

Here We Go Again

2012-01-03T16:37:00.002-05:00

Given that the new course I'm teaching starts tomorrow, I came to the conclusion that I should probably start planning what I'm going to actually teach. That's not quite as "by the seat of my pants" as it sounds; it's course I've taught before, so a majority of the legwork has already been done by past PoC. (It's about time that guy pulled his own weight.) Most of the actual changes are cosmetic; I permutate the examples I used, I update the syllabus to include the new course dates, and I set up the university course page. Same old, same old.

But there are two significant changes, beyond the cosmetic uplifts. One: The first time I taught this course, I acquiesced to student requests that I post the class notes online. The result was a term of dismal, dismal attendance. This time, I'm both refusing to post the notes and taking attendance for marks--and if that doesn't put butts in seats, I'll start giving away free candy, or something. That might seem like a pretty small change, but it means a rather extensive revamp of my course notes. If you're creating slides students can refer back to at any point, you're free to be rather expansive, but if you're expecting them to furiously write (or type, these days) down the essentials, then you have to stick to the essentials, and leave the extraneous explanatory stuff for verbal espousal or blackboard writing. (Yes, I said espousal--going into teaching mode does horribly pedantic things to my vocabulary.) It'll mean a streamlining of my lectures, which is probably something my original notes could have used anyway.

Second, taking away the reading responses and replacing them with a blog component. For the last course I taught (a digital media thing), I had my students contribute weekly to a blog, posting and replying to each others' posts. Whether the blog had an overall positive impact is a matter up for debate. For some students, it served as a place for discussion, and granted them a voice they didn't--or couldn't, for whatever reason--exercise in class. Others tended to ignore it, and the skipped posts became this weight that dragged down their grades. Overall, though, I think the blog is a lot more in tune with the pop culture focus than the reading responses, so we'll try that out. (It's also a lot easier to point to as "innovative" in a job talk--though I'm totally just thinking about the students, of course.)

The trick to the blog approach, if you're thinking of trying it, is that it's a lot of work. Students are constantly making posts and comments, and you need to keep up with them. I'll admit, I fell behind a few times last semester. And that was with under a dozen students--now, I've got a full roster of 35. I'll probably have to keep up a regular daily check just to keep afloat.

But don't worry, blog. Just because I'm going to be doing some blog action on the side doesn't mean that I don't love you any more. I just want to do other blogs on the side. You understand, I'm sure.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Of Ossuaries and Operas

2012-01-01T12:51:00.006-05:00

Is there any better way to ring in the New Year than with an examination of the books a university receives on a weekly basis?

Well, yes, actually. I can think of a half dozen or so rather quickly. But this is the way we're doing things here. Waiving the further adieu, here's Bibliophile.

There's a mere 1000 new books this week; it looks like the torrent dwindles to a trickle when most of the university staff are still out on break. A mere 1000. My, we'll be done this in no time.

Sins of old age 14 piano pieces [electronic resource] / composed by Gioachino Antonio Rossini. [S.l.] : ASV, 1998.
We appear to be getting another influx of musical sources. My google scholarship tells me that Rossini was a 19th century Italian composer, probably best known for his opera, the Barber of Seville. And the opera itself is probably best known for its Bugs Bunny parody, which I'll embed here:

I love Elmer Fudd's sense of entitlement on where it's okay to enter with a shotgun. It's like some hunter version of extreme golf; as long as the rabbit's in play, everywhere is fair game.

Cd-induced responses in plasma ionic regulation and oxidative stress in rainbow trout (O. mykiss) or lake whitefish (C. clupeaformis) during chronic waterborne exposure / by Amanda Mancini.
This entry is sandwiched between Preludi Ostinati and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 9. I really don't understand how the entries in these lists that are outside the Library of Congress filing are organized.

Devil's trill, and other violin sonatas [electronic resource]. London : Hyperion, 1991. Tartini, Giuseppe, 1692-1770.
Going back a little further, we have Tartini, an 18th century composer. I thought I'd look into anyone who had a good claim to doing Satan and fiddles before "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" made it cool. And since I'm in an embedding sort of mood, here it is:

At 13 + minutes, it's a little beyond what I'd call easy listening, but it's not bad.

Controversy spaces : a model of scientific and philosophical change / edited by Oscar Nudler. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub. Co., c2011.
Almost half way in, and we hit the listings proper. Nudler's anthology looks at issues of science and philosophy in terms of theoretical model based on the controversy a particular theory can create. Some of the controversies covered include general histories of catastrophes, the history of the mind, irreversibility from Fourier to chaos theory, linguistics, and DNA molecules. That's a staggering range of scope, if nothing else. And at a $150 price tag on Amazon.ca, this is one book that I'd definitely go with the library's copy.

Dial M for mentor : reflections on mentoring in film, television, and literature / Jonathan Gravells and Sue Wallace. Charlotte, NC : Information Age Publishing, c2011.
I'm focusing on this one because I was hoping they'd cover that Seinfeld episode where George attempts mentoring. Judging from Google Books, we're covering Shawshank Redemption, Jeeves and Wooster, Boston Legal, Lear, Buffy, The Matrix, and the Sopranos. So we have another very wide scope, albeit one of a very different nature. I'm not sure how you could approach something so large without it falling apart a bit, but the effort itself is noteworthy.

Cocktail hour under the tree of forgetfulness / Alexandra Fuller. New York : Penguin Press, 2011.
This one caught my eye as it was an unusual title to find outside of the fiction section. It appears to be a biographical examination of Fuller's mother, and her connection to Africa.

Players unleashed! : modding the Sims and the culture of gaming / Tanja Sihvonen. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press c2011.
Videogame books get a mention. Always. To be honest, you'd have to do some talking at this point to convince me that the Sims are still worth talking about, after being covered so thoroughly by game scholarship, but it sounds like Sihvonen is on the right track, focusing on the cultural contexts of Sims mods. And, browsing through her works cited (again, thanks to the power of Google. How did I ever do research before it? Don't answer that), she's mentioning all the right game studies people, from Aarseth to Wolf. Might be worth a look at some point. Mental note.

Next, a string of digital media books. First up:
Access contested : security, identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace information revolution and global politics / edited by Ronald Deibert ... [et al.]. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, c2012.
Essentially, it's a discussion of how the Internet, especially in terms of censorship and piracy, is evolving on the Asian continent. As you'd imagine, China looms large, but there's also discussion of the Malaysian blogosphere, regulation in Thailand, social institutions in the Phillipines, and opposition media in Burma. I can't say I recognize any of the contributors, but I imagine it would be a culturally enlightening read. Or utterly unfathomable. There tends not to be much middle ground in these cultural studies books.

Cultures of participation : media practices, politics and literacy / Hajo Greif ... [et al.] (eds.) Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, c2011.
Apparently, it's a collection of the papers delivered at the COST 298 Conference in Copenhagen, May 2009. It's an international, interdisciplinary conference focusing on how social media and technology change people's lives. Hmmm. Worth knowing that this conference exists, yes? The program for 2009 is here, if you're curious, though none of the panels in particular jump out at me.

Handbook of Internet studies / edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess. Chichester, West Sussex, UK ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
And then there's this. This book probably wouldn't have made it on my radar, to be honest, as these very general anthologies tend to be a dime a dozen (figuratively speaking; practically speaking, they tend to be much, much more than a dime a dozen). But Consalvo, a game studies prof who has shown up here before, makes it worth a look. Glancing purely at the chapter headings, it seems a little perfunctory, ("Internet and religion," "Internet and Games") and the only user review floating around for it seems to be rather damning. All the essays seem to have been written for the book, which makes for an interesting contrast with other anthologies, such as Nayar's New Media and Cybercultures Anthology. Nayar's book, in contrast, is a collection of essays written elsewhere, and gathered because they speak to a particular context. The pitfall of the former method is that it covers everything, but without depth; the pitfall of the second is that the topics are always considered outside of the original intent. I suppose the difference is in the titles; a handbook needs to be a survey of the area, and an anthology is, comparatively, a collection of difference. Personally, I'd use the handbook for a first year course, and the anthology for a second. (And I actually have used Nayar's anthology to teach a second year course. So there you go.)

Empire of death : a cultural history of ossuaries and charnel houses. New York : Thames & Hudson, 2011. Koudounaris, Paul.
Because you can never get enough charnel houses.

Postal pleasures : sex, scandal, and Victorian letters / Kate Thomas. New York : Oxford University Press, c2012. Thomas, Katie-Louise.
And here we are in the literature section. It's still early, but rather short on fiction this time around; it's much more focused on the scholarship about fiction. I mention this book because, to be honest, I find all the 19th century writing I read to be incredibly boring, despite the attempt of numerous colleagues to the contrary. The actual history is incredibly fascinating, from the British Empire to the Industrial Revolution to the rise of science. But the fiction and poetry and so forth? Eh. This may--may--be a good way to challenge my views on that front.

Vigilante women in contemporary American fiction / Alison Graham-Bertolini. 1st ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
I was hoping for a book on Buffy and Sarah Conner and Ripley and the like. What we're getting here is a bit more "traditionalist" with a study of the writings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Faulkner and the like. Still good. I guess.

Portraits of a few of the people I've made cry : stories / Christine Sneed. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, c2010.
There's the fiction! I'd like a list of the people I've made cry. It would probably be a short list. The list of people who have made me cry is... I regret opening this line of discussion.

Later Days.

Pop Pop! As in Pop Culture.

2011-12-30T13:06:00.003-05:00

I don't really have the fodder for a full post at the moment, so here's a list of some of the books/games/movies/TV shows I've watched over the last few days. Warning: there is a LOT.
I saw the (Americanized) Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was better than I was expecting, to be honest. Not that I was expecting something horrible, but when you realize that you're watching an adaptation of an adaptation, then you prepare yourself for the worst. And on the same note, I was surprised that the pacing felt very novel-like, in terms of subplot developments. For the origins to still shine through after these layers is somewhat surprising.

I read Snuff, the latest Terry Pratchett book. Admittedly, it's not a series highlights or anything. There's no particularly memorable new characters. (Although Vimes' son is developing a distinct personality) But at this point, I will, gratefully, read anything Pratchett signs his name to that isn't too obvious a cash grab. (Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, I'm looking at you.)

I watched a few episodes of Samurai Jack, as I was a little too old to see it the first time round. (Not that that stopped me with other "kids" shows at the time--I've seen most episodes of Recess, for example.) Jack is an odd duck--essentially, the high concept is "samurai warrior fights in sci-future." And so far, that's pretty much it. It's a children's cartoon that's essentially an action movie. There's little witty banter, character development, or even plot. But it's an action movie from a period when the phrase wasn't synonymous with "loud and dumb"--it's all done pretty well.

And I watched the first episode of Gargoyles. The Friday Quotation below explains the general gist of the show. What's also notable about it is that it had a rather wide swathe of Star Trek people voice characters. The main one was Jonathan Frake as series villain David Xanatos, but there were also repeat characters played by Marina Sirtis (Troi/Demona), Michael Dorn (Worf/Coldstone & Taurus), Kate Mulgrew (Janeway/Titania), Brent Spiner (Data/Puck), and Nichelle Nichols (Uhara, Diane Maza). And for another sci-fi connection, John Rhys-Davies from Sliders/Lord of the Rings played Macbeth--yes, the Shakespeare Macbeth. And now I've forgotten my point. Save that this show is awesome.

And I've been playing Skyrim, the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series. For the most part, it's more of a refinement than a deviation, and it's not really unique in any obvious way. But I think it does a much better job (better than Oblivion, at least) at depicting a interesting game world, complete with civil war factions, counter factions within the factions, wizard rivalries, city politics, and so forth. The problem, for me, is that it always feels as if you're interacting with this world from the outside, rather than actually being a part of it. But I imagine any game starts to feel like that once you're north of the.... 40 hour mark. (I went with 40 hours, after much inner debate; the truth is somewhere far, far north of that mark. Think Santa Clause territory.)
And there's more. Much more. Video game books, tv shows, books, web comics. But we'll let that hold it for now.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Nostalgia

2011-12-30T13:03:00.001-05:00

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled.
It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear.
It was the age of gargoyles.
Stone by day, warriors by night, we were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years.
Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again!
We are defenders of the night!
We are GARGOYLES!

--opening credits, Gargoyles.

In terms of "awesome things I loved in the 90s," this is right up there with "I am the terror that flaps in the night."

Bibliophile: The "C" Word. No, Not Christmas.

2011-12-26T13:33:00.006-05:00

Yeah, I forgot the last Friday Quotations. The holidays got in the way. Lootwise, I came away with two Huraki Murakami books. And a videogame where you attack zombies with chainsaws! What a life. Anyway, while the Bibliophile's official day is Sunday, it is on a less strict schedule than its quotation sibling, so it's now time for another edition of book searching.

(For those coming in late: Bibliophile is me going through the list of all the books added to my university's library in the past week, and commenting briefly on anything that looks good.)

Derrida for architects / Richard Coyne. London ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2011.
I've had a fondness for Coyne, ever since I took a class on spatial theory and we read a chapter from his book Technoromanticism. More recently, I read his Tuning of Space, of which I remember very, very little, but took copious notes. The book is part of a series: "______ for Architects," where you insert the name of some big theorist in the blank. Past thinkers include Irigaray, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Bhabha, Bourdieu, and Benjamin. All very good theorists, but it seems a little too rote a concept for me to get very excited about, to be honest.

Book forged in hell : Spinoza's scandalous treatise and the birth of the secular age / Steven Nadler.
I like that title. I don't really know anything at all about Spinoza, but the title's nice.

Memory chalet / Tony Judt. New York : Penguin Press, 2010.
When the memory palace sounds too gauche, but you still want to aspire to mental high society. Joking aside, the book is a set of essays Judt wrote, organizing his life while he was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. He used the method of the memory palace (whereby you organize your memory by populating a mental palace with objects that represent the respective memories), and dictated the book as he resided in a Swiss chalet, hence the title. I don't know what the actual essays are, but the composition itself is something I can respect.

Horse that leaps through clouds : a tale of espionage, the Silk Road and the rise of modern China / Eric Enno Tamm. 1st U.S. ed.
Tamm explores modern China by contrasting its current state with the account written by the Scandinavian Mannerheim a hundred years ago. I have an amateur interest in Chinese history; it's this vast swathe of human experience that barely makes a blip on the Western grand narrative of the past. This is a little more recent, and a little geared towards the ethnographic/travelogue genre, but I'd love to read it if I had a good chunk of time.

Room for all of us : surprising stories of loss and transformation / Adrienne Clarkson.
Mentioned because it's authored by a Canadian icon. I can still hear the Air Face satire: "I'm Adrienne Clarkson, and you're not." It's a collection of stories concerning the immigrant experience in Canada, a subject significant to Clarkson, given her own background.

Disconnected / Andrew Leigh.
Well, I guess it gets points for brevity, though it's not very descriptive on what the book's about. It's a "society has lost its way" kind of book, arguing that contemporary life, specifically contemporary Australian life, has lost its sense of community, and it needs to be fixed. I'm always a little skeptical of books with this premise; yes, things could be better, but at a certain point, a base response of "this is all messed up" just makes the mess a little worse. But at least this guy's got a proposed solution.

Cunt : a declaration of independence / Inga Muscio ; [foreword by Betty Dodson]. Expanded and updated 2nd ed. [Seattle] : Seal Press ; [Berkeley, Calif.] : Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2002.
There's the direct approach. Muscio has written, as you might have guessed, a feminist book. Specifically, it investigates the connotations of the word "cunt" and tries to reclaim it as a word of empowerment. I have to confess, one of the reviews said that the book did more than pay "lip service" to the subject, and I giggled, because I'm a 12 year old boy.

Theory of Zipf's law and beyond [electronic resource] / Alexander Saichev, Yannick Malevergne, Didier Sornette. Heidelberg ; New York : Springer, c2010.
Zipf's law: I would stop, but I love the sound of my own voice. Oh sorry, that's Artie Ziff. Zipf's Law says that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. That's much more exciting.

Steal : a cultural history of shoplifting / Rachel Shteir. New York : Penguin Press, 2011.
Shteir writes a history of... of shoplifting, like the title says. I know people who are convinced that shoplifting is phase that the modern teenager goes through; it's never been something I've particularly seen the appeal of (I'm more of a cookie-jar raider--I keep my petty thefts in the family), but I can relate to the small thrill of the petty larceny.

Radical prototypes : Allan Kaprow and the invention of happenings / Judith F. Rodenbeck. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011.
Kaprow was a performance artist (something of an understatement) in the 1960s, and he pioneered the happenings--public participatory art things, basically. Think of them as the flash mobs of the hippy era, only not really that at all. Rodenbeck wants to look at the happenings not as the happy-go-lucky community meetings, but as dark, sometimes twisted critiques of society.

Batman [videorecording] / Warner Bros. presents a Guber-Peters Company production ; a Tim Burton film ; produced by Jon Peters & Peter Guber ; directed by Tim Burton.
My university library has a copy of first Batman movie. Are you jealous? You're jealous.

Paying for it : a comic-strip memoir about being a john / Chester Brown. 1st hardcover ed. Montréal : Drawn & Quarterly, 2011.
Chester Brown's autobiographical account on his experience with the receiving end of prostitution. It's pretty good, although also rather bleak.

Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade : a duty-dance with death / Kurt Vonnegut. Dial Press trade pbk. ed. New York : Dial Press, 2009, c1969.
This is just a great book. As far as war satires go, it's right up there with Catch 22 for me.

Moonwalk with your eyes [electronic resource] : a pocket field guide / Tammy Plotner. Follow-up: "Thriller dance with your elbow: a reference book."

Reactions : the private life of atoms / by Peter Atkins. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
I don't really have a lot of useful commentary to offer regarding the science stuff, beyond "clever" jokes regarding the titles. But honestly, I like this one. It's appealing. Atkins starts with the basic building block-type chemicals and reactions--water, electrolysis, catalysis, and so forth--and explains how they combine for more complicated processes. It's very much "pop science," but that's basically the only kind I can really appreciate anyway.

Dingo / by Brad Purcell. Collingwood, Vic. : CSIRO Pub., c2010.
I wanted to post a Dingo picture.

Bioethics matters : a guide for concerned Catholics / Moira McQueen. London ; New York : Burns & Oates, 2009.
Containing such hot button bioethics topics such as euthanasia, prenatal genetics, and so forth. I've got some problems with some of the traditional Catholic stances on a few of these issues, but it could be worth it to keep up on some of the current arguments.

Relatively short list this time around. I won't complain about that.

And Then There's That Time I Gave a Pigeon a Concussion

2011-12-21T18:27:00.002-05:00

I was out and about today, walking to a lunch engagement. Approaching on my left, there's a pigeon pecking at some crumbs someone dropped. It's inside one of those enclosed bus-waiting areas, the kind with 3 glass walls and a roof. I get close, and I guess I got too close. It takes off--and slams headfirst into the glass wall. Twice. Finally, it figures out that this line of flight isn't going to work, and exits the booth, taking to the skies.

I feel bad. Then I laugh. Then I feel bad again.

This is an animal studies issue, right?

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Superhero Studies and Church for Profit

2011-12-20T13:37:00.010-05:00

My goodness. The holidays start, and suddenly I forget that Biblophile ever existed. Well, sooner mended then ended.

I like to think of Harriet Tubman [electronic resource] : chamber works / Wolff.
Now, this sounds interesting. A series of chamber music dedicated to Harriet Tubman, the 19th century abolitionist. And it's composed/performed by Christian Wolff, a composer who studied under and collaborated with John Cage. (John Cage trivia fact: it was Christian Wolff, whose parents owned a publishing company, who gave Cage an in-house translation of the I-Ching, which would go on to have a large impact on the composer's methods and thoughts.) I don't know how the actual music will sound, mind you, but I'm sure it'd be interesting.

Vaudeville accordion classics [electronic resource] : the complete music of Guido Deiro (1886-1950).
In case you're wondering, that sounds like this:

Why yes; our library did receive access to a new music database this week.

Person vanishes : John Dewey's philosophy of experience and the self / Yoram Lubling. New York : Peter Lang, c2011.
Mentioned mainly because I've got a soft spot for Dewey. Anyone who founds a widely-used library organization system is okay in my books, though personally I prefer the Library of Congress coding. ...I have a favorite library system. I am such a geek. Anyway, the book is attempting to synthesize a theory of personality based on Dewey's body of work, coming up with a version of self that emphasizes individual experience, and the limitations thereof. It's apparently a stand against dualism and attempts to apply the method to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last bit sounds like a bit of a stretch; this may be one for Dewey completitionists. (He has those, right?)

Priority of events : Deleuze's Logic of Sense / Sean Bowden.
This week's dose of Deleuze. Bowden argues that Deleuze places events over substances, and presumably explains what that means. There is also, I understand, a heavy focus on Leibnez, Simondon, and individuation, which I last came across in my interminable Stiegler readings.

Hitchens vs. Blair : be it resolved religion is a force for good in the world / Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair.
Here's a timely one. It's a transcription of their 2010 Toronto debate on the subject,which apparently happened without even showing up as a blip on my radar, because I pay virtually no attention to my surroundings. Sigh. It has Blair arguing in religion's favor, and Hitchens against it. (Although if you didn't already know which side Hitchens was arguing, you're probably not the audience for this book anyway.) Additionally, it has an interview with Hitchens by Noah Richler, and one with Blair by John Geiger. Oh wait; judging by the page numbers, this may be a version without the additional interviews. If you'd rather watch it to begin with, it's all on youtube, here.

Juvenile sexuality, Kabbalah, and Catholic reformation in Italy [electronic resource] : Tiferet bahurim by Pinhas Barukh ben Pelatiyah Monselice / by Roni Weinstein ; translated by Batya Stein.
Now there's a set of subjects that don't immediately seem to go together. Weinstein is actually analyzing a 17th century book, the Tiferet bahurim, a book telling Jewish young men of the period how to raise a family and conduct themselves sexually. His approach is to situate the advice in the wider context of Jewish tradition and 17th century (extremely Catholic) Italy. Is it odd that this premise interests me much more than a book investigating these subjects on a contemporary basis?

Commercial church : Black churches and the new religious marketplace in America / Mary Hinton.
Essentially, I'm just intrigued by the entanglements between religion and commerce. Ever since I was introduced to the "moneylenders in the temple" part of the Gospel, I've thought of it as an issue without an easy answer. Religion shouldn't be overly concerned with material wealth (easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven) but at the same time, it can't, and shouldn't be avoided--commerce is a part of people's lives, a vital part, and the various churches and so forth can't ignore that. Anyway, Hinton's book is looking at a more specific phenomenon, religious groups and churches that cater to a predominantly black congregation. Moreover, it's critical in particular of the Potter's House Megachurch and Creflo Dollar's World Changers Church International, which is an amazingly loaded name in the context of the aforementioned moneylenders. The latter is also a proponent of Prosperity theology, the belief that, grossly simplified, that God wants Christians to be successful and have money. 'Cause you know, Jesus was known for being a big spender. Hinton's argument is that these two represent a break with the traditional black church, and yeah, it seems like she has a pretty obvious case.

In the traces of our name : the influece [sic] of given names in life. London : Karnac Books, 2011. Tesone, Juan Eduardo.
As someone whose first name (and middle name, for that matter) is common as dirt (in English-speaking countries, at least), I am interested in this topic. What is in a name? An awful lot, actually. Tesone looks at the personal name from a psychological perspective, both in terms of what it inscribes on the child from the parents, and how the child writes that name, and what that means. I'm not a big fan of psychological approaches in general, but this sounds promising.

Small powers in the age of total war, 1900-1940 / edited by Herman Amersfoort, Wim Klinkert. Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2011.
The obvious question of the book is, which countries fall into the "small powers" category? Sorry, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland--you've all been declared small fish in the early 20th century pond. And, I suspect, there but the grace of a Eurocentric focus goes Canada.

Cyprus problem : what everyone needs to know / James Ker-Lindsay.
There's an aggressive title, especially regarding a subject that may be uncharitably called a local issue. Why should everyone know? I'm not sure Ker-Lindsay answers that, besides an indirect answer: Cyprus been a focus point of UN and European concern for decades now, as its continuing civil war has brought it international attention. And whenever a war goes on for that long, the human suffering involved means it deserves some attention, especially in the form of compassion. Ker-Lindsay here outlines the issues--as the current UN expert advisor on the subject, he's in a good position to know what he's talking about.

Tales from the sausage factory : making laws in New York State / Daniel L. Feldman and Gerald Benjamin.
Catchy title. Essentially, it's a book on the history of New York legislature, where it went wrong, and how to make it right again. It's a subject I have very little interest in, but still: catchy title.

Re-made in Japan : everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society / edited and with an introduction by Joseph J. Tobin. New Haven : Yale University Press, c1992.
With my videogame focus, I tend to come into contact with a lot of Japanese products (videogames) that have been localized for Western audiences. This is the inverse trend--taking Western products and making them Japanese. The book's a little old (published in 1994), which makes it a little out-of-date in pop culture discussions, but it should be a fascinating read for anyone doing comparative culture studies with a focus on Japan.

Work of play : meaning-making in video games / Aaron Chia Yuan Hung. New York : Peter Lang, c2011.
Mentioned out of professional obligations. I'll have to put a hold on this one and flip through it once I get back from vacation. It looks like it's focused on game design for the purpose of education, which isn't really one of my interests, to be honest.

Surface tensions : surgery, bodily boundaries, and the social self / Lenore Manderson. Walnut Creek, Calif. : Left Coast Press, c2011.
Manderson interviews people who have suffered the loss of limbs, functions, and organ replacements, in terms of how they re-establish their bodies and identities afterwards. The perfect holiday gift for body/technology scholar on your list.

Revolution will be digitised : dispatches from the information war / Heather Brooke.
Here's one to cater to my digital humanities interest. Brooke questions who holds the power in the global information economy. The book covers her involvement with British access to information laws, Wikileaks, modern hackers, and the information manipulation of the American government. It's a very "us vs. big government" kind of story, whereas I'm all about the "us vs. big corporation" story, but that doesn't make it any less true. And it's endorsed by cybermedia superstar, Cory Doctorow!

Television as digital media / edited by James Bennett and Niki Strange. Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2011.
Having recently read Sheila C. Murphy's "How Television Invented Digital Media," this anthology appeals to me by acknowledging a simple truth: as much as a cell phone or a computer monitor, the modern television is a digital artifact, washing us in bits and bytes that it assembles into hypermediated wholes. The focus here seems to be television as a technology rather than specific programs, and the only contributor I recognize is Graeme Turner, though I'm at an utter loss to explain why I recognize his name. Still, a good topic, and I'm glad someone's doing it.

Digital condition : class and culture in the information network / Rob Wilkie. 1st ed. New York : Fordham University Press, 2011.
And for the digital media trifecta, we have Wilkie and Digital Condition. Essentially, Wilkie argues that the "disembodiment" side of cyberspace has lead to an obfuscation of social inequality. And the list of theorists is impressive enough: "Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells." It's a veritable who's who of digital culture and social issues.

I'll have what she's having : mapping social behavior / Alex Bentley, Mark Earls, and Michael J. O'Brien. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011.
Points for the title. The subject, for those interested in such things, is a sociological study on how people use the actions of others to make choices.

Emperor has no clothes : teaching about race and racism to people who don't want to know / Tema Okun. Charlotte, N.C. : Information Age Pub., c2010.
Fatigue is setting in. The amount and quality of research I do into the titles will be considerably reduced from here on out. I'll just say, then, I like the idea of book. Racism is one of those issues where the worst cases are generally those most resistant to new information.

Blood at the root : lynching as American cultural nucleus / Jennie Lightweis-Goff.
Speaking of racism, I think that when there's a case to be made that your culture can be described in terms of the history of lynching, you've got a problem.

Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day : a guide to starting, revising, and finishing your doctoral thesis / Joan Bolker. 1st ed. New York : H. Holt, 1998.
Now here's a real classic. I've heard this book recommended by professors, so it might be worth a look.

Bytes and backbeats : repurposing music in the digital age / Steve Savage. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Press, c2011.
Music is one of my weak points, both in terms of pop culture studies and personally (as I've alluded to before Remember when my blog was a participatory thing that people commented on? Yeah. ). Maybe this book could fill some gaps. Savage uses three digital music projects to explore the participatory and contextual nature of digital music, and how it can repurpose other forms.

Retromania : pop culture's addiction to its own past / Simon Reynolds. London ; [New York] : Faber & Faber, c2011.
This. How soon something can become nostalgic seems to be accelerating; I've heard people look back with fondness on the Rick Rolling internet meme. It might be the side effect of the acceleration of culture: the faster things get, the more we look fondly on anything we can use to differentiate the present from other time periods. I'll point you to recently reviewed Ready Player One for a rather unironic example of pop culture past addiction. Reynolds is looking more specifically music, asking whether such a backwards view means the death knell of creativity. I haven't read his book, but I'm guessing that he's arguing that it doesn't.

Clifton Childree : fuck that chicken from Popeyes.
I have no idea what this about, but I feel compelled to find out.

Game urbanism : manual for cultural spatial planning / Hans Venhuizen ; with contributions by Charles Landry, Francien van Westrenen ; [translation, Billy Nolan, Leo Reijnen].
Venhuizen espouses his theory place and culture into a ludic, gamelike space. I've got some friends interested in Augmented Reality type stuff; I might send this book their way.

New narratives : stories and storytelling in the digital age / edited by Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c2011.
Another book flagged as of interest for digital media scholars. It's an updated look at how narrative functions in technology, hypertext, and videogames, among other digital things. This is one of the rare essay collections I could see myself perusing soon; narrative theory is a persistent subject in my area, and keeing abreast of the most recent arguments is a good idea. And it's got a lot of the big names of the field. There's Marie-Laure Ryan on user participation; Michael Joyce on narrative transparency; Nick Montfort on the authorship system Curveship; Brian Greenspan on story maps; James Newman and Iain Simons on Lego Star Wars. (Narrative in a Star Wars video game? Take that, Jesper Juul.) Mental note: Definitely on my "to read" list.

Surveillance of women on reality television : watching The bachelor and The bachelorette / Rachel E. Dubrofsky. Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, c2011.
This looks like a fun read.

Bachelors and bunnies : the sexual politics of Playboy / Carrie Pitzulo. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2011.
See above.

And here's a set of comic-based scholarship:
Superheroes of the Round Table : comics connections to Medieval and Renaissance literature / Jason Tondro. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2011.
Classics and comics / edited by George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall. Oxford [U.K.] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
Mutants & mystics : science fiction, superhero comics, and the paranormal / Jeffrey J. Kripal. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Tondro is apparently using classic literature--Shakespeare, Spenser, Authurian literature, and the like--to inform readings of Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, and Grant Morrison, and vice versa. Kovacs and Marshall's collection appears to be more of the same, although I'll note that it features an essay by Eric Shanower, he of the criminally underrated Bronze Age series. I guess which book you prefer depends on whether you're looking for a collection or a prolonged argument. Kripal's focus is a little different, examining how comic book writers use comics to explore the paranormal, from Moore and sex magic (with an emphasis on sex--I've read Promethea)to Jack Kirby's superhero pantheons. It's a banner week for superhero studies.

Supergods : what masked vigilantes, miraculous mutants, and a sun god from Smallville can teach us about being human / Grant Morrison. New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2011.
Speaking of which--Grant Morrison's book on philosophy and comics? Hells yeah. Another mental note, to recall the bejeezus out of this when I get back. Why do all the good books come to the library while I'm on vacay?

James Bond in world and popular culture : the films are not enough / edited by Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield and Jack Becker. 2nd ed. Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars, 2011
Clever title.

Hours / Michael Cunningham. New York : Picador USA ; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2000].
Mentioned because it's one of my favorite books. And still the most beautifully written book I've ever read.

And then there's the long slog through the sciences. Don't get me wrong. I love the sciences. Some of my best friends are... science-y. But the titles are... eh.

First steps in random walks : from tools to applications / J. Klafter and I.M. Sokolov. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
This one mildly amused me. I do hope it was deliberate.
Transylvanian dinosaurs / by David B. Weishampel and Coralia-Maria Jianu. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
You thought raptors were tough? Try vampire raptors. Add zombie ninjas, and you've got yourself a meme.

Once More, A Feeling

2011-12-18T13:15:00.005-05:00

I recently rewatched the classic (yeah, I'll use the word "classic" here) Buffy episode 6, season 7, better known as the musical episode. Yes, they did it before Scrubs, Grey's Anatomy, and Glee made it cool. Not before Cop Rock, the musical show about police officers, but well, Cop Rock most definitely did not make musicals cool.

The verdict? A little disappointing, to be honest. The songs haven't aged as well in reality as they did in my mind. Even the most charitable interpretation would have to admit Whedon gets a lot better at writing for song and dance by the time Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog comes a few years later. What saves it, for the most part, is that there's some really good singers among the core cast. That's not to say the songs are bad; I still got the dose of nostalgia I was looking for.

But the one that really strikes me years later is this one, Amber Benson as Tara singing "I'm Under Your Spell."

I really wanted to get a version with the video, but, alas, Youtube does not have all that is desired. First, it's a very character-oriented song. Willow was definitely the more "outgoing" person in their relationship, compared to Tara's more withdrawn nature, and that definitely comes through here, perhaps even to an unhealthy extent. The positive interpretation is that Tara is saying, er, singing, that Willow brings out the best in her, which is a common enough sentiment for those in happy relationships (or so I'm told). But the other, at least as valid, interpretation is that Tara is really putting a lot of weight on Willow for their relationship ("Nothing I can do, you just took my soul with you." Yikes.)

But what's really amazing, to me, is the innuendo that got by the censors in the final stanza. Take a close look:
The moon through the tide, I can feel you inside.
I'm under your spell.
Surging like the sea, floating here so helplessly.
I break with every swe - ll,
Lost in ecstasy, spread beneath my Willow tree.
You make me comple - te.
You make me com - plete.
You make me com - plete.
You make me com - plete.

"I can feel you inside." "break with every swell." "Lost in ecstasy, spread beneath my Willow tree." There is a subtext here. And just in case that subtext isn't clear, in the original video, at this point, the two women are embracing each other in bed, and the then Willow, with a devilish look on her face, moves from face to face to somewhere decidedly lower on Tara's body. I don't think she's moving down in order to tickle her feet. I really can't believe that this scene made it past the Fox censors in 2001. How does it end? Well, put it this way: "complete" is definitely pronounced as two words.

And yet, there's nothing puerile or salacious about the scene. This isn't a "OMG too chicks duing it xxxx" scene done more for a male audience than anyone else. It's a very sweet, rather romantic scene between two gay characters. It's a portrayal that I can't think of seeing anywhere else on prime time television, and it was ten years ago now. Good for them, frankly. And why aren't we still seeing more of that now?

Later Days.

Nostalgia Facts: Ow.

2011-12-17T12:18:00.002-05:00

I never feel quite at home upon reaching my childhood home until I have a shower. First, there's the shower door, missing its handle for the past decade now. It must be navigated along its rungs with a degree of care. It's not some shower curtain that can be thrust to and fro in an absentminded, hurried gesture, mere prelude to the shower itself. Rather, it encourages an attentive approach to the relationship between man and technology.

Then there's the showerhead itself. It's an ancient, ragged looking thing, at least 25 years old. It is also one of the best, most powerful examples of its breed that I have ever experienced. For the past decade now, I've been showering in apartments, rented houses, and... sigh... rez washrooms. The water is always under someone else's control, and emits itself in turgid, often frigid flows. I am sick of this whiffling water. The older I get, the more I appreciate a good nozzle. You know the saying on what cleanliness is next to? Well, showerhead is next to godhead.

Finally, there is the faucet itself. In most baths, the faucet is attached to the wall at a right angle. Ours has a 45 degree decline. That's because, about nine years ago, I slipped in the tub, somehow twisting so that I landed facing away from the showerhead, and slammed my back into the faucet, lowering it to its current state. And yes, it was pretty painful, and yes, it left a lasting but if you think I got messed up, then, Gentle Reader, you should see the other guy. Er, appliance.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Quoth Ho, Ho, Ho.

2011-12-17T00:32:00.006-05:00

It's been a little dead, blog-wise. We're officially in the X-Mas slump. But let's get back into the swing, with a Friday Quotation. And by quotation, I mean a comic book scan:
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(If the image isn't appearing, try clicking on it. It's a hassle, I know, but I trust that you're all capable of it.) That is Volstagg the Voluminous, Norse God/gourmand, filling in for Ol' Saint Nick. And the comic is Journey into Mystery #632, wherein Loki, the God of Mischief, destroyer of worlds, perpetrator of Ragnorak, is a 10 year old boy who must find homes for a litter of hellhound puppies. It's honestly one of the best single issue comics I've read this year. And perfect for stocking stuffers, if one is so inclined.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Of Magical Monks and Sex-Crazed Bugs

2011-12-11T19:34:00.006-05:00

Look! In the sky! It's an indices! No, it's a compendium! No, it's... Bibliophile!

Equine massage : a practical guide / Jean-Pierre Hourdebaigt.
How to keep the charley horses away from your horse named Charley.

Deleuze and ethics / edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2011.
Ah, the weekly Deleuze spot. This one investigates how Deleuze looks at values, normativity, and, surprise, surprise, ethics.

How to think about weird things : critical thinking for a new age / Theodore Schick, Jr., Lewis Vaughn ; foreword by Martin Gardner.
Eye-catching title. The idea is that the authors apply typical philosophical notions of evaluation to "weird" phenomena, including ESP, UFO sightings, miracle cures, and human combustion. It has a bit of an "undergrad" feel to it, though I realize that saying so reflects more on my intellectual snobbery than on the book. And considering that my own area is video game studies, I probably don't have a leg to stand on here.

Faith and money : how religion contributes to wealth and poverty / Lisa A. Keister. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
The idea behind this book is to look into how, in the US, a person's religious beliefs impacts their networth and savings. It's an empirical-based study, so it's less about offering potential explanations for the results and more of establishing how the results were gathered in the first place. It's a pretty thorny issue; does a particular denomination encourage or discourage economic growth? How much does money buy happiness?

Lovelorn ghost and the magical monk : practicing Buddhism in modern Thailand / Justin Thomas McDaniel.
The first half sounds like a good title for a manga series. What the book is actually about is tracing the evolution of these two figures throughout Buddhist culture. I suppose a Christian equivalent would be mapping Messiah figures or the Wandering Jew.

History of the world in 100 objects / Neil MacGregor.
I mention this one because a friend of mine listens to the British podcast of the same name. (Incidentally, he recommends the cast over the book, as the voice and tone of the figures interviewed make a significant contribution to the proceedings.) The idea is that each object (found in the British museum) is used to justify a brief exploration into the history it represents. It's a potentially productive idea.

Players unleashed! : modding the Sims and the culture of gaming / Tanja Sihvonen. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press c2011.
I'm contractually obligated to draw attention to any book touching on video games. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the Sims, and pretty significant for those interested in participatory game mod culture in general.

Mediated boyhoods : boys, teens, and young men in popular media and culture / edited by Annette Wannamaker. New York : Peter Lang, c2011.
While the table of contents don't mention very many specific works (excepting an essay on the Spy Kids franchise), it does cover videos, documentary films, pop music, and hip hop, and both homosocial and homosexual relations between young males. There's nothing that jumped out as a must-read essay, but if the subject interests anyone, it might be worth a look.

New media and technology : youth as content creators / Marina Umaschi Bers, issue editor. San Francisco, Calif. : Jossey-Bass/Wiley, c2011.
Here's a similar youth-oriented focus, but closer to my personal subject area. It's an anthology with essays on youth use of Facebook apps, ARGs, Youtube videos, and mobile phones. Again, there's no essays that particularly jump out at me, but it'd be a good resource for those more interested in the subject.

Nudge, nudge, think, think : experimenting with ways to change civic behaviour.
John, Peter, 1960-.
Major points for the title. Sadly, it's not about the intellectual lives of John Cleese and Eric Idle, but a method of social action. John argues, in a position against his last book, that it's not enough to "nudge" people into social change--they must enter into new patterns of thinking as well.

In the peanut gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000 : essays on film, fandom, technology, and the culture of riffing / edited by Robert G. Weiner and Shelley E. Barba ; forewords by Kevin Murphy and Robert Moses Peaslee ; afterword by Mary Jo Pehl. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2011.
This would probably be a pretty fun read. And it might inspire me to actually watch one of the Mystery Science episodes.

War, politics and superheroes : ethics and propaganda in comics and film / Marc DiPaolo.
I don't know anything about this, except that it has chapters on the Punisher, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and a final chapter on President Obama and zombies. Really, that's all anyone needs to know.

Newslore : contemporary folklore on the Internet / Russell Frank.
Frank looks at how rumors and stories pass through the Internet, and what they say about public responses. Honestly, it's an issue that may be too big for analysis; there's message forums, motivational memes, email forwarding, videos, images, podcasts, blogs, twitter feeds... I suppose the big issue is how Frank defines newslore in comparison to folklore. To me, folklore is first and foremost information that's passed down, usually in a generational context. But internet memes and so forth aren't passed down--if anything, they're generally incomprehensible a few years down the line. So it's not passed down, but passed around; it's news, in the sense that as soon as it stops being news, it might as well cease to exist.

Sex on six legs : lessons on life, love, and language from the insect world / Marlene Zuk.
I presume that the lessons don't involve post-coitally ripping your mate in half and devouring him in order to feed the brood. But don't tell me; I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.

Cyber junkie : escape the gaming and Internet trap / Kevin Roberts.
Sigh. Roberts discusses how people obsessed with games show classic signs of addiction and offers a sixteen step process for recovering addicts. I'm of two minds of this sort of book--on the one hand, I don't want to accuse the people who lose jobs and friends and family to video game time of being weak people. Everyone has their own demons, everyone is fighting a great battle. At the same time, I would like to point out that just as not everyone who plays a first person shooter goes on to become dangerously violent, not everyone who plays a video game is dangerously addicted. There are hundreds of mitigating factors involved. I think it's important that we engage in the debate of what makes a game addictive, and how we deal with that potential. What I'm afraid of is that a book like this operates from basic assumptions about the nature of compulsion, and treats those assumptions like facts. And as soon as you've created a general method, you're doing some level of abstraction and assumption. And when a book on game addiction is classified between a book on autism and another on down's syndrome, you're perpetuating another level of assumptions. (And yes, I realize the irony on pontificating like this when I haven't read the book myself.)

And on that proselytizing note, I'll draw this session to an end. Till the next read.

Later Days.

Book Reviews: Let's Pretend We Can Keep This Short, Shall We? Part III

2011-12-11T16:26:00.000-05:00

It Was the War of the Trenches.by Jacques Tardi. "I haven't told the 'whole story' because that would be a monstrous enterprise. From when I first herd my grandfather's stories, I've always been haunted by the desire to try to create an account of this early part of the 20th century. I consulted books...; I used them as departure points for episodes which I then fictionalized. It was not my goal to create a catalog of weapons and uniforms--although I did, of course, use documentation--even less so to render an accounting: How many shells per square meter, the number of men involved in such-and-such offensive. ... The only thing that interests me is man and his suffering, and it fills me with rage." --Tardi, in the Foreword.

In "It Was the War of the Trenches," Tardi provides a fictional account of French frontline soldiers during World War I. You can't really say there's a story at work here; it's rather a series of vignettes, almost all of them ending with the death of the figures they depict. The result is that the names and characters become a blur, with the only commonalities being war, death, and the trenches. But that, I think, is Tardi's point: the war dehumanized its victims, and everyone was just a body in the trenches. After the first establishing part, most of the book is told in 3-long panels per page, and the repetition of form contributes to the overall sense of immersion. It's a bleak book, without consolation or mercy. It ends in the armistice, but the final panel of corpses that were just alive tells us that such treaties always come too late.

This book is the third I've read from Tardi, the other two being the almost absurdist "You Are There" and the noir adaptation "Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot." This book is by far my favorite. Both of the others had much more in terms of characterization and plot, but they also both left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I don't think I have the French political background to really grasp There's ending, and Sniper's just seemed nihilist. And that's an odd response, given that Trenches is far more nihilist--and more sniper-filled, for that matter. Part of the difference is that I don't like the way Tardi writes women. I realize that there's a tendency to idealize female discourse in English male writers, and I feel that, on some intellectual level, I should appreciate what Tardi's doing in attempting to portray them as different, but it often comes across as less "unidealized" and more of "woman = mother earth savage." (See the female characters in Sniper and There; I also feel the same way about many of the female characters in the Dungeon series by Sfar and Trondheim; perhaps it's a cultural thing.) So perhaps I like Trenches because the female element that Tardi is misconstruing (IMO) is minimalized. Mostly, though, I think what I like is that Tardi doesn't flinch from his depiction. These are men dying in horrible ways. There's no false nobility, no heroism. Just death.

I guess I have to ask, though, what the use of such a book is. We are long past World War 1, after all; these men would almost certainly be dead now one way or the other. Tardi makes it clear that his connection to the war is personal, in dedicating it to his grandfather. It's also a cultural connection--a war fought on French soil. And I think, as evidenced by the quotation above, it's representative of all wars to him, especially the brutality of the modern war. Not brutal in the sense of people savagely attacking the message--a message, one of many messages--here may be that we need to see soldiers as people, see everyone as people. Does it work on that level? I don't know. It made me reflect on the subject, for a little while at least. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's a start.

Later Days.

Book Reviews: Let's Pretend We Can Keep This Short, Shall We? Part II

2011-12-09T14:38:00.003-05:00

The Finder Library Vol. 1 by Carla Speed McNeil. "He is arrogant... He is shameless, immoral, anti-social, irresponsible. He's too slick. He's so charming, but he's callous. Cunning, and too self-assured. He is dangerous." "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." I've long passed the point where I can still justifiably be surprised that there's some award-winning graphic novel that I've never heard of. But here we are, with The Finder Library, winner of the 2009 Eisner award in the webcomic category, a series I've never even heard of before now.

I hesitate to describe the premise, since I'm not sure I've got it right. But from what I gather, it all takes place in a future sci-fi setting where the world has been divided into various castes and tribes. Jaeger, the title character, is a half-breed, and in a very strict caste world, he doesn't really fit in. He took on the only role available to him: sin-eater, someone who takes on the punishments and sins of other people who can't bear them all themselves. His dedication to this role in his youth gave him a second title: Finder, one who is given special tasks of exploration and aid to others.

The story is divided up into three main parts: the first and longest describes Jaeger caught up in a domestic situation, and a very complex one. A male from a paternalistic, military tribe broke clan rules and married a female from a tribe where the gender roles are extremely feminized (in a traditional Western, and biological sense)--the males have breasts, and penises that are tucked into them when not in use. The man is Jaeger's military commander, and he undergoes a mental breakdown, and barricades his family from the world until he's hospitalized/arrested. Jaeger looks after the family in his absence--and starts an affair with the wife, who exists primarily in her own fantasy world. And that's without counting the children:the oldest, who's attempting to bed Jaeger, the son, who as you might imagine, is very confused (what with the breasts and all), and the youngest daughter, who is attracted to her mother's fantasy world. Jaeger feels responsibility for everyone involved, and a guilt that he's gotten so involved to begin with.

As you can imagine, it's hardly a typical sci-fi superhero story, though Jaeger certainly has the superhero background. And while I felt for the characters, I really didn't like Jaeger. He's too... well, perfect. He's the rugged individual who plays by his own rules. He's the the tormented artist searching for his muse. He's the sensitive, caring individual who also happens to be a virile and caring lover. He's great with kids, but you can't chain him down, man. He's a female fantasy, and while I don't have any problem with female fantasies (see as credentials Gossip Girl, My Little Pony, Being Erica), this particular one is a little smug for my tastes.

And yet, I still liked the story, and cared for the characters (although my dislike for Jaeger probably gave me a bit too much sympathy for the cuckolded/clinically insane and emotionally dangerous father character). But I preferred the second story, which is Jaeger trying to prevent a tribal war in the middle of the future equivalent of Disney Land (providing a clever satire on war and consumerism), and the last story, which uses the memory of Jaeger--the youngest daughter of the aforementioned family grows up, struggling to find an outlet for her own creativity. (I can certainly relate to that sentiment.) The first and third stories especially are things you'd never find in mainstream, male-oriented comics, and it's interesting that McNeil found a space to tell them using a character who's basically a more sensitive version of Wolverine. McNeil's art progresses nicely through this 22-issue volume, and the final few bits have some really great facial expressions. It's a good read, and it would probably be even better read for an early teenage female comic book reader--if you could find such a creature.

The sad thing is, this still counts as a short book review, by this blog's standards.

Later Days.

Book Reviews: Let's Pretend We Can Keep This Short, Shall We? Part I

2011-12-09T14:21:00.004-05:00

Next Tuesday, I make my annual pilgrimage back to the land of snow and horizon. So at the moment, I'm busy with finishing all the little things that need to be done before I leave. Student papers, essays... and of course, the public library books that must be returned before I depart. Thus, I've finished four lingering books in the last 24 hours, and while I could do a long full-length review of any of the four, I thought that something more abridged may be more appropriate. I think I'll divide them into four parts and release them over the next few days.
As a bonus aside, I've been thinking about the value of literature and videogames and media as such, and added a subtitle to the blog as a result. Let me know your thoughts.
Let us begin.

Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury. One of Issac Asimov's more enduring ideas was the Foundation series, a number of books based on a simple premise: while you can't predict what any individual human can do, you can, mathematically, determine what the human race as a whole will do. And if you know that, then you'll be able to alter the course to the outcome you find most beneficial. The Foundation books themselves depict the first few centuries, with humanity slowly falling under the pyschohistorians' control; Kingsbury's book imagines what happens (without ever explicitly referring to the Foundation books) a few millenia later, with the larger galaxy at peace. He also adds a number of other "future" elements, but the most interesting one is probably the fam: every adult human in the future has a fam, an electronic device that hooks directly into their head, connecting them to intergalactic databanks, aiding in their mental processing and memory storage. It's a logical extension of our current devices, and works well in the context.

The details of the plot are actually quite simple: an up-and-coming psychohistorian realizes that the rules of psychohistory are wrong, and that they're heading for an unmitigated disaster. He is regarded as dangerous for these views, and has his fam removed as a result. The story's structure is rather odd--we get the scene I've described rather immediately, but most of the book is spent on the protagonist's childhood and upbringing, so that by the time we actually reach the "now" point, there's so little of the book left that it feels both rushed and dragged out, and neither in a good way. The strength of the book is its ideas. First, there's something amusingly "meta" about the plot, in that it's a new set of eyes finding a flaw in a plot that's been accepted as a matter of fact for years. And psychohistory is a concept that's always struck at the root of what it means to be human. Do we have free will? How much do our actions matter? If the course of history can be mapped out, where do we fit on the map? We may be able to move freely through and in a system, ala de Certeau, but if we're always trapped in the system, is there any freedom at all? The book doesn't answer these issues definitively (and it is far, far too long) but it raises them in provocative ways.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Think Hitchhiker's Guide meets Glinda's Great Book of Records

2011-12-09T12:18:00.001-05:00

"The nephews, moreover, hold the key for entry into the adult world, and they make good use of it: the Junior Woodchuck (Boy Scout) Handbook. It is a Golden Treasury of conventional wisdom. It has an answer to every situation, every period, every date, every action, every technical problem. Just follow the instructions on the can, to ge4t out of any difficulty. It represents the accumulation of convention s permitting the child to control the future and trap it, so that it will not vary from the pat, so that all will repeat itself. All courses of action have been pretested and approved by authority of the manual, which is the tribunal of history, the eternal law, sponsored and sanctified by those who will inherit the world. It's all written down there, in that ridig catechism, just put it into practice and carry on reading. even the adversary is possessed of objective and just standards. The Handbook is one of those rare one-hundred-percent-perfect gimmicks in the complex world of Disney: out of forty-five instances in which it is used, it never fails once, beating in infallibility even the almost perfect Mickey Mouse." --Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to read Donald Duck; Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.

Later Days.

The Collection, of course, would be called "Good Grief."

2011-12-07T12:23:00.003-05:00

Back when I was a starry-eyed MA with hopes and dreams a non-expanding waist line, I dabbled in creative writing. God help me, I dabbled in poetry. Particularly, I had an idea that I'd do a collection of poems that was based on reflections on the characters from Peanuts. I only finished two poems (sadly, the world will never hear the wonder of "I Am the Pig Pen.). One is titled "The Little Red-Haired Woman" and the other I'm going to share today. I'd like to put some heavy caveats in front: first, I really don't get poetry, generally, and I think this reflects that. Second, it really works better as a spoken poem, when I can add some inflection and emphasis. And third, I'm really very bad at poetry. And with that...

I Love Lucy
Lucy is a bad sister.
She berates her brothers’ blankets and knocks over their blocks.
She gives orders that Must Not Be Denied.
She plays the big sister card so often, it’s the only one in the deck.
Years from now, Lucy is the sister you only see at weddings and funerals.

Lucy is a bad friend.
She misses the catch, and makes excuses.
She takes your money, and gives bad advice.
She always pulls the ball away.
Lucy is the friend you can’t afford to trust.

Lucy is a bad person.
She kicks dogs and picks on children.
She is bossy and crabby and mean.
She is pride without humility.
Lucy is the devil before the fall.

But every day, after Lucy mocks her brothers,
after Lucy ridicules her friends,
after Lucy alienates herself,
She goes to a man with a piano and asks him to love her
more than his music.

And she knows.
She knows what the answer will be,
Better than she knows herself.
Every day, Lucy’s heart is broken.
And every day,
This creature of hate and anger and rage and fear
And jealousy and arrogance and human
goes home
and dreams of someone who will not dream of her.

It's sort of a clumsy ending, but... eh. Not the worst thing I've done.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Wet Works

2011-12-04T10:31:00.006-05:00

Books, books everywhere, and not a word worth reading. Or is there? Lead it to Bibliophile to find out.

There's no place like home : the empowering potential of the midwifery model of childbirth. 1991. Squire, Denise C.
The university appears to be slowly digitizing its decades' worth of theses and dissertations. I'm against it, purely because it means more work for me when reading through the titles. Ah, the passions of the true scholar. I mention this title because most are so mundane that a Wizard of Oz reference really brightens the proceedings.

Is conservatism an artifact caused by dissimilarities between the laboratory and the real world? 1992. Kamenetsky, Stuart B.
Essentially, are people less likely to sacrifice other people if they know they're real people and not just numbers? Answer: results cannot be generalized. That's somewhat ironic--that the study investigating how people come to make generalizations ends in a conclusion that can't be generalized.

Bald truth : determining the need for a Canadian alopecia association / by Bonnie Lipton.
I'm imagining the Canadian equivalent of Stan Sitwell here.

Gender differences in perceptions of sexual and nonsexual cues in dating. Alksnis, Christine.
Through analysis of surveys, Alksnis found that men are more likely to associate sexual encounters with a "good" date than women, and that women are more likely to describe a "bad" date as one that includes sexually-charged situations. So in other words, if there's sex involved, men aren't going to have a bad date. Science, everybody.

Empathy and intergroup relations : do people empathize less with outgroup members? / by Gillian Macdonald.
Interesting question. On the one hand, I'd say that in general, we're more likely to empathize with people we know better and identify with, which includes people we're in groups with. On the other hand, I'd say there's a point where you're so familiar with a person's problems that you're too close to see them for what they are--that you get so used to them, their concerns become a sort of background noise. I think it happens with families, especially. The actual study appears to be based on ethnic groups, though, and it found no difference either way.

Never call them "jerks" : an approach to responsible pastoral leadership in the face of difficult behaviour in the congregation. 1997. Boers, Arthur Paul.
Well, that's just good advice.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster by Joel Wadfogel, 2011.
The typical music industry complaint against file-sharing and so forth is that it damages the industry, whereas respecting copyright encourages creative growth. Wadfogel's findings basically show that there's been no decrease in the quantity of new artists or material coming to market since the proliferation of Napster and after its decline. Without any data at all, I'd argue that digital distribution has been a real boon to emerging artists in general, as it's easier to develop an audience.

Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics : theory, subjectivity, and duration / Tamsin Lorraine. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2011.
Finally, finally, we are out of the theses/special papers section, and into the new books proper. And what better way to kick that off with this week's Deleuze and Guattari tribute?

Concept of time / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Ingo Farin. London ; New York : Continuum, c2011.
Speaking of major figures in modern philosophy, we have this translated entry from one of phenomenology's heavy hitters. All I know from Heidegger is what I've derived from my Stiegler readings, but it's more than enough to know that this would be an intense reading.

Yuck! : the nature and moral significance of disgust / Daniel Kelly.
Other books that include "Yuck" in their titles: "What the Yuck?: The Freaky and Fabulous Truth About Your Body," a book on the female body; "Yuck!: The Grossest Joke Book Ever!" ("Man: I'd like some toilet paper please. Lady: What colour would you like? Man: Just give me white, I colour it myself!"); and "Oh, yuck!: the encyclopedia of everything nasty." Can Kelly's book live up to this illustrious pedigree?

Religion and democracy : a worldwide comparison / Carsten Anckar.
I like books with a simple, modest scope. It does appear that Anckar is addressing something more specific than the title suggests. He is apparently testing Huntington’s claim that democracy and religion are tightly connected, and that western Christianity is the only religion capable of supporting democratic institutions. Anckar finds quantitatively what I would call the intuitive answer, that local political context matters more than declared religion. It gets more complicated when you factor in that religion is also determined in part by political context, and determines it as well, but in general, it seems like Huntington is confusing causation with correlation.

Terror of history : on the uncertainties of life in Western civilization / Teofilo F. Ruiz. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2011.
Man, if there was ever a title that seemed to encapsulate the "First World problems" meme. What the book actually argues is that Westerners generally have three responses to large-scale disaster and trauma: religion, worldly success and pleasure, and art and knowledge. That's a good thumbnail sketch of the classic Faust story, where the good doctor gives up the first in the name of the last and winds up thoughtlessly going after the middle.

Architecture of doom [videorecording] / POJ Filmproduktion AB ; First Run/CARUS Film production ; a film by Peter Cohen. New York : First Run/ICARUS Films, 1991.
I was hoping this would be about sinister buttresses and evil archways. It is instead a book on Hitler's theories of architecture, which isn't far off, come to think of it.

Stone and dung, oil and spit : Jewish daily life in the time of Jesus / Jodi Magness.
I like the contrast Magness was clearly going for--mixing the typical sense of the sacredness of Jesus with the ordinary and profane.

Job search in academe : how to get the position you deserve / Dawn M. Formo and Cheryl Reed ; foreword by Kristina Mesaros, Carla Maroudas, and Kevin Degnan. 2nd ed. Sterling, Va. : Stylus, c2011.
...I'm listening.

Big thirst : the secret life and turbulent future of water / Charles Fishman. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York : Free Press, 2011.
Water management's an issue that's not going away--as the book's description tells us, major American cities are only 90 days away from running out of water at a given time. Fishman's book seems more positive than most environmental-oriented examinations, arguing that we do have enough water and we will have enough, provided we can manage it properly. It's sort of a training resource; it's the closest we have to something that's actually renewable, and if we can properly manage it, then maybe there's hope that we can responsibly use a few other things.

Better angels of our nature : why violence has declined / Steven Pinker.
Catchy title. For those wondering his argument, he backs up his point that we're living in the most nonviolent time in history with pages and pages of graphs and statistics. The main three factors he identifies is the influence from the Enlightenment, that promoting education lowers propensity for violence; the prevalence of the state, in that people have less need to personally defend themselves; and the global spread of commerce, which makes it in everyone's best interest to play nice. I think there's a case to be made against all points--the State has led to some massacres on a far wider scale than any other, the education factor may be construed as intellectual elitism, and the commerce issue ignores just who's making money off of all those guns. But it's hard to argue that we're not as bellicose, as a species, as we once were.

Cold breezes and idiot winds : patriotic correctness and the post-9/11 assault on academe / Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale. Rotterdam : Sense Publishers, c2011.
Somebody sounds a little peeved. Although I'll admit that there does seem to be a bizarre anti-intellectual strain in American discourse.

Book of rotters / Alan Bold & Robert Giddings. Edinburgh : Mainstream Pub., 1985.
Putting "rotter" in the title of your book improves it by 8.67%. Fact.
Later Days.

Future species : Hybrids, Exoskell, Cyborg living, Makeover madness. Toronto : Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, c2009.
I wish I was still teaching a course on digital media. Ah, well. I might check out this book anyway.

Agonizing love : the golden era of romance comics / Michael Barson. New York : Harper Design, 2011.
Another entry for the comic book historian.

Blackout / Connie Willis. 1st ed. New York : Spectra Ballantine Books, c2010.
Time travel romps. There's nothing that can go so bad as a time travel story, but it should be fun.

Close to Spider Man : stories / Ivan E. Coyote. Vancouver : Arsenal Pulp Press, c2000.
Sadly, not an anthology of characters ranging from Aunt May to Flash Thompson.

Virtual water : tackling the threat to our planet's most precious resource / Tony Allan. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2011.
And for a different perspective on the water debate, Tony Allan argues that water is finite, and running out fast. We need to be better appreciate the value of this resource, while we have it. Or so his argument goes.

Inventing Iron Man : the possibility of a human machine / E. Paul Zehr. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
A book in the "Science of Superheroes" sort of vein.

Later Days.

Book Review: Do The Gods Wear Capes? by Ben Saunders

2011-12-03T00:11:00.003-05:00

"This phenomenal development of a national comics addiction puzzles professional educators and leaves the literary critics gasping. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought. But by these very tokens the picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations, hidden customarily beneath long accumulated protective coverings of indirection or disguise. Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self." --William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, circa 1940s, quoted in Ben Saunder's Do The Gods Wear Capes?.

I know, two book reviews in a 24 hour period. It's been a long day. Hopefully, this one will be a little abridged.

About a year ago now, I was pressing a friend for his opinion on a trio of superhero comics we'd both read. He was somewhat reluctant to voice said opinion, but under further pressure, he finally blurted out that he hated them. Not only did they raise his ire, but they reminded him of everything that he was sick of about the genre: overblown, oversimplistic morality, downright misogynist portrayals of women, and a celebration of violence and carnage. I was, as you might imagine, somewhat surprised. The worst part was that I could tell this wasn't a conclusion he'd come to casually. He was a bigger comic fan than I was (if you can imagine such a thing), and he wouldn't willingly dismiss any part of its history, capes or no capes, unless he felt he had very little choice. And the hell of it was, I couldn't really marshal an argument in favor of the current crop of spandex-sporters. A lot of the time they ARE depicting the adventures of misogynistic, hyperviolent hypocrites. And the hell of it was, I'd probably keep on reading them anyway.

Saunders' book, Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes, isn't exactly the answer I was looking for, though that's mostly because of its era of focus--it's stretching the whole of superhero comics history, from pre-WWII onwards, but there's not much about the current era; the closest it gets is some Warren Ellis-penned stuff in the early 2000s. Each chapter looks at a different comic book superhero and the seminal work on him or her to argue for the philosophical representations each one conveys. Chapter 1, for example, is on Superman. Supremely powered, Superman's story isn't about power, but about pursuing moral goodness. The catch is, this goodness is constantly being reinterpreted--Siegel and Shuster saw him as a rebel figure, best typified in an early issue where he tears up a car manufacturer's factory for producing unsafe vehicles, then kidnaps the mayor to get him to promise stricter guidelines. Later, he becomes a bastion of public order, and later still, something more ambiguous. Spiritually, Saunders connects him to the difficulty of pursuing goodness, as its definition proves elusive.

But it's chapter two where things really get interesting. Saunders here looks at the inception of Wonder Woman, by psychiatrist turned comic book writer William Moulton Marston. Marston's predilection for bondage scenes is well-known, but what's less known is that this bondage was based on a very complex system of beliefs. Marston thought that, using some questionable biological arguments, that women were naturally dominant, and men submissive, and that much of the evils of world persisted because both sexes had forgotten the pleasure of being in bondage. As Marston put it, "The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound." It's a very weird idea, but a pretty interesting one--especially when juxtaposed with Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. Limbo, as I'm sure you'll all remember from the book review I never wrote, had the premise that in the future, men disavowed themselves from aggression by voluntarily removing their limbs. The endeavor failed because they were just as aggressive as ever--they replaced the limbs with constructed limbs that they built in competition, trading a nuclear arms race for a literal arms race (and with Wolfe, the pun is always intended). At the same time, their sexuality all but vanished--the world was fun of women desperate for male attention and men who ignored them. Perhaps Marston's bondage is a way of channeling that aggression into pleasure?
Saunders' own contribution of the argument is that the value Marston favors--submission--is an original Christian value, but one that's fallen out of favor. He suggests that Wonder Woman, as a character, presents a utopian model combining submission to a higher power with the ecstasy of the flesh, seeing that combining sex and spirituality has been a problem at least since the Songs of Solomon.

Chapter 3 is Spider-Man, and in this figure, Saunders sees a merger of Freudian trauma theory--Spider-Man's constant return to the death of his uncle and Gwen Stacey--to the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Specifically, Kierkegaard argues that we pass from a state of no moral order, to some system of moral order, to a realization of that no moral order is capable of encompassing all experience, and that rationality is always limited. Those three stages are represented in Spider-Man by his original moral-free acceptance of his powers, his "great power comes great responsibility" shift with the death of Uncle Ben, and the unpreventable death of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacey. (There's also a brief section on Gwen's role, as the innocent woman sacrificed so Peter can reach this enlightenment.) One wonders, given this analysis, what Saunders makes of Peter's recent deal with Satan to his aunt's life, at the cost of his memory of his marriage. Yeah, that happened. Comics!

The final chapter is on Iron Man. Here, Saunders argues that Tony Stark's reliance on technology is similar to his reliance on alcohol, that in both cases, it's about control, and it's through the lenses of alcoholism that the series portrays the follies of overreliance on technology. Saunders weaves this interpretation with a discussion of the posthuman, represented by Stark's merging of man and machine. The spiritual issue touched on here is one of acceptance of the limitations of the individual, as in the form of the AA program. A coda follows, in which Saunders cautions against comic book studies creating a divide between super hero comics and the more auteur-based indie books. Preach it, sir.

Saunders' interest here is not in showing how these superheroes function as springboards for philosophical discussions, but to argue that these philosophical issues have always been built into these characters to begin with. Thus, the value of superhero comics aren't escapism or wish fulfillment, but the way they address, intrinsically, the same values and questions that have driven philosophy for centuries. And while Saunders does get a little preachy at times, for the most part, he does exactly that. It's probably a testament to his writing that I was left wondering what could be done with other superhero characters. If Gwen was a sacrifice, then what do we make of Jean Grey, a woman who died not just once but twice, the second time explicitly so her husband could progress as a person? Batman is notoriously missing in Saunders' analysis, save for a reference that his morality is not so much complex as contradictory, but surely there's something to be made out of a man who dedicated his life to vengeance and wound up with a family? And then there's the Fantastic Four. If Tony Stark represents faith in technology, then Reed Richards is the poster boy for rationalism and modern science. And Ben Grimm is essentially the archetype of "bad things happening to good people." Ah, the endless possibilities. Comics!

Later Days.

Stealth Status Update

2011-12-02T19:21:00.003-05:00

Normally, this would be a Facebook post, but it's a little too geeky to broadcast on quite so public a scale. Currently, I'm in the university library. I'm switching back and forth playing Shining Force II while listening to a YouTube channel (Reboundary, BTW) on "Great Video Game Music," and occasionally taking a break to read 2008 Rock Paper Shotgun posts and choice bits from a philosophy book on superheroes and religion that I'm probably going to do (yet another) book review tonight. It's Friday night, and it's a combination of sad and awesome how much I'm enjoying myself.

Later Days.

Book Review: Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

2011-12-02T13:14:00.003-05:00

“Realism might, in one sense, be intended to create a relatively transparent effect, based on not drawing attention to the deficits in the level of representation achievable in the playable parts of games, or reducing somewhat the gap between visual resolution of the game and audio-visual media such as film and television. But it also offers what can often be termed a 'spectacle' of realism: degrees of graphical realism that are flaunted and designed to be admired as striking or impressive images in their own right. As a form of spectacle of this kind, as in other respects, realism can be a source of appeal in the realms of either real-world reference or more outright fantasy.” --Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska.

Every time I finish a book on video game theory, I feel obligated to write a review of it, for posterity's sake, if for no other reason. And so, we come to Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. Published in 2005, this book has had a relatively modest (to be generous) effect on videogame scholarship as a whole. And that's a shame, because while many of its claims are a little too widely accepted to be really innovative, and its organization could use some refinement, in general, Tomb & Space (my oh-so-clever shorthand) has some very useful ideas on subjects such as immersion and realism.

The book starts with a very brief introduction that establishes a continuity between the two title games, then segues into the authors' main argument: that games need to be studied in terms of both their gameplay and their wider context. Again, not exactly an approach that is very controversial, but their dedication to the stance throughout the book is admirable. The first and longest chapter is loosely on explicitly that subject: gameplay and its context. More specifically, they cover a very wide variety of subject matter. It starts with some definitions of gameplay and games, taking some well known definitions from Johan Huizinga and Roger Callois. The play vs. game notion is explored in some detail, with the conclusion that play occurs within a system, allowing them segue nicely into the next topic, how games function in larger cultural contexts. This leads them to examine gameplay in terms of hooks that motivate the player, and a very thorough discussion of the concept of flow, as defined by the commonly cited Mihaly Csikczentmilhalyi. That leads to the official discussion of game context, with a discussion on how games draw on common cultural narrative frameworks and genres, such as the quest motif or the fantasy setting. In general, they argue, this setting helps with establishing immersion, though it tends to disappear from attention once that flow is established. (Jesper Juul argues something very similar in his book Half-Real.) To put their work in context with the narratology/ludology debate (is a videogame a system of rules or a story?), they're essentially arguing that while games vary greatly, in general, narrative is used as a secondary element, but a really important secondary element. And its effect depends on the background of the player as much as the game itself. And that's chapter one. Yes, that's all chapter one.

Chapter 2 examines the notion of gamespace, and how a game offers the player opportunities for exploration and presence. The amount of freedom offered in a game vvaries greatly; on a most basic level, there's the range from the single screen representation (Pac-Man) to fully 3D worlds (Mario 64). There are hard boundaries, which are impassable, often invisible, boundaries in the game world, as well as soft boundaries, which are temporary, and used to direct player's progress (ie. you need a key to open a door in Tomb Raider.) There's also a variety of navigational aids, ranging from game maps to NPC advice to the presence of enemies. Familiarity with game space is a form of knowledge that can be leveraged for power in game communites, especially for players in MMO games (online games such as World of Warcraft). That brings us to presence. They distinguish between perceptual and psychological immersion--particularly, the closer the presence in the game world, the greater the perceptual immersion, the feeling that the player is actually there. Thus, a game in first person view is more perceptually immersive than an overhead view. But because you can't see behind you in a such a game, it would be harder to play, which creates frustration, which disrupts the psychological immersion, or flow, as it was defined last chapter. It's one of the many useful distinctions that King and Krzywinska make, one that I can't recall being made elsewhere. The chapter covers other issues of presence as well: sound, camera control, player death, and HUD (head's up display--the information the game presents on screen), concluding the chapter with a brief section on how, following Kendall Walton, we turn games into objects that enable imaginary play, and thus psychological immersion may be more significant than sensory immersion.

Chapter 3 is the one most useful to my own work, a chapter on realism, spectacle, and sensation. Here's another handy distinction: the authors distinguish between visual realism, which is how closely the graphics resemble the real world, and functional realism, which is how closely the gameplay resembles the real world (ie. an enemy combatant dies with a single head shot, or the player character has to eat regularly). Much of game design and commercial promotion revolves around claims of superior graphics, but the authors note that it's not so much real-world versimilitude that's being pursued, but accepted mediated versions of the real world. For example, a sports game doesn't present the game as experienced in real life so much as how it's experienced through TV cameras. And the functional realism has to maintain a balance--familiar enough that we can relate it to the real life equivalent, but not so identical that it's as difficult as its real-life equivalent. Think Guitar Hero--it presents playing a guitar, but a simplified, less difficult version. Finally, there's a brief section on spectacle, and how games use various forms of spectacle--expansive vistas, big explosions, dizzying sequences--to direct player experience.

The fourth and final chapter examines games within cultural and political contexts. After briefly mentioning overt political games such as Frasca's September 12th, they take a broader approach, noting that games follow conventional Western notions of the power of the individual, the evils of science amok and shadowy corporations, and a hodgepodge of myths cribbed from various cultures, especially fantasy. Character representation tends towards reinforcing white masculine fears. The female heroine straddles a line (a very familiar line, in video game arguments) between empowerment and sex object. And race is almost erased entirely, with few games allowing any focus on racial difference in their protagonist.

The above covers the "visual" part of the ideological context; the rest of the chapter looks at ideology in terms of gameplay. Again, going as broad as possible, the competition aspect of games fits nicely with late capitalism, especially the imperialist model found in your basic strategy game such as Civilization. In the discussion of game violence, they raise the notion of Althusser's interpolation, that video games are ideological apparatuses trying to assign players subject positions. The complication here is that they distinguish between the player's subject position and the player character. Generally, the player-character is put into a position of the hero fighting evil; the player is put in the position of someone playing a game in a particular manner. Thus, a shooting game doesn't turn the player into someone who's likely to shoot things in real life, but into someone who's likely to shoot things in the context of a videogame. I should be opposed to this idea, because it really wrecks a paper I wrote on Mass Effect, but it's actually rather appealing. they continue in this vein for a bit, and then end with a section on game industry, largely derived very explicitly from De Pueter, Kline, and Dyer-Witheford's excellent book, Digital Play. The brief afterword reminds us that game studies is very big, and there was no way for them to cover everything.

I have a few niggling points with some of their choices. For example, they argue that hardcore players prefer to focus on mechanics and it's casual players who want better graphics, which doesn't really work as an argument in face of the massive casual player embrace of less graphically superior things as phone games, browser games, and the Wii (in comparison to other current consoles, at least). And ending your book on a section that relies very, very heavily on someone else's book is an odd decision, to say the least. But overall, I agree with their arguments. I don't think you'll find many who dispute that games need to be considered within wider contexts, and the study of narrative and genre is broad enough not to ruffle any but the most steadfast ludologists, while still being applicable enough to be useful. And many of their distinctions I know I'm going to find very useful--player vs. player character interpellation, pscyhological vs. preceptual immersion, and most importantly, visual vs. functional realism. So that's all good.

What's less good is the way the information is portrayed. Let's start with the use of games. It's rare that King and Krzywinska focus explicitly on an individual game for an extended period of time. Rather, they bring the game up, move on, and bring it up again, in the next section or chapter where it happens to be mildly relevant. It creates an unfocused feeling. Moreover, there's no real sense or argument that the specific games they chose were particularly significant for what they wanted to discuss. For example, while I personally have very fond memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn't hold it up as exemplar for promoting cooperative gaming, just based on the fact that its characters talk during cutscenes and you play as different characters.

But for my largest complaint, let's go back to the issue of focus. My main problem with the book is that focus exists only on the macro level, and even then, in very broad strokes. Within a single section, the authors will switch from setting to character to gender to race to violence, all with nothing but a brief segue that sometimes ranges on a non-sequitor. It left me with a constant uncertainty over where the argument was going, and how everything fit together. It's a shame, because it's really a problem in terms of editing and presentation rather than the argument per se. A longer introduction or a few chapter subheadings could have made a world of difference.

So yes: it's a good book, with useful ideas, but its content is hurt somewhat by its disorganized form.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Like Rickey Rouse or Monald Muck

2011-12-02T11:08:00.000-05:00

"Juvenile literature is a father surrogate. The model of paternal authority is at every point immanent, the implicit basis of its structure and very existence. The natural creativity of the child, which no one in his right mind can deny, is channellled through the apparent absence of the father into an adult-authoritarian vision of the real world. Paternalism in absentia is the indispensable vehicle for the defense and invisible control of the ostensibly autonomous childhood model. The comics, like television, in all vertically structured societies, rely upon distance as a means of authoritarian reinforcement." --Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.

Later Days.

Apple and Snow

2011-12-01T11:44:00.004-05:00

I ate an apple outside yesterday, and it brought back one of my earliest memories.

I don't know if it's this way for everyone, but once you start delving back into the early years of my childhood, "earliest memory" becomes a distinction that's hard to grant with any degree of accuracy. Once you go back a certain point, memories get confused with photographs, dreams, and the stories other people tell you. But this memory is clear enough.

It's winter, I'm in Saskatchewan, and I'm sitting in a snow bank. Across from me, in the neighbor's driveway, there's a furious game of street hockey going on, and it's been going on for a while. I have been watching--I've been allowed to watch---nearby, and I contemplate the events solemnly, periodically taking a small bite out of my apple. I couldn't tell you how old I was. I was old enough that my teeth were in, thus making apple consumption a possibility. But I was young enough that I wasn't allowed to play with the older boys, not in a game of street hockey, anyway. I think that puts me somewhere between 4 and 8, which gives me an admittedly large margin of error.

It's almost as if we were deliberately trying for a cliched Canadian tableau: rural Saskatchewan,piles of snow everywhere, a half dozen or so boys zooming around nets, and another younger one, bundled up in a comical manner, watching them. Clearly, we were trying to reconstruct a scene from the Hockey Sweater. I can't even remember who any of the other boys were; it can be safely assumed that at least one was a grandson of our neighbors, but beyond that, it could have been any of a number of suitably aged town kids.

What I do remember, though, is the apple. I was wearing mitts and I ate it slowly and fumblingly, in part because it's really hard to eat an apple while wearing mitts, and in part because I knew if the apple was gone, I'd have to make a move--I'd have to go inside to throw it out, or get a new one, or something, and I'd miss some of the game. I remember feeling very strongly that if I didn't have an apple with me, my presence would, for some reason, become suspect. Such are the logical certainties of a child in the 4 to 8 age bracket. You'd think the apple would be incredibly cold in such conditions, and in fact I do remember actually dropping it in the snow more than once. But while I was reluctant to go inside, I'm certain that I did, maybe more than once, just to put the apple quickly into the microwave to heat it up a bit. And so the time passed, me gnawing on my warmed up apple core, watching some kids play hockey.

And that's it. That's the memory, in its entirety. I'm not going to say it's a life-changing moment, or that it had a profound effect on my feelings towards hockey, fruit, or winter general. But whenever I eat an apple outside in the winter months--granted, not something that happens often--this is what I remember. And in some small way, I feel a little better, just for the connection to my younger self.

Memory's funny, isn't it?

Later Days.

It's unfortunate, since they have almost, almost opposite meanings.

2011-11-29T14:45:00.001-05:00

I mix up decisive and divisive.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Feng Shui Blogging: An Easy and Practical Guide Packed with Exciting Hints to Enhance Your Hit Count

2011-11-27T15:58:00.005-05:00

Bibliophile: because an ink fetish is nothing to be ashamed of. Right? Right?

Let's see what's new and interesting in the university ledgers this week:

Most of the first 500 are videos available on a database not accessible at my university. So skipping over those really speeds up the process.

Two regimes of madness : texts and interviews, 1975-1995 / Gilles Deleuze ; edited by David Lapoujade ; translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina New York : Semiotext(e).

I've always felt kind of bad that I haven't read a lot of Deleuze and Guattari; I have the first 100 pages or so of A Thousand Plateaus read, but that's about it. Generally speaking, either of them are worth further reading, although what you get out of them depends how open you are to the more "ramble" based side of the French theorists.

What if Derrida was wrong about Saussure? / Russell Daylight. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2011
I first came across Derrida and Saussure when I had to read Of Grammatology for a class on Jean-Jacques Rosseau. It utterly baffled me, but I think I have enough of it down now, six years later, that I could follow this book. Maybe.

Freud on coke / David Cohen. London : Cutting Edge Press, 2011.
A detailed investigation of Freud's coke use and its impact/allegiance with his general theories? Yeah, I'd read that. In general, we need more books on long-standing humanity theorist go-to figures, and their various drug addictions.

Hurt feelings : theory, research, and applications in intimate relationships / Luciano L'Abate.
I feel like this is a book that could be utterly fascinating, grant me great insight into human behavior, and make it that much more unlikely that I will ever be able to sustain a long term relationship.

Fengshui for joys of sex : an easy and practical guide packed with tips and exciting hints to enhance happiness in love, sex and romance / Ashwinie Kumar Bansal.
I feel like this is a book that could be utterly fascinating, grant me great insight into human behavior, and make it that much more unlikely that I will ever be able to sustain a long term relationship. But mostly because I'm worried I wouldn't be able to remember any of the positions unless I take notes with me. I also love that this is by the same author who wrote Fengshui for Offices ; An Easy and Practical Guide to Improve Efficiency and to Fulfil Your Career Goals. Because those are two very close subjects.

God laughs & plays : churchless sermons in response to the preachments of the fundamentalist right / David James Duncan.
I'm not particularly religious, but I know which side of the debate I'd be rooting for.

Bureau of missing persons : writing the secret lives of fathers / Roger J. Porter.
This sounds interesting, and it's one for you autobiography scholars out there: Porter is studying memoirs of people whose fathers led some sort of secret life, focusing on how their desire to learn about their sires (sorry) turned them into detectives searching for the missing people that were right in front of them. It features, among others, Paul Aster and Alison Bechdel of Fun Home.

Evening's empire : a history of the night in early modern Europe / Craig Koslofsky.
I mention this only because I wanted to make a joke about it being good nighttime reading.

Video games and learning : teaching and participatory culture in the digital age / Kurt Squire ; foreword by James Paul Gee ; featuring contributions by Henry Jenkins.
It's not even remotely where my interest in game studies lies, but it's got Jenkins and James Paul Gee, and I feel scholarly obligated to mention anything related to videogames when it comes up.

Selling sex short : the pornographic and sexological construction of women's sexuality in the West / by Meagan Tyler.
I have a feeling I might have mentioned this before; the cover is certainly familiar. Ah, well--I bring it up now because I don't think we should really accept "sexology" as a word.

Carnal resonance : affect and online pornography / Susanna Paasonen.
This plays a little more to my interests. Digital tech interests, I mean, not... ahem. At any rate, I recently went over a 2002 paper on this subject with my students. They were very, very reluctant to talk. So I'm interested in Passonen's book, on the level of how we respond to the issue.

Motherhood online / edited by Michelle Moravec. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK : Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011.
I just wanted to juxtapose a book on online pornography with a book on online motherhood. If the next book's about online old age, we'll have a nice gamut of human life cycle going.

Sex cells : the medical market for eggs and sperm / Rene Almeling. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2011.
Points for the pun.

Siblings : brothers and sisters in American history / C. Dallett Hemphill.
My brothers never call me. Sigh...

Getting wasted : why college students drink too much and party so hard / Thomas Vander Ven.
This gets a mention because there's a picture of a girl doing a beer bong on the cover. How many academic books can say the same? In case you were wondering, the answer to the title question appears to be "peer pressure."

Very small cafés & restaurants / John Stones
This would be a perfect coffee table book for a very small... eh, maybe a little too on the nose.

Duels and duets : why men and women talk so differently / John L. Locke.
Locke argues that, based on physiological difference, men are better at conversational arguments, whereas women operate on collaboration. I know some women who would challenge this argument--and thus invalidate it.

Drunk as a lord : samurai stories / Ryotaro Shiba ; translated by Eileen Kato.
I know I'm guilty of cultural tourism here, but... this sounds awesome.

Essential Avengers by Roy Thomas, Harlan Ellison, Steve Englehart at el.
This gets a mention because it's comic books. Also: Harlan Ellison! Writing superheroes!

Characters and plots in the fiction of Raymond Chandler / Robert L. Gale.
I hope there's a lot about the Operative.

Sweet invention : a history of dessert / Michael Krondl.
Okay, this one's here because I'm hungry.

...And that brings another end to a round of Bibliophile. Till next week, then.

Later Days.

Steam Monk: An Arcanum Retrospective

2011-11-26T08:28:00.013-05:00

I look glumly at the distance between the two locations. The game features an expansive world, but what that translates into is a long slog between locations. Sure enough, no sooner do I set off to my next than I'm attacked by a series of bandits, assassins, and local wildlife, each one determined to make me part with my money, my life, or both. My companion is of little help; my control over him can be charitably described as limited, and during a battle, he's just as likely to run away than to come to my aid. Finally, as I narrowly finish off my first my last opponent, a telltate chime sounds. A faint smile shows through my weariness. Finally, a level up. I open up my character screen, and bite my lip. So many skills, so few points to spend...

For the first major (excluding Fate of the World, which was a less thorough play for me) gameplay on my new laptop, I thought long and hard about what game would get the honor. From the above description, you can tell that I went with a game that will clearly stand the test of time, something that could really put an Alienware game rig through its paces. I wanted a game that would be rather long, and involved. It didn't matter so much if it was weak on characterization, as long as the world was richly portrayed, and the character management was nice and robust. So, clearly, I had no choice but to play--what? Skyrim? That flavor of the week? No, I decided that the best choice for me was the 2011 Troika game "Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magik Obscura."

You'll have to pardon an old blogger his little jokes. Of course, Skyrim is the one destined to be championed for years, at this point, whereas the the ten year old Arcanum has sadly been delegated to the dustbin of videogame history. But the similarities between the games struck me as worth noticing--Arcanum, directly or indirectly, is part of the history that leads to Skyrim, a legacy of excruciatingly detailed gameworlds, complex player character design, and emergent, sandbox-style quest play. So let's talk about that for a while, shall we?

The preliminaries, then. As mentioned, Arcanum was developed and released in 2001 by Troika Games, a short-lived game company that operated from 1998 to 2004, formed mainly by former Interplay employees. it was so short-lived, in fact, that it released only three games: Arcanum, the critically acclaimed Vampire: The Masquerade--Bloodlines (because nothing helps sell a game than two subtitles), and the lesser-known Temple of Elemental Evil. Troika games have a history of being very intricate, yet simultaneously very buggy. That's one of the benefits of coming to a franchise such as this a decade late to the party--fan patches have rounded off a lot of the rough edges. (And there were a LOT of rough edges--see a partial list of one of the patches' changes here, on Muro's post.) That isn't to say my play was bug-free, by any means; I was beset by game freezes, numerous exploits (although that's more of me beseting on the game than the other way around), and broken quests. But it was at least playable.

Interplay was the company that produced the original two Fallout games, which means that Troika employees originally cut their designer teeth on that post-apocalyptic series. (It also means that there's a more direct connection between Arcanum and Skyrim; the former is by people who created the first two Fallout games, and the latter is by people who created the third.) And Fallout's influence on Arcanum is pretty clear. The graphic engine, for example, is clearly very similar. Compare these screenshots:

Without the telltale signs of the HUD, there's very little reason to identify the top screen as Arcanum and the bottom as Fallout 2, a game that predates it by three years.
Similarly, the world map, inventory menus, and combat (isometric, turn based, with what you can do limited by the number of action points you have) are all very familiar. Worse, the game has somewhat less personality than its older brother; whereas Fallout 2 is famous (or infamous) for its humor and pop culture, Arcanum, while not totally without charm, is playing things much more straight-faced. No "What is your favorite color?" here, I'm afraid.

So what does Arcanum have going for it that's uniquely its own? In short, plot, character system, and the connection between the two. The idea behind Arcanum is that the game world is a place of magic, but magic that is now being rapidly occluded by technology. It is, in other words, a steampunk universe. The aesthetics of steampunk are reasonably common in videogames and even RPG series; the Final Fantasy games have dipped their toes in it frequently, and I think the latest Fable game dabbles in the area too. The difference between these games and Arcanum is that Arcanum makes the conflict between magic and technology the crux of the story. The game starts when the zeppelin the player is riding on is brought down by mysterious means, and you are soon embroidered in a long-term quest to find out what happened to a group of dwarves banished for (it appears) allowing a human to have access to steam technology.

That brings me to the level up system. It's the basic fallout model, which in turn was cribbed, I think, from the traditional D&D form: you get experience, you go up a level, you get points to spend on abilities. Where Arcanum starts to go off the beaten track is the sheer number of options to spend points on. First, you can raise your basic stats--the usual array of Charisma, Intelligence, Strength and so forth. Or, you can raise skills. And that's where things get interesting. Your character has an aptitude level for magic and technology. It starts somewhere around zero, between the two (or a little higher or lower, depending on how you dish out your character initially). You learn a spell, then the gauge moves up the magic side. You learn a technology skill, such as mechanical crafting or gun use, it moves down the mechanical side. Some skills, such as melee and dodge, are neutral, but most are geared to one or the other. And the effects are accumulative; the higher the gauge is on the magic side, the better your spells and magic items work, and the same for mechanical.

The catch is, then, that you have to choose. The game caps leveling at 50, and that gives you less than 100 points in total to fool around with (again, not counting initial character creation). When you factor in the fact that you need a certain level of basic stats to raise certain skills (a charisma of 18, for example, to raise the skill Persuade to its full value), then your choice becomes further limited. It's not just that you need to choose mechanical or magic, you need to choose what kind of technician or mage you want to be. Do you want to deal in healing magic or ice magic? There's 16 different branches, and 5 spells for each, so you'll have to choose. Similarly, do you want to be able to construct firearms or build mechano-spiders? (Okay, stupid question; spider-bot, I choose you!)

(Look at that. Eight legs of mechanical mayhem.) On the negative side, I was extremely paranoid that I'd construct a character that was totally useless, especially in an early part of the game I'll get to later. But on the positive, it really makes it feel like the character is your own, and really adds to the game's replay value, which is a real consideration when it comes to RPGs.

Here's a screenshot of the skill screen:

Starting from the top left, we see the menu trigger buttons: quest, world map, items, etc. Then there's the fate points, which are worth explaining: if you finish a notable quest in an exemplary manner, then you get a fate point, which can be used to guarantee some action--100% success rating for a lockpick, or a critical hit for example. It's a nice way of rewarding the player, by allowing them control over the stat-based system. Then there's the middle bit, with three spaces. I never did figure out what that's for. That's followed by the "wait" button, determining how long you wait, and an iconic representation of the time of day. That brings us to the next row: first we have the character window, which is what's currently going on in the main screen. Then there's the character portrait, with level (clearly a mod, since level is above 50), name, race, and so forth. To the right of that is three buttons that control the submenu below them: skills, mechanical skills, and magic, respectively; currently, it's the magic submenu that's open. And the lightning bolt icon to the right of that allows you to set auto-leveling schemes, where the computer decides for you where the character's skill points will be allocated (it also doesn't tell yo that it's controlling this already, by default). Moving down another level, we have the gauge that measures alignment in terms of good or evil, and to the right of that is the main stat list; below this list is the stats that are based on these main stats (and equipped items) and the player's various resistances. To the right again we have the list of spells, currently in the lightning subclass. And to the right of that is the magic/mechanics gauge. Finally, we can start on the bottom row. We have first the red gauge, health. Then there's the shield button, which triggers combat mode. Under that is a number I never figured out. Below that are two quick cast/use icons depicting the last two items/spells/skills used. And to the right is the entire quick cast/skill/use bar, with the description text box underneath. To its right is the quick buttons for the spells, skills, and crafting submenus. And finally, on the bottom right, we have the blue gauge for fatigue/magic power. If it goes to zero, your player collapses, which is usually sure death in a combat scenario. My point here is, there's a lot of stuff going on.

Moving finally back to the magic/mechanical divide, it's equally important, the alignment choice has an effect on the story. Certain characters will treat you differently or even hostilely if you're overly aligned on one side or the other. Not only does aligning your character with magic make magic more effective, it also make mechanical technology much less effective for you. So if you're building an uber-mage, those working at the train station are rather reluctant to allow you to ride their rails. And if your mechanically inclined gnome inventor is in need of healing, you'd better not expect your team's healing mage to get the job done. It's an excellent integration of story and game mechanics, and other designers (I'm looking at you, Bioware) could do well to take notes here.

And that brings us to my playthrough. It being my first time, I took the vanilla approach. Neutral affinity, neither fish nor fowl, neither mechanical nor magic. The result was that I never got the uber level skills with either side--no giant elementals or robo-spiders for me. Instead, I focused on the combat skills, particularly the dexterity related ones. Being able to attack 8 times a round compared to my enemy's three is a good thing. What I'll remember most about the game, I'm surprised to say, isn't the story, or the level system, or the exploit I found where you can sell items to merchants, sneak into their houses at night, steal them back, and sell them again (although I did find it funny that I could do that and not have it even slightly affect my "good" standing). No, what I remember most is my first golem.

Ugh, golems. Baldur's Gate 2 had impossibly hard golems too, so maybe it's a D&D thing. But in this game, somewhere in the first third or so, you're sent into an abandoned dwarf mine, and meet your first golem. If your character was anything like mine, it's a moment of extreme punishment. It brutally decimated my character in three turns flat. To add insult to injury, my own blows were not only extremely ineffectual, but because of the golem's hard exterior, I was damaging my own weapon in hitting it. And with a typical dungeon comportment of at least six or so, after a few, you're fighting them barefisted. And you don't want to do that: If I unequip the weapon and hit it barefist, then I take damage, hasting my own demise. I went online, and looked for others' strategies. Use magic. Nope, didn't invest any points in attack magic. Shoot it with a firearm. Again, no firearm points had I. Shoot it with arrows. Same problem. This was the point I mentioned earlier. Would I have to start over? Would I need to replay hours of the game, just to get back to this point with a few more levels of magick to my name? Finally, I hit upon a running strategy--I noticed that if I kept just the right distance between me and the golem, it would target me exclusively and by running back and forth, I could keep it distracted while my teammates battered their weapons into nothingness inflicting small amounts of damage on its damnably impenetrable hide.

Damn your impenetrable hide!

So yes: even though it's the sort of thing that leads players in great droves to exclaim that a game is "unbalanced" or even "broken," I'll remember that golem. Not fondly, but I'll certainly remember it.

In the end, the whole thing wore a little thin for me. Once I reached the level cap, there wasn't a lot of inertia left to make me want to finish the game. Once they're on your team, most of your characters show remarkably little personality, rarely making any comment or contribution beyond the odd battle compliment. (With the exception of Virgil, who has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the blandest characters in games that I can think of. Affectionately bland, but bland. Though trivia fans should take note that he's voiced by Rino Romano, the man who voiced both Batman from "The Batman" and Spider-Man from that ill-fated series where he goes the animal-man planet.) And the plot itself isn't really interactive enough to keep me fully engaged--the sidequests become somewhat dull when you take out the experience incentive, and the main story is rather linear. Granted, it has a nice twist at the end, one which is even slightly choreographed, but the themes it pursues in sad twist is rather contrary to the thematic thrust of the game up to that point.

So: It's no Fallout, it's no Planescape, it's no Baldur's Gate. But its storyworld and character design make it worth remembering. And its golems make it worth cursing. Seriously.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Yellow Wallpaper

2011-11-25T08:16:00.002-05:00

Moira: Madam, are you all right?
Vivien: It's my own fault. I... I read labels on everything. And then I didn't, when it really counted, I just followed directions blindly. My doctor gave me a prescription last week for a drug for nausea, and I just checked it on the internet, and it says that it can cause fevers, and seizures, and, um, vision changes. It's the only explanation.
Moira: For what, madam?
Vivien: For all the crazy stuff that's been happening. My doctor never even told me about the side effects.
Moira: Doctors are charlatans.
Vivian: My mind is playing tricks on me, Moira. I'm seeing things.
Moira: There, there, madam. You just need a good cry. Sometimes it's the best possible thing.
Vivien: And everybody thinks I'm crazy. I know Ben does, I know it. And I've been too embarrassed to call Luke.
Moira: That's what men do. They make you think you're crazy, so they can have their fun. Haven't you read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman?
Vivien: No.
Moira: Her husband, a doctor, locks her away in the upstairs bedroom to recuperate from a slight hysterical tendency. Staring at the yellow wallpaper day after day, she begins to hallucinate that there are women trapped in the pattern. Half-mad, she scrapes off the wallpaper to set the women free. When her husband finally unlocks the door, he find her circling the room, touching the wallpaper, whispering, "I've finally got out of here. (Pause) Since the beginning of time, men find excuses to lock women away. They make up diseases, like hysteria. (picks bowls out of the sink) Do you know where that word comes from?
Vivien: (whispers) No.
Moira: The Greek word for uterus. In the second century, they thought it was caused by sexual deprivation. (puts bowls on counter) And the only possible cure was hysterical paroxysm; orgasms. Doctors would masturbate them in their office, and call it medicine.
Vivien: I had no idea.
Moira: It was a hundred years ago, but we're no better off today. Men are still inventing ways to drive women over the edge. Look at you and Mr. Harmon. Cheating on you, leaving you here, pregnant with twins, alone to care for your truant teenage daughter. Any woman would lose her mind. May I speak freely, Mrs. Harmon?
Viven: Yes.
Moira: You are not crazy. And the strange things you are experiencing, I am afraid it's not the drugs. I've never said this to any of my employers, for fear of losing their trust or my job, but this house is possessed. Things break, disappear. Doors open for no reason. There are spirits here. Malevolent spirits. Mrs. Harmon, please hear me. You need to get out while you still can. I fear for you, if you don't.

--From American Horror Story, episode 1-8, "Rubber Man."

Later Days.

Super Orphans

2011-11-22T11:34:00.001-05:00

Why is it that both comic book superheroes and Disney characters are marked by a distinct lack of parental figures and marriages?

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Don't Want No 18th century Short People

2011-11-21T12:04:00.004-05:00

Books. Books, Books, Books.

Food : from farm to fork statistics. Luxemburg : Office for Official Publications of the European Communities
Did you know 41% of the family labor force for European farming is provided by women? It's true.

Book forged in hell : Spinoza's scandalous treatise and the birth of the secular age / Steven Nadler.
Good title, though I was expecting the Necronomicon.

Canada's 10 least wanted foodborne pathogens. [Ottawa] : Canadian Food Inspection Agency, c2011.
Sadly, the sequel, Canada's 10 most wanted foodborne pathogens, sold very poorly.

Walt Disney on the front lines [videorecording] : animation from 1941-1945 / produced by Buena Vista Home Entertainment in association with David A. Bossert and Kurtti Pellerin ; producer and writer, Leonard Maltin.
This could be very interesting. I remember being fascinated as a kid by a video we got somehow of a 1940s cartoon where Scrooge convinces Donald to invest in war bonds.

Blood, sweat and cheers : sport and the making of modern Canada / Colin D. Howell. Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, c2001.
I imagine there's a lot of hockey in here. Like, a lot a lot. Hopefully the fierce, gripping sport of curling gets its fair shake as well.

Crass struggle : glitz, greed, and gluttony in a wanna-have world. Montréal : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2011. Naylor, R. T.
It's been a while since I finished "Evil Paradises," and I could go for something that will fuel my inner Marxist rage.

Onward : how Starbucks fought for its life without losing its soul. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. : Wiley & Sons, 2011. Schultz, Howard
...Starbucks has a soul? So yeah, here's a book on the history and goals of Starbucks written by its CEO. Now my inner Marxist is scared.

Your call is (not that) important to us : customer service and what it reveals about our world and our lives / Emily Yellin. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York : Free Press, c2009.
As someone who now has a rhetorical stake in instruction manuals, I find this line of thought fascinating.

First 60 seconds : win the job interview before it begins / Dan Burns. Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, c2009.
Now that's crafty marketing. I bet he got a five-book deal to cover the next four minutes.

Greenback planet : how the dollar conquered the world and threatened civilization as we know it / H.W. Brands. 1st ed. Austin : University of Texas Press, 2011.
So can you tell yet that the local business college just made some big purchases?

Connected : the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives : how your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think, and do. 1st Back Bay pbk. ed. New York : Back Bay Books, 2011.
Okay, two subtitles is cheating.

Making is connecting : the social meaning of creativity from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 / David Gaunlett. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2011.
Reading YouTube : the critical viewers guide / Anandam Kavoori. New York : Peter Lang, c2011.
No jokes here; these two would probably be useful to read for my pop culture class next semester, and I want to make a mental note to come back to them.

Host in the machine : examining the digital in the social. Witney, Oxford, UK : Chandos Pub., 2010. Thomas-Jones, Angela.
This, on the other hand, gets points for the pun. I can't believe that's the first time I've seen that variation.

Designing culture : the technological imagination at work / Anne Balsamo. Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2011.
And I know enough about Balsamo to know that when a new book of hers comes out, it's worth paying attention to. Consider the mental note extended. (Sidenote: looking for her wikipedia page, I was informed that it didn't exist, and that I might be really looking for "anna balls." Which also doesn't have a page that exists. Stop helping, Wikipedia.)

Digital fandom : new media studies / Paul Booth. New York : Peter Lang, c2010.
Okay, university library system, if you're just going to present me with book after book of material that's incredibly relevant to my area of research, then this is going to take all day.

Not quite adults : why 20-somethings are choosing a slower path to adulthood, and why it's good for everyone / Rick Settersten and Barbara E. Ray.
This doesn't apply to ME, clearly, but... it might help shed some life on... a friend... of a friend... yeah...

How to build your own country / written by Valerie Wyatt ; illustrated by Fred Rix. Toronto, ON : Kids Can Press, c2009.
Mostly, I mention because a 40 page educational book clearly written for children has been filed between "Morality, leadership and public policy : on experimentalism in ethics" and "Globalization and human rights in the developing world." Sometimes, the Library of Congress gets whimsical.

Free for all : fixing school food in America / Janet Poppendieck. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2010.
Seems somewhat topical, what with the "pizza is a vegetable" ruling and all.

Intern nation : how to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy. London ; New York : Verso, 2011.
Skills for the modern worker! Also, I appear to be back in the business section.

Prairie fabric : architectural intensification in Saskatoon / by Logan Kari Hepworth. Waterloo, Ont. : University of Waterloo, 2011.
As a Saskatchewanier, this one had to get a mention. And congratulations to Logan Hepworth for completing his thesis. If I could only read one book on Saskatoon housing, this'd be it.

Media, masculinities, and the machine : F1, transformers, and fantasizing technology at its limits / Dan Fleming and Damion Sturm.
I don't even *like* Transformers (not part of my childhood culture), but yes, I would still like to read a book analyzing its masculinity.

Encyclopedia of the vampire : the living dead in myth, legend, and popular culture
Joshi, S. T., 1958.
Someone I know, but can't remember, is giving a paper on vampires in the near future. Maybe if they're reading this, (or more likely, someone who reads this knows who I'm talking about, and can tell me who the person is) they'll find this useful.

Kiss my relics : hermaphroditic fictions of the middle ages / David Rollo.
No interest in the topic, but good title.

Looney tunes golden collection.
Rabbit of Seville, Duck Amuck (which was actually adapted into a videogame), and Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century? Yes, please.

Secret identity reader : essays on sex, death and the superhero / Lee Easton, Richard Harrison.
The super hero stuff will pretty much always get a nod with me.

Straight from the heart : gender, intimacy, and the cultural production of shōjo manga / Jennifer S. Prough.
I've watched every episode of Gossip Girl and My Little Pony. Is it any surprise I'd be a fan of manga designed for teenage girls?

Little everyman : stature and masculinity in eighteenth-century English literature / Deborah Needleman Armintor.
As an amateur 18th centurist, I'm intrigued. As a vertically challenged individual, I'm offended.

Dinosaur vs. bedtime / Bob Shea.
The epic battle.

Chinnovation: how Chinese innovators are changing the world / Yinglan Tan.
That title sounds kind of racist.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Juicy is the new Gross

2011-11-18T08:12:00.002-05:00

"A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it.” --Kyle Gabler, member of 2D Boy, creator of World of Goo.

Later Days.

Thanks from an Asshole

2011-11-17T19:19:00.004-05:00

God, that was a good run. Why?

Long version: I went on today's run with a chip on my shoulder. I was carrying the emotional debris of yesterday's post, to begin with. I'd thought the Juul reading would take an hour or so to finish, and it took four hours. Five, counting that blogpost. Which meant I got home at 2:30 am. Which meant I got six hours of sleep. Today was also the first day where it's clear the snow is around to stay, and that's a mood-setter, if you let it be. Then I spent a good portion of today running around trying to track down a laptop for my students (although the downtime downtown was really nice, mostly thanks to good company). Back on campus, I felt inundated with minutiae (It's my blog and I'll use fancy vocabulary if I want): I had to drop off the laptop, get the key from the mailroom, carry a package from the mail room to my office, return a recalled book to the library, go up to the 10th floor to get a book on the rhetoric of instruction manuals (gonna bet they weren't thinking of game manuals), remember that I still had the mailroom key, return the mailroom key, and run at top speed to reach a bus that was pulling away. So I finally get home at around 5, which means the sun is setting. It's at that point I realize that I've lost my debit card, so I have to go the local grocery store and wait around until the floor manager's free so I can reclaim it. I get home, get ready for the run, and it's 5:30, which means the sun has already set.

And thus, I was in a bad mood for my run.

And because of the mood I was in, I wasn't taking the precautions I should have been. I was in a "cars make way for pedestrians, dammit" sort of mood. That misguided view came to a head when I came to a certain corner. There was a main road going east-west, and a road that joined it going south; the only traffic guiding element was a stop sign on the south road. So I'm running east across this walk while a car going west is turning left. I have to jump to avoid being hit, and it honks at me. At which I, being rather annoyed already yell, "IT'S A CROSSWALK!". The rejoinder came in that special tone that only a young male can properly affect: "GET THE FUCK OFF THE ROAD ASSHOLE!".

I'm pretty sure that a pedestrian crossing at a marked pedestrian crosswalk has the right of way in this situation, but that's not the point; if I hadn't been so wrapped up in my own gloom at that point, I probably wouldn't have been in situation to begin with. My anger was endangering me, and I needed to calm down. And thus I did. I took some deep breaths, and ran on, sans iPod and music, just me and cold weather clothing, moving in the night. And once i settled into that groove, it struck me that this was all very familiar.

Those with particularly good memories may recall that I've previously said that I started running in order to impress a girl. Though that's a gross oversimplification, it still has an element of truth. I started running way back in the summer of 2004 for that reason. But what kept me running over these next seven years wasn't misplaced masculine pride. Rather, it was night jogs in the crisp, often cold night air of the late fall and early winter.

At that point in my life, most of my self-esteem was tied into my intellectual endeavors, and for some good reasons. Unfortunately, one of those reasons was that I really, really disliked my body. I was short, short-sighted, kinda chubby, and, though this was long before the asthma days, not exactly in good health. My body was just clumsy, accident-prone, and all around faulty. What was there to be proud of? But when I started running, that changed. Sure, I was still awkward and uncoordinated, but by God, at least I had endurance, and I could continue performing awkwardly long after those smooth-functioning pretty boys had to sit down for a breather.

But while I was appreciating the effects of my running, it wasn't until that fall that I started to appreciate the running itself. I was feeling a lot of pressure from school at the time--the double major was a tough mistress to please. And I was doing marking for the Math department, which meant a pretty heavy workload some nights. Running wasn't an escape, but it was a release. There's a tranquility to a good run that sets in after a kilometer or two. It's a simple satisfaction, but a true one. It's being content in the knowledge that the whole mind/body/meat/whatever assemblage is working together to forge its way through and in the environment around it. When I'm running like that, I'm at peace with myself in a way that's a little different from anything else in my life.

And I'd forgotten that, recently. Partly because I've gotten too used to jogging with the iPod, which, love it though I do, is undeniably a distraction. And partly because I've been doing nothing but day runs, where you have to be more concerned about the fellow pedestrians you're sharing elbow room with. But mostly because I've let the running slide. Once a week, twice a week, maybe skip a week, if sometimes. I've got a lot of things to do, after all, and running's not important. But what I reminded myself today is that it is important. It's important to me, both in terms of who I want to be, and what it does for me on a day-to-day basis.

Or, to put it another way, here's the short version of why that was a good run:
It reminded me who I am. I'm a mother-fucking runner, man.

(Knock on wood, but this would be a good time to start a betting pool for how long until I have my next running-related leg injury.)

Later Days.

Book Review: A Casual Revolution by Jesper Juul

2011-11-16T23:09:00.006-05:00

“It was important for me to finish the game—I believe that it is important in life, to finish things, no matter what. I like competing with myself, to see development and progress. 'No matter what,' is really the point for me. I googled for solutions and found a cheat code to make Zuma slower. It worked!!! For me, that was even more satisfying than beating the game on its own terms: to modify the game to fit my own limitations and capacities.” --50 year old woman, on discovering the casual game Zuma. Interviewed in A Casual Revolution.
“Look at chess. Why shouldn't video games aspire to [the] same kind of status? Why shouldn't the very best of them aspire to have that kind of impact on the world? A game could be something that is worth devoting your life to, for a player to grow up playing it, to spend their whole life playing it... to make it the centerpiece of their entire life.
“Is that casual? No, but that's what golf is, that's what baseball is, that's what poker is, and those are the games that appeal to a broad audience. So to me, it's foolish to not look at this larger audience. I think wwe should think about this larger audience in historical terms. It's not just about reaching a million soccer moms, it's about making a game that can stand the test of time.” --Frank Lutz, part of the development team of the Facebook game Parking Wars, and a former director at gamelab, interviewed in Casual Revolution.

Right. It's 11:30 pm, I'm still in my office, and time's a-wasting. So let's minimize the amusing anecdotal portion. I am a hardcore gamer. Here, for example, is a short list of games off the top of my head that I know I have spent over a hundred hours on: Mass Effect, Mass Effect II, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Disgaea, and Dragon Warrior VII. I am a casual gamer. I am (or was) a frequent player of casual games such as FreeCell, Minesweeper, Farmville, Mafia Wars, and online Scrabble. So what's the difference between these two identites? Or, alternatively, what's the difference between these two sets of games? Jesper Juul, veteran videogame scholar, aims to find out, in his book A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.

The book is rather breezy, to the point of being quite short: it runs at 218 pages, but the last 73 pages are appendices detailing the resulting of Juul's interviews. The real meat is the first 152 pages, wherein he outlines his discussion of casual games. The first chapter outlines the basic theory. Videogames are becoming normalized through the proliferation of popular games, which make a point of appealing to a wider audience. In particular, the casual games function through two main means: mimetic games, that focus on approximating controls with real-life equivalents (think the Wii, the Kinect) and downloadable games that focus on flat screen interfaces over fancy 3D graphics. Juul argues that hardcore and casual don't present two choices or even a spectrum, but different stances on a variety of factors that change over time.

Chapter 2 defines what it means to be casual under five categories: type of fiction (happy or disturbing), usability (ease of learning and mastering the interface), interruptibility (how easy it is to put the game down if need be), difficulty, and juiciness (how immediately the game rewards success). Game studies, he argues, needs to pay attention to how the game addresses these elements, but also on the type of players at work (or rather, play). Chapter 3 examines the history of casual games, with a focus on the development of Solitaire, from the 19th century on. Games, Juul argues, have to be considered in terms of four time frames of experience: historic time (history of the game and genre), design time (the background of the designers), player time (the game conventions the player is familiar with) and game-playing time, the time of actually playing the game. Personally, I would have gone with something like "context" over "time," as the latter places a distracting focus on temporality, but it's still a nice consideration.

Chapter 4 looks at downloadable games, with a focus on the 3-tile swap game's evolution. Again, I would have handled this somewhat differently; in my mind, if you want to talk about the history of the downloadable game, you need to start much earlier, with not just Doom and shareware, but also with the original distribution style of the mainframe game. Yes, these games are about as far from casual as you can get, which is why I imagine Juul didn't go there, but that's the point--what changes alter the use of this medium of distribution to change it from a hardcore channel to a casual one? (Easy answer: the Internet, but I suspect there may be more to it.) Anyway, using early tile-based games Tetris and Chain Shot, he identifies four traits for the games: time (whether the game is hectically paced or turn-based strategic); manipulation (whether you manipulate pieces as they fall or after they are in place); completion criteria (matching three or filling a row), and obligatory matches, whether the game lets you make nonmatching moves or not.

The next chapter is on mimetic gaming, with an emphasis on the Wii and the Guitar Hero-type games. He focuses on the Wii, as the first console to use a simplified controller as its main peripheral, and the arcade games, which had a heavy mimetic bent (think racing games shaped like race cars). Chapter 6 is on social meanings and social goals. Essentially, Juul states that gamers in a social setting keep in mind their desire to win, their desire to create an interesting game, and their desire to keep the esteem and goodwill of the other players. (Note that in an online multiplayer game, anonymity makes the last element less of a concern.) Chapter 7 studies Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and The Sims 2, stating that the success of these games is their flexibility in offering goals, but not forcing players to meet them, enabling hardcore and casual play.

Chapter 8 concludes things, suggesting that the casual shift is occurring because of rising costs in game production, the proliferation of PCs, and the aging demographic of players. He also briefly mentions browser-based games, like the facebook apps, and concludes that games becoming normal is good for hardcore and casual folk alike. Three appendices follow: the first show number crunches for who's casual gaming (most interesting part: the people at that particular site tested 93% female, and average age of 41); interviews with players over what brought them to casual games; and interviews with casual game developers.

As you may have guessed by my dissatisfied, almost snide remarks, I wasn't too enamored of this book. A lot of that, to be fair, must be chalked up to my own personal prejudices. As a scholar, I like studying both casual and hardcore games, though the former my focus is more on player discourses than the games themselves, per se. But as a player, I far prefer the hardcore. And I think that may be because of my single player RPG background. I *do* prefer a good story with my game, even if that story presents itself mainly in terms of ambiance, as in Oblivion. As one of the casual designers, Margaret Wallace, admits, the interruptibility of the casual game means it's not really suitable for sustaining a long term narrative, and I find that inherently less interesting. So I have a vested interest in supporting the hardcore (but not the multiplayer FPSes, or the MMOs. See, even in "hardcore," there's distinctions).

And I should say that the interviews are really quite fascinating. Juul sticks to a pretty typical set of questions for the interview subjects, and those questions really illuminate his discussion points for the book proper: whether casual refers to players or games, whether all video games were originally casual games in the 70s, but drifted away from this form, whether there's a distinction between developing games for themselves and developing for a casual audience. The first question question is significant, because it asks designers to choose a side: focus on the game, or focus on the players. Most designers, like Juul himself, answer somewhere in between. The second question is significant, because if the answer is yes, then suddenly you have a different narrative happening. It's not about casual games suddenly appearing now, but a return to the originary form. My favorite answer to this one was also a yes and no; yes, some games were very simple, like Pac-Man, but others were so punishing--and designed to be punishing, to get the maximum quarter drain--that they can't be really defined as casual. And finally, the third question is significant, because it deals with the image of the designer. If the designer designs for themselves, they are still, in some way, auteurs, creating works of art they themselves appreciate. Or, alternatively, they are selfish jerks, ignoring a wide segment of the population. If they design games they wouldn't play themselves, they are more akin to business suits, catering to demographics. Or, alternatively, they are widening games to more than their immediate narrow circle.

I quite liked the interviews; I liked them more, in fact, than the conclusions Juul drew from them in the book proper. I suppose my main problem with the book is that just because its subject is casual gaming, it shouldn't feel like a casual encounter with the subject. And yet, it does. It's too short. 152 pages is almost nothing, especially when you consider the liberal use of large screenshots and diagrams. It's great to see such quality shots, but it doesn't help me shake the feeling that this book is artificially inflated at the cost of cheapening its subject. Take chapter 6, the chapter on social gaming in casual games. It's eight pages long. Eight pages (one of which is a page long cartoon strip Juul reprints) to describe the entirety of the social element of casual games. It seems like there should be more to say on the subject. (But while I remember, that cartoon strip does get points for being incredibly moving, and a great example of social aspects of gaming--see its original slideshow version here, Animal Crossing is Tragic.)

So to wrap up then: Excellent topic, excellent discussion. I'm just left with the feeling that something of greater substance is still waiting to be written on the subject.

Later Days.

TV Talk: How I Talk About Meeting Your Mother

2011-11-15T13:48:00.007-05:00

To say that How I Met Your Mother has been slow going this season is an understatement. It's been in a slump, and it isn't aging particularly well. A large part of the problem is the show's central concept, that the Ted character is telling a prolonged story to his kids about how he met their mother. Presumably, then, the show ends with the line "...and that's how I met your mother." The problem with approach--or at least one of the problems--is that it means that your main character's story arc is already set: he is the one who will meet his "true love" and there's only so much you can do with introducing "potential mothers" before it feels as if you're teasing the audience. So the show tries to distract with its other running plots. This season, it's the Barney/Robin love connection, the mystery of Barney's wedding (which we've seen in flashforwards, thanks for adding that phrase to the TV lexicon, Lost), and Lily and Marshall's attempt to have a baby. The immediate problem with the show is that with the exception of the wedding frame, these are all plot lines we've seen before. This season seems to be a clearing of the deck--Barney's put his womanizing ways behind him, and Ted has resolved two of his longstanding love affairs, the chef girl from Season 1 and the Season 1 Slutty Pumpkin. (On the former: the show's a lot more tolerable if you imagine it ending when he meets the chef. On the latter: don't ask. The explanation's less interesting than the phrase.) But really, it's been more about wallowing in the past than moving forward. And while moving forward is not really a traditional strength of the laugh-track sitcom, HIMYM usually does a better job of at least presenting an illusion of such progress.

Last night's episode, (he said, finally getting to the point)was a welcome departure, not so much because it depicted anything radically new, but because it played to the strengths of the show, namely, its romantic flair and its focus on the subjectivity of memory. We tend to take for granted that what we see in a sitcom is what's actually happening in the fictional world. At times, HIMYM breaks this convention, drawing on the fact that it is not just a world that we're glimpsing into, but a story told by an unreliable narrator. (Which is why, as I continually argue with a friend, you have a father you sounds like Bob Saget, but, in his own memory, looks and sounds like Josh Radnor. It's not a point requiring a suspension of disbelief, it's part of the show's basic conceit!) I've discussed this great, boring length elsewhere, so I won't rehash it all now. Last night, that element is brought to the forefront. First, there's the A plot. (Oh, spoilers abound, folks.)

Barney and Robin slept together last episode, which means they are both cheating on their respective partners. Through one of those ridiculous coincidences sitcoms are built on, they have to go to a boat party with these partners, and thus see not only the person they cheated on, but the person seeing the person they cheated with. (But the contrivance allows for a guest spot from Alexis Denisof, so I'm not going to complain too loudly.) They're both feeling guilty, and thus, through their interpretation, the live band is singing a song directly to them, telling them to confess. In the B plot, the subjectivity is even more evident. Lily, Ted, and Marshall are attending a concert, and Ted and Marshall go through a drug trip. They think they spend hours wandering the stadium, encountering bizarre figures and hearing odd nonsequitors. In reality, as we see through a security camera, they stumbled around for two minutes, and we revisit the whole scene through that perspective (there's a brilliant double use of the line "It's a sign."). The actual plot point--that Marshall is worried about becoming a dad, and Ted's insecure about losing his friends to parenthood--has already been done multiple times this season. And as my brother pointed out, that is not how people high on pot actually act (though if my parents read this, I assume he got this knowledge from friends, because OF COURSE my brother has never smoked any pot, ever). But it's still a clever use of both the show's concept and a reversal of the audience's confidence in what they're viewing.

Equal kudos has to go to the way the A plot was handled. It's very easy to set up villains and victims in a cheating partner plotline, and it's not the sort of situation that lends itself to laughs. And for the most part, it doesn't. I was impressed with how maturely the plot was handled. Barney and Robin are, obviously, conflicted--they don't want to hurt anyone, and they don't know exactly how they feel about each other. It's the sort of thing that could have been drawn out too far, but both of them have frank conversations with their partners and with each other about their futures. No one's demonized, no one's transformed into a pure victim (although Nora comes close) and the situation is resolved through rational discussion rather than explosive, cheap emotional theatrics. It's a glimpse at adult relationships that haven't been filtered through some overly romantic lenses. And with spoiling even further, one stays with their partner, and one doesn't, and the look on the face of the one who leaves their partner for their friend when they realize that they've made the jump and been left alone is just devastatingly well-acted, and definitely a caliber of performance rarely seen in this genre. Chris Harris, the writer of the episode, also deserves some major props. He's been a writer for the show a long time, and last night, he really showed he understands how to play to its strengths.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Roommate Dynamics and Telepathic Marsupials

2011-11-13T20:45:00.005-05:00

All right, I'll level with you--posting is work. The academic blogs, rare as they are, require a big picture view of my career. The book reviews (and indeed, the reviews in general) require some effort towards theme and reading. Even the personal posts require an amount of self-reflection that I'm not really ready for at the moment. (Who's in a rut? Not me. Where are my comic books and skittles?) And so I stick to what's easy. What's simple. And thus, we have Friday Quotations, Sims quotes, and the subject of the most depressing introduction ever,

Biblophile!

Here's what's new and interesting at a library near me.

The Role of taste and calories in access-induced excessive sweets consumption by the rat. By Adam Celejewski.
First: Congratulations to Adam for completing a thesis. It's not easy, which means it amply prepares you for the rest of your life from this point on. Second: there are now some rats in Waterloo that require a good rat dentist.

Manure pathogens : manure management, regulations, and water quality protection / [Dwight D. Bowman, editor].
Mentioned only because I read it as Manure Pantheons, and the six year old in me would have been really fascinated by a book dedicated to the gods of poopy.

Lip service : smiles in life, death, trust, lies, work, memory, sex, and politics / Marianne LaFrance.
Credit where credit's due--that's a clever title.

Astonishing general : the life and legacy of Sir Isaac Brock / by Wesley B. Turner. Toronto : Dundurn Press, 2011.
I don't really know anything about Sir Isaac Brock, but a book called "Astonishingly General" would be great. "Be amazed by our lack of description!" "Marvel at our vague accounts!" "No specifics, no details, just the broad scope you've all been waiting!" And so forth.

Beauty pays : why attractive people are more successful / Daniel S. Hamermesh.
I suspect the answer has to be a little more complicated than "because they're attractive," else it will be a rather short book.

Erotic capital : the power of attraction in the boardroom and the bedroom / Catherine Hakim. New York : Basic Books, c2011.
One assumes that attractive people pay in erotic capital, then.

American idyll : academic antielitism as cultural critique / Catherine Liu. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, c2011.
The pun's a little subtler than most, which is nice. More to the point, the subject is interesting, if not really my bag; a brief search on the book reveals that its focus is the recent swathe of anti-intellectual, anti-elitist protests in the States, and the failure of both it and the forces it's rebelling against to address the issues that lead to its creation.

Making chastity sexy : the rhetoric of evangelical abstinence campaigns / Christine J. Gardner.
I just saw a Louis C. K. episode on this, and I think it could be a really interesting subject. All right, I saw half an episode. Roommate show-watching is a tricky beast to negotiate. On the one hand, you don't want to commit to asking them to make sure you're informed when they're watching a new episode, as that places demands on both you and them. If you're on the fence for the show, it's a level of devotion that you don't want to meet. And you can't watch the ones you miss by yourself either, because that suggests that you were actually interested in the show all along, but didn't voice any opinion, which raises the question of whether you acted in that manner just to avoid watching them with the roommate. Which means that the only option you're left with if you do like the show is to drift in occasionally and catch what you can. Hence, I saw half of this episode.
...I feel like we've moved off topic somewhat.

John Byrne : art and life.
For a moment, I thought this was John Byrne the comic book writer/artist, but no, it's John Byrne the British artist and playwright.

Ai Weiwei's blog : writings, interviews, and digital rants, 2006-2009 / Ai Weiwei ; edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy.
I like the idea of a book that's just a transcript of an online blog. It's sort of digital archive in reverse. And some Google research reveals that there's a heavy political side as well, as Weiwei was a Chinese artist who blogged until the Chinese government shut the site down and deleted it. (Also, publishers take note: There is precedence, and I am open for negotiating a deal. Experimental Progress goes print!)

Kiss my relics : hermaphroditic fictions of the middle ages / David Rollo.
Heh. Good title.

Politics of insects : David Cronenberg's cinema of confrontation / Scott Wilson
After seeing just a handful of Cronenberg films, I think an in-depth study is very warranted.

Super black : American pop culture and black superheroes. Adilifu Nama.
Another example of a book I think is a great idea, though I doubt I'll ever get a chance to read it. It includes Black Panther, Blade, and Luke Cage, for those curious.

Italo Calvino's architecture of lightness : the utopian imagination in an age of urban crisis / Letizia Modena.
I love the idea of a really thorough analysis of Imaginary Cities, though I understand this is more of a postmodern, urban renewal sort of emphasis.

Hog butchers, beggars, and busboys : poverty, labor, and the making of modern American poetry / John Marsh.
All of the sexiest professions.

Farmer Buckley's exploding trousers : and other odd events on the way to scientific discovery / edited by Stephanie Pain.
Do I really need to explain why "Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers" is an attention-grabbing title?

I usually skim over a large chunk of the Q area of the Library of Congress listings, which is the math and computer science section. Honestly, they're incredibly interesting topics, but the titles seem to be in a competition to see who can come up with the driest approach to a subject. And they all make the Sahara look like a sandtrap. ...Okay, that wasn't my a material. Moving on...

Ah, biology. Now there's a group that knows how to lay a title.
Mindreading animals : the debate over what animals know about other minds / Robert W. Lurz.
I assume this book is on the growing danger of the telepathic wombat.

Twitter power 2.0 : how to dominate your market one tweet at a time / Joel Comm.
Considering it's still with only very, very reluctant distaste that I even have a Twitter account, this book would be a novel way to angry up my blood. Twitter. Ugh. (Follow me at PersonofCon! (No exclamation point))

...Okay, that takes at least as long as the regular subjects. I don't know what I was talking about earlier. I suppose it's mildly less intellectual effort, as a bon mot is easier, in many ways, than the careful development of a sustained argument. (Take that, Twitter.)

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Future Civilizations will marvel over our devotion to LOLcat.

2011-11-11T11:45:00.004-05:00

"Images are not just a particular kind oif sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary status, a history that parallels and participates in the stories we tell ourselves about our own evolution from creatures 'made in the image' of a creator, to creatures who make themselves and their world in their own images."-- W. J. T. Mitchell

Who has two thumbs, a blog, and just got his Amazon-ordered copies of W. J. T. Mitchell's Picture Theory and Iconology?

This guy.

Later Days.

Creating Electronic Marrow

2011-11-10T13:27:00.003-05:00

Research-wise, my focus of late is still on videogame instruction manuals. And the most recent one has been the manual for the 2000 videogame classic, The Sims. Certain traits become apparent after you've examined a dozen or so of these manuals. For example, the longer than manual, the fewer images it uses, especially for PC games. And despite having the budget of the mighty EA behind them, The Sims is less an exception to this rule than its exemplar--aside from the cover image, the only images you get are cropped shots illustrating some piece of text. And there is a lot of text: the manual is over 90 pages long (90 very detailed pages, which in itself says something about the real nature of casual gaming--this "casual game" is really, really complicated.) But it does its best to keep the reader's interest, mainly through a constant stream of reasonably well-written, often eye-rolling, and sometimes head-scratching jokes. So, without further ado, here are the top ten quotations from the Sims Instruction Manual.

1. “The tutorial is just an appetiser: To get to the real meat (or cheese sandwich, for you vegetarians) of the game, you have to investigate the Soul of a Sim/Daily Life section of this manual. Hey, you don't think we wrote them just because we love the alphabet, do you? Check out that information and make some Sims your parents would be proud of. And if you make some that they'd be horrified by, tell 'em your sister did it.” I thought I'd start off with a baffling one. What does that alphabet thing even mean?

2. “Remember, if you choose to quit, you have to return to your regular life, where your family members won't do your bidding like Sims do. Are you sure?”
That is the chief difference between my Sims life and my real Life. That, and my real life career as an international jewel thief hasn't taken off. Yet.

3.“However, just as in human life, these are the kinds of challenges that make life interesting. And miserable as well. Here's to interesting misery!”
Interesting misery would make a good band name. For a gothy/hispterish sort of band.

4. “if you attempt the really high household counts (between six and eight), you're probably no longer eating right or bathing in your real home. (You can still tell the difference between your real home and your Sims' home, right?)”
They're very worried about distinguishing the real world from the game world. It's a real problem these days, what with all the plumber on turtle assaults you read about in the paper.

5. "This section... attempts to answer the question Freud would have posed if he were alive today: 'What do Sims really want?'"
Well, someone on the writing staff knows his stuff. Feel free to draw the conclusions you'd like in comparing women to Sims--especially considering that Sims are portrayed as less-than-human, easily controllable versions of the real thing. Yikes.

6. “Click on the High or Ultra speed settings if you want to accelerate game actions to achieve a certain goal, like getting the gal off to work so the guy can play video games in peace.”
And while we're on the subject of gender, here's another crowd-pleaser.

7. “If you want to place a few of the same items without having to return to the panel, just hold down the Shift key after you select your trinket—you can put 20 grandpa clocks in a row, if you've got time on your hands.”
That is an amazing pun, in both its groan-inducing awfulness, and the effort the writer had to go to in order to make it fit.

8. “If you're just beginning a game in an unfurnished home, you need to cover the basics first. Think eat, sleep, poop, and polish.”
This one works in real life, too.

9. “WINNING THE GAME. Don't be absurd. This is a Maxis game! What's to win? You and your Sims can play unto perpetuity, getting them into all kinds of entanglements and trying to get them out. Before you know it, it'll be 3A.M. your time, and you don't even have your teeth brushed...”
You heard them. This game is an insidious plot to turn us all into Sims.

10. “A balustrade always offers a refined touch on a staircase or balcony, and if you use 'balustrade' in conversation, all your friends will think you're ever, so, so---so pretentious, so don't even try it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

What was your favorite Simism? Do you have fond memories of guiding whole families to their doom? Do let us know in the comments.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Clockwork Pirhannas

2011-11-06T17:53:00.002-05:00

It's time, once again, for another round of judging books by their covers. Or rather, titles.

Iron Jaws: The Killing Power of Civil War Artillery.
I like that title-- "Iron Jaws." The Civil War stuff I could take or leave, but the idea of a giant shark made out of metal appeals to me. Steam-punk fish FTW.

One Breath: A Personal Journey with Asthma.
As someone who can barely breathe in the morning until he has his daily puff (If you haven't experienced this, it's essentially the same feeling that motivates "I NEED Coffee," with a slight but persistent fear that you might accidentally die before you get it.

Truth in numbers?: everything, according to Wikipedia.
A documentary on all things Wikipedian. Apparently, it delves into the ethics of the wiki-founder, Jimmy Wales--though it was facing accusations of being out of date almost since its inception.

Do the gods wear capes? : spirituality, fantasy, and superheroes. by Ben Saunders.
A philosophy book on super heroes? Sign me up.

Surfing life: surface, substructure and the commodification of the sublime. By Mark Stranger.
A consumer-based study of surfing? Finally, something that can shed new light on Point Break.

Selling sex short : the pornographic and sexological construction of women’s sexuality in the West. by Meagan Tyler.
I like books that look into how we make these categories for sex. That, or I'm a dirty old grad student. Take your pick.

Joss Whedon : conversations. A compilation of interviews from Joss Whedon. The perfect gift for someone who really, really liked Firefly.

Approximate Continuum Comics. By Lewis Trondheim.
I've been following Trondheim ever since I came across the Dungeon comics. He's a French comic book writer who combines cartoonish creatures (usually anthropomorphized ducks) with slice-of-life reflections. I think this book is an autobiography.

Beard fetish in early modern England : sex, gender, and registers of value. by Mark Albert Johnston.
There should be more books on beards.

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers. by Robert C. Martin.
It might be interesting, in terms of what it will say on the social side of a rather tech-based profession.

Epigenetics : a reference manual. by Jeffrey Craig.
I originally read this title as "Eugenics," and was momentarily startled. But no; it appears that "Epigenetics" refers to the study of changes to genes that can be passed on, but don't alter the actual composition of DNA.

Winged obsession : the pursuit of the world’s most notorious butterfly smuggler. By Jessica Speart.
How often do you see "notorious" and "butterfly smuggler" in the same sentence?

Okay, this turned out to be a much longer exercise than I thought. A lot of good books this time around--and a lot of holds on good books. I think all the librarians may know me by sight at this point.

Later Days.

Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

2011-11-05T11:23:00.003-04:00

"Most online games of the day generated revenue by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access. GSS only charged a onetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, for which you received a lifetime OASIS account. The ads all used the same tagline: The OASIS--it's the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter.
"At a time of drastic social and cultural upheaval, when most of the world's population longed for an escape from reality, the OASIS provided it, in a form that was cheap, legal, safe, and not (medically proven to be) addictive. The ongoing energy crisis contributed greatly to the OASIS's runaway popularity. The skyrocketing cost of oil made airline and automobile travel too expensive for the average citizen, and the OASIS became the only getaway most people could afford. As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus. Every day, more and more people had reason to seek solace inside Halliday and Morrow's virtual utopia." -- Ready Player One.

Join me, if you will, as I try to pursue that most elusive of blog posts, the short book review. I think this quotation demonstrates the basic plot: as global conditions worsen in the near future, we'll all retreat to virtual worlds. It's Second Life gone global, with a dose of Matrix-level VR. The catch is that OASIS' founder James Halliday was obsessed with 80s pop culture--Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, video games. And when he passed, he left behind a challenge--anyone who could solve his 80s-themed riddles and puzzles would get his controlling share in OASIS. Thus, we have the plot: teenaged geek boy Wade Watt sets out (with some help from his friends/rivals) to unravel the mystery. And against him are the employees of Innovative Online Industries, the heartless conglomerate that will throw any amount of money or kill anyone necessary to get control themselves. (Note to any benevolent billionaires who wish to put odd inheritance clauses in their wills--in general, you should probably add provisions to keep people whose business practices are your exact moral opposite out of the competition.)

Thus, the book is an unusual combination of future thinking scifi and nostalgia-based 80s pop culture. And there is a LOT of stuff on videogames--the opening chapter has one of the most in-depth explanations of Robinett's easter egg in the Atari 2600 Adventure that I've ever read. So this should be right up my alley, right? Eh.... not so much, actually. As someone who was 7 when the 80s ended, most of my pop culture nostalgia is for the 90s--X-Men cartoons and Reboot and Sega Genesis, and so forth. Thanks to various research, I'm familiar with most of the stuff Kline's talking about. I know Joust, and the D&D Tomb of Horrors module, and the phone phreaks. But it's all academic knowledge for me; there's no personal attachment. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

What's more interesting to me is how the book is being marketed. The list of author recommendations on the back include Charlaine Harris, Terry Brooks, John Scalzi, and Patrick Rothfuss. So we're talking about a pretty hard push to get it to the audience that's reading the adult fantasy/sci-fi genre. Ready Player One is not really in that genre at all. I understand why it's promoting itself as that, given adult fans are the ones likely to favor the nostalgia factor. But it is, very much, a book from the\young adult fantasy/sci-fi genre. And despite the uniqueness of the trappings, it's a very typical YA format: teenager gathers friends, fights evil, grows up. It's Harry Potter, if Harry was into obscure 80s geek stuff rather than magic battles against the forces of evil.

Actually, that's not quite right; it doesn't remind me of Harry Potter so much as a YA Heinlein-penned book, such as the previously reviewed . They're both tales about a young male figures overcoming adversity (in fairly black and white conditions) and growing into independent adulthood. It's the difference that's interesting, because the difference between the two is the difference between Heinlein's 1950s, 60s version of what makes a boy into a man, and the modern equivalent today. Heinlein's figures need to become functionally independent, for example, and Wade's problem is largely the opposite. Starting off as a rather stereotypical shut-in, he slowly becomes more used to having friends in his life--he doesn't have to worry about setting himself apart from his parents, because they never had much impact on him to begin with. Similarly, Heinlein's boys to men come to occupy very traditional gender roles, with a slowly blossoming, era-appropriate relationship with a young woman, in a manner that solidifies the proper behavior for both. (This makes a sharp contrast with his adult material, such as Job: A Divine Comedy, which features the Church of the Divine Orgasm.) Wade is a boy interested in girls, but gender roles don't really concern him; he accepts homosexual relationships as readily as any other sorts, and falls quite thoroughly for a girl gamer who's largely his gaming equal--no shrinking violets here. The society of the future may be economically starved and generally impoverished, but at least we're not intolerant jerks. (The best example of the difference between now and then, though, is that there's a passage in Ready Player One where Halliday extols the virtues of masturbation. Not finding that in a 50s YA novel.)

Thematically, the book is about escapism, and doubly so. By centering on a sci-fi based creator that's obsessed with the 80s, the book has simultaneously a retreat to the past and future--anything to escape the now. Cline set himself a difficult task. How do you sell a YA story about moving into adulthood when so much of the plot is about glorifying the past? There are two choices--you either promote the past as better, which is rather defeatist, or you try to forge ahead, in which case you risk disrupting exactly what attracted readers in the first place. I think he strikes a nice balance between nostalgia and bildungromans, all in all. And Cline's pulled off a double audience: I'd recommend the book for both the Harry Potter adventure crowd, and those looking for an 80s nostalgia kick. It's a light, fast-moving story, and if that's what you're in the market for, it'll do fine.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Bigger than Orc Jesus?

2011-11-04T08:31:00.002-04:00

"Only a handful of religious denominations have more members than World of Warcraft does. Given its supernatural symbolism, its engagement of the user's emotions, and the many hours each week members may participate, one could argue it has greater significance than all but a half dozen mainstream American denominations." (46)
William Sims Bainbridge and Wilma Alice Bainbridge, "Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications."

Later Days.

First you get the laptop, then you get the power, then you get the women

2011-11-03T22:22:00.003-04:00

I've had a lot of trouble with technology over the years. I came across a prime example of this misfortune when I was dredging up posts for the 500th compilation--there was a period of about three weeks when the keyboard on my computer was so broken that I couldn't use the spacebar button. I'd copy a space from regular texts, then insert it in by first typing "*" and using a find and replace function to change them all. How well did that work? It*didn't*work*well.

And my dear computer, beloved as it was, really wasn't any better. Just prior to moving down here, the graphics card burnt out. With a bit of jury-rigging, I got the computer working again, but it wasn't the same. Without a graphic card, even the scrolling changes, as the screen can't process as fast as you're moving. And when you're focused on game studies, not being able to use a reasonable graphics card means that you can't play anything beyond 1997 or so.

Thus, I bit the bullet, and bought a laptop. The very same laptop I'm using now! Since I needed something capable of a bit of gaming, it's an overpowered behemoth Alienware thing that cost more money than I've ever paid for anything except tuition. And I have to say, despite my miserly, luddite streak, I love it. It's transformed where and when I can work. (and play for that matter, but it hasn't, in the two days I had it anyway, cut into work time) And thus, I go one step further into technological sophistication.

So it begins.
Later Days.

Does Not Compute

2011-11-03T19:41:00.003-04:00

I rode home on the bus today. The bastion of public transport, the chariot of the people, the service for the masses. And so forth. And while traveling on the bus, juggling my reading with my new laptop (more on that later), I overhead a conversation between two undergraduates. One was adamant, even proud, that he had never, ever picked up a math midterm after it was marked. Why bother, he asked? His mark is posted online. The answers are posted online. The actual effort to go down to someone's office and pick it up was superfluous. (I'm paraphrasing. This particular undergraduate's vocabulary did not, I'm betting, contain "superfluous" in its regular listings.) The friend offered several counter-arguments:
-don't you want to know what you did wrong? Not really.
-But what about finding your mistakes, so you don't do them again? Fixing them at that point servers no purpose; he'd forget what he learned, since the class was moving on to something else. Made more sense to learn with the answer key when studying for the final.
-What if the mark was wrong? Well, arguing with the TAs never does any good.
-But what if they actually added it wrong? You could prove that much. Sure, but what are the odds of that happening? Why waste the effort?

It was at this point the bus reached my stop. And I'm glad it did, because I really, really didn't want to hear any more. You see, in my life before being an English grad student, I was a Math marker. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I was the best. Or one of the best. In my department. At that university. That I knew of. Marking math isn't like marking English, but the difference is really one of degree rather than kind. I imagine the popular conception is that English is subjective marking, and math isn't--there's one right answer. That can be the case. But just as often, your math marker is looking for either a written proof or shown work, and in either case, it becomes somewhat subjective. Is skipping the expansion a half-mark penalty? If the student just made one error in adding, and got the wrong answer, is that worth less than the student who showed no work but came to the right one? Did they skip a step in their logic argument? How does skipping that step translate to a deduction for a problem with 3 marks allocated to it? Can you really deduct 1/4 of a mark?

Yes, it's often one check mark after the other, but there can be a lot of work involved. I usually had a large number of students, much larger than any English class section--in some first year courses, I was marking around 100 papers a quiz. But I had a fast turnover, I wrote analyses to the profs explaining which problems most students got wrong and how (I bet they loved that), and I always, always made a point of finding out where the student had gone wrong, and at least hinted at how to go about getting the final solution. Yes, it was more work than my pay or instructions merited. But I thought that if I was in their shoes, I'd like to know.

And then to hear, even years later, in a university I'd never even marked a math paper for, that some undergrad couldn't be bothered to walk down to an office to pick up his own paper--that bugged me. In some small way, it felt like it dimished all those hundreds of papers I worked hard to mark. Yes, he's paying the same amount of tuition as a student who did pick up their paper (or so we'll assume for the sake of argument), and he is entitled to not pick it up if he chooses, but... well, there seems to be a basic respect for the process and the actual people involved to shrug it all off with such a cavalier, self-indulgent attitude.

Or to put it another way, sometimes I wish "Rate Your Professor" had an equivalent "Rate Your Student."

Later Days.

I've become a very small portion of the things I hate

2011-11-01T09:18:00.004-04:00

One of the truisms of being a prolonged student is that you extend certain "student-esque" traits beyond their commonly accepted lifespan. That is, many grad students are poor, keep poor hours, eat poorly, and live in poorly cleaned areas, often with similarly minded roommates. Generally speaking, the traits tend to fade somewhat when cohabitation with significant others and children enter the list. But frankly, most of that fits me like a glove. Poor cleaning and poor eating habits segue nicely into the life of the eccentric professor, a position I have been training for quite extensively. And the prospect of some day giving up being poor in a monetary sense is a pleasing, if entirely abstract and distant, possibility. But of all the poorness listed above, I never thought that my first to go would be "keeping poor hours."

That's right. I've been sleeping regular hours for the first time since... high school, probably. I go to bed around 10:30 or so, I'm asleep by 11:30, and I'm up at 7. Let me repeat that, as those who know my sleeping habits may have assumed they misheard: "I'm asleep by 11:30." That's right, the man who once prided himself on never closing an eyelid before the witching hour now rarely sees it at all. How did I get to such a state? It started, as most addictive behavior does, in small increments. Since I'm teaching a morning class this term, I figured it behooved me wake up early on class days. And that was fine. A bit of a pain to remember the night before, but fine. But then I started waking up earlier on my Tuesday/Thursdays. And then I did the same on weekends. WEEKENDS. Oh, I've held the line at the 10 am slumber sessions on my weekend days, but it seems that for Tuesday/Thursdays, 7 am is the new noon.
Now, being up at that time has its benefits. I'm getting more work done. I'm seeing more people. But at what cost? Is it worth giving up a romanticized version of my ideal slacker persona just to be more efficient at my chosen profession?

Well, yes, probably. When you put it that way.

Sigh. The real test will come next week, when my new laptop arrives. If my new schedule can survive a time sink like that, it will probably last the rest of my life. Or at least until the first newborn enters the equation.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Song and Dance

2011-10-28T14:35:00.002-04:00

"But back the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cat-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds signing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don't yet know each other, the borders cross themselves." --Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy.

Bibliophyte: The Literary Equivalent of a Magpie.

2011-10-28T10:00:00.004-04:00

Once a week, I browse through the new books listing at my university library. I thought I might start noting what catches my eye.

Devil wears nada : Satan exposed / Tripp York.
I appreciate puns.
Bismarck : a life / Jonathan Steinberg
I also appreciate brevity.
Space, time, and crime / Kim Michelle Lersch, Timothy C. Hart.
And rhymes. Gotta love a rhyme.
Michaël Borremans : eating the beard. Michaël Borremans
Points for the interesting subtitle.
Everything is obvious : once you know the answer / Duncan J. Watts.
I've always suspected that this is the case.
Shakesqueer : a queer companion to the complete works of Shakespeare / edited by Madhavi Menon.
And then there's the pun that goes for broke. We.. done, Dr. Menon. Well done.

Later Days.

It's Time for Buddha Lite.

2011-10-27T13:03:00.004-04:00

Remember a week or two ago when RIM pulled the Blackberry network offline? And Apple chose the same time to put out a new version, and it was crashing for some people? Well, as the owner of outdated, outclassed, antique 3G World phone, I looked up the term "schadenfreude" on Wikipedia, so I could properly spell exactly how I was feeling on the Facebook. According to the austere wikipedians, schadenfreude refers to "feeling happiness in the misfortune of others." Which I already knew; I was looking for spelling, not definitions. But what interested me was the related terms list, which was formed basically by taking the schadenfreude definition and cycling through the binary possibilities:

"feeling unhappiness in the misfortune of others" -- empathy.
"feeling happiness in the fortune of others"--envy.

And, most interestingly: "feeling happiness in the fortune of others"--mudita.

If you're not familiar with the last term, don't worry; it wasn't exactly a common occurrence in my daily vocabulary either. It's a Buddhist term, and its more expanded definition is sympathetic joy, taking delight in the well-being of others rather than begrudging them of it. I'm not a Buddhist; there's something about their emphasis on non-being that doesn't mesh with my Western sense of the importance of individuality. And everything I know about Buddhism comes from a second year religious studies course I took nine years ago. (Man, I'm old.) But it seems to me that mudita is a concept worth adopting. So yes, I thought, moved considerably from my initial contemplation of cell phones and smart apps, I will try to cultivate a spirit of mudita.

It is surprisingly hard. According to the research (okay, Google search) I did, mudita is directly contested by jealousy and envy. And it is hard (maybe just for me?) to look at someone else's joy without envy. Even just thinking, "I want that." And if you do share in something similar, it then becomes a sort of self-congratulatory smugness: I'm doing pretty good, too. And that relates directly to another issue: it's not mudita if you are congratulating yourself on helping the person get to that happiness--if you're thinking about your contribution and investment, then you're thinking about how awesome you are, not the other person.

The "non-obvious" opponent of mudita is interesting as well--exhilaration. That is, it resembles the joy of mudita, but it is a joy that you cultivate in order to mask some sort of lack in yourself. So to a recently dumped individual, for example, going to a wedding is risky business. You not only have to evade jealousy and envy, but you also have to keep from throwing yourself into it emotionally to cover up for your own loss.

Again, I can see how the mudita concept relates to some core Buddhist philosophies. There's a level of detachment involved--thinking of others, feeling for others, without drawing your own baggage into things. At the same time, I wonder if that's really possible. We're all individuals, and our experiences are subjective experiences. There's always a filter on what we perceive, and trying to pretend it's not there seems like it could cause greater problems down the road. Dealing with your emotions shouldn't mean suppressing them.

But for the moment: mudita. Even if you don't subscribe to the Buddhist way of thinking, keeping mudita in mind, for me, has really drawn attention to how much jealousy and envy could influence my actions, if I let them. So let's all try to be a little more aware, and cultivate some mudita in our lives.

...Oh, I just know you're cultivating more mudita than me. And I hate you for it.

Later Days.

Amusing Comedy / Horrible Embarrassment Avoided

2011-10-26T17:39:00.005-04:00

The latch on the screen door of my jointly-shared rented house was broken. Specifically, it was broken in such a way that were it allowed to shut entirely, it would be impossible to open from the outside. One of my roommates cautioned me about this state of affairs, and told me that since he had to both break into the house and to fix it last time, he was leaving it up to either myself or the third roommate.

"Pssh." I said, exactly like that: "Pssh. We just move the washer on the bottom so it doesn't close entirely. Beyond that, it's not going to affect me at all, so I'm not going to bother worrying about it."

Now, to the universe, them's fighting words, on par with "God himself couldn't sink this ship," and "man, if I lost this memory stick on the way home, I'd be screwed." So today, while I'm heading out the door to go for a run, I suddenly reflect on my roommate's words, and decide to take a quick look at the door. 30 seconds later, I'm standing outside and have successfully locked myself and my roommates out of our house.

At this point, I have very few resources. I'm dressed in bunny hug and gym shorts. I have no wallet, cell phone, or other communication device. I do have my house key (I keep it on a chain around my neck now, after certain badexperiences), but it's not going to do me much good, as there is another door in front of the door it opens. So I do the only thing I'm dressed for: I jog to campus, log onto a university computer, and tell my roommates the problem. By the time I get home, one of them has arrived, and has opened the door with a screwdriver. After I watch him for a few minutes, he says that I could probably just go about my day, since it was a one person job. So I go to the library, read a few pages of Love in the Time of Cholera, and when I come back, the door's fixed.

I know, the story's a bit of a let-down. Previous narratives concerning me being locked out of places have been much more interesting, or at least a lot longer. Necessity may not be the mother of my invention, but it does seem to be the source of my muse. Sure is a shame that I have roommmates and friends that I can count on for help. *finishes his blogpost wrapped in a warm blanket rather than huddling desperately outside on his front porch.* Yeah, that sure is terrible.

Later Days.

Movie Buff: Math Rules Everything Around Me--A Review of Moneyball

2011-10-23T12:31:00.002-04:00

Moneyball tells the story of what happens when you put sabermetrics in charge of a baseball team. It stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, and Jonah Hill as assistant GM Peter Brand. The basic plot of the film is that, faced with the loss of several key players at the start of the 2002 season, Beane embraced sabermetrics to answer the team's pressing deficits--sabermetrics being the analysis of baseball purely through statistical means, with no concern for extrinsic factors that determined a player's worth. It's based on the A's real-life results, which were somewhat mixed: on the one hand, they set a new record with a 20 game winning streak, but on the other hand, they lost out in the first round of the postseason. The movie's story, however, is less about the rise and fall of the team and more about the life of Billy Beane in regards to the sport of baseball.

In terms of acting, the film has a relatively small main cast, with a number of lesser but significant performances. In comparison to most sport films, the players themselves are mostly bit characters. Stephen Bishop does a good job as the aging pro, and Chris Pratt (of Parks and Recreation) plays a more realistic version of his Andy character as a ball player who lost his confidence after suffering some nerve damage to his arm. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Art Howe, the team's manager. As someone resistant to Beane's methods, Howe has the thankless task of serving as the closest thing the film has to a villain, but to the credit of both Hoffman and the script, Howe's viewpoint is offered not so much as a demonized view but misguided one--which is perhaps slightly more patronizing, but you can't have everything. (I'm gathering there was some acrimonious discussions over Howe's characterization at some point--according to the wikipedia article, Art Howe in the film is "a fictional A's manager named after the actual A's manager.") Moving up, the supporting cast role is definitely Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, the economics graduate Beane hires to do the bean counting. Hill plays a much more subdued character than his usual "raunchy comedy" schtick, and it's good to see some range for him. Of course, the star role is Brad Pitt. I spent most of the film trying to decide exactly how I would characterize his performance. I finally decided that he reminded me of a mix between the father on Gossip Girl and George Clooney, which meant that he was more or less exactly like Coach Laundry on the Friday Night Lights TV series. The GM role is usually a money-obsessed villain in a sports movie, so it was nice to see the role take the lead here.

And that's what really struck me about the film--the way it very consciously engages with the genre of the sports film, and breaks away from it. To continue my wikipedia perusal, it seems that the earlier director for Moneyball was Steven Soderbergh, who wanted to frame the film with interviews from the actual players and use other touches that would distinguish it from the typical sports film. Soderbergh was replaced with Bennett Miller, and Aaron Sorkin was called in to rewrite the script, but that sense of "the anti-sport film" is still there. There's barely any focus on the players, the movie doesn't end with the team's triumphant victories, and, in one of my favorite bits, Beane's attempts to delivering rousing speeches in the locker room fall awesomely short: "Nobody likes losing! So... don't lose!" This falls a little short from Al Pacino's "Six Inches" in Any Given Sunday.

And of course, there's the focus on math over players. Though it works for a fantasy league, I imagine it was a tough sell for managing an actual team. It's an even tougher sell for the basis of a movie, as it counters our basic narrative principles--nobody, with the possible exception of mathematicians, really favors looking at numbers over looking at people. Personally, I have virtually no love for baseball, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for sabermetrics. As a former mathematician who once specialized (or at least dabbled heavily) in abstract algebra, I don't really care for math that has a "practical" application. But sabermetrics is different. First, it has the name--even though the name's origin has nothing to do with weaponry, (It actually comes from SABR, The society for American Baseball Research), it still translates into sword-math, which is awesome. And I have a fondness for it because, as Barton notes in Dungeons and Desktops, sabermetrics is a distant predecessor for the stat-based Role playing game, making it an ancestor of the modern video game and Dungeons and Dragons. But I still recognize that to a normal person, math = underdog is a hard sell.

The film manages to make it work through two main methods. First, by appealing to a different cultural zeitgeist--the constant, and perhaps growing, anxiety of the average Westerner that the top 1% perhaps don't deserve to be on top. The argument here is that the top ranked players in the league are overrated--their wages are based less on performance and more on inflated egos. Sabermetrics is a way of evening the field, and brings to the front those players who are technically better, but underrated. Thus, the math of sabermetrics isn't dehumanizing, but a way of recontextualizing value to something more fair. Or to put it a different way: you're not going to lose sympathy arguing against the salaries of the New York Yankees.

The other way the film garners sympathy is by casting sabermetrics in the lens of the Billy Beane's personal struggle. As a former player turned manager, Beane is constantly trying to keep himself emotionally distant from the game he once loved. An early scene of the film shows him, as a younger man, being recruited under the pitch (heh) that you only get one chance to do what you really love. Later, he tells Brand that you can't get emotionally involved with the players, because you might have to fire them. He makes a point out of not going to the games in person, because he finds himself too personally involved. The viewer gets the sense that, out of necessity, Beane has taken to treating his entire life at the same emotional distance, as demonstrated in a scene where he treats his ex-wife and her new husband with polite cordiality. In fact, there's another clear difference with your typical sports film: there's no love interest here. The only major female character is Beane's 12 year old daughter (played very well by the 14 year old Kerris Dorsey). So Beane keeps everyone and everything at arms' length, and sabermetrics is a part of that distance. The film's point, however, punctuated three times by a first baseman's winning hit, a heavyset player's home run, and Beane's daughter's song, is that distant isn't uncaring, and that numbers don't have to be dehumanizing--by giving them space and encouragement, Beane inspires these people to be more than they are.

In a lot of ways, Moneyball reminds me of my other favorite sports film, Fever Pitch. Both address a fan-based approach to the game: Fever Pitch, the obsessed fan compelled to attend every game, and Moneyball the desire to understand and master through numbers. And both are about individuals dealing with their attraction to something they recognize as much bigger than themselves, Fever Pitch by asking how you forge a normal life in the wake of such an obsession, and Moneyball... well, it's about the same thing, really. And that's what I like about both films, that at the bottom, they're not about baseball, but about people, and what they need to do to make it through the day.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Megalomania

2011-10-21T12:24:00.002-04:00

The fantasy of disembodiment is that of autogenesis, a megalomaniacal attempt to provide perfect control in a world where things tend to become messy, complicated, or costly; it is a control fantasy. The idea that one could take on a second-order or virtual body and somehow leave one's body behind with no trace or residue, with no effects or repercussions is a luxury only afforded by the male subject." --Elizabeth Grosz.

Conversely, in the essay "Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors Among Online Gamers," Consalvo et al argue that according to their findings, it's the casual female player that seeks control and escapism, whereas the hardcore female players accept technology into their lives in a more integrated fashion. (Not that that's exactly what Grosz is talking about, but still.)

Later Days.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

2011-10-19T21:04:00.000-04:00

"It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

"The first part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been horses stabled in the barn they would have stamped and champed and broken it to pieces. if there had been a crowd of guests, even a handful of guests bedded down for the night, their restless breathing and mingled snores would have gently thawed the silence like a warm spring wind. If there had been music... but no, of course there was no music. In fact, if there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

"Inside the Waystone a man huddled in his deep, sweet-smelling bed. Motionless, waiting for sleep, he laid wide-eyed in the dark. In doing this he added a small, frightened silence to the larger, hollow one. They made an alloy of sorts, a harmony.

"The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the thick stone walls of the empty taproom and in the flat, grey metal of the sword that hung behind the bar. It was in the dim candlelight that filled an upstairs room with dancing shadows. It was in the mad pattern of crumpled memoir that lay fallen and unforgotten atop the desk. And it was in the hands of the man who sat there, pointedly ignoring the pages he had written and discarded long ago." --Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

I'd like to begin this review by stating that I hate Harry Potter. I don't mean the books, or the movies (though the existence of each makes the other a little redundant), or the multimillion dollar franchise. I quite like the concept of Hoggwarts (though "school of wizards" is hardly a new concept in fantasy lit), and Ron and Hermine are quiet nice. And I'll always be a Luna/Neville shipper, authorial statements be damned.

No, what I hate is Harry Potter, the character. I hate his insufferable, unshakable smugness. I hate the way Dumbledore, particularly, fawned over his quote unquote genius. I hate the way the entire fictional universe seemed to bend over backward to reinforce his importance. I know this reinforcement is largely there to enable the reader to project themselves onto Harry, but mostly, what it mainly did was make me root for Snape.

The reason for this digression will become clear later.

The Name of the Wind is the first book in The Kingiller Chronicle (not the best of names) and the debut novel of Patrick Rothfuss. The plot starts off simply: a man known as the Chronicler tracks down the innkeeper of a small, isolated hamlet. It turns out that the innkeeper is actually Kvothe, a man of near legendary exploits. After some posturing, he agrees to tell the Chronicler his life story, over a three day period. Each book, then, is supposed to represent one day's worth of story telling. This first book covers a lot of ground: Kvothe's early childhood in a traveling circus, a brief period as a city beggar, and, for the most part, his teenage years as a member of university. The framing device is in third person, but most of the book proper is Kvothe telling his story, so it's told in a first person format. I've seen first person/third person switches in fantasy novels before (L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s The Magic of Recluce comes to mind), but it flows much more organically in this context.

The single main character fantasy story is a bit of an odd beast. In a lot of ways, the genre works better with an ensemble cast, ala Lord of the Rings; even the Harry Potter series places a lot of emphasis on the Rest of the Group. The single hero format places a lot of weight on a main character, and the author has to walk a pretty thin line. If the hero is too down-to-earth or non-heroic, then the reader has trouble accepting them as a the savior of a fantasy world; Stephen R. Donaldson walks this line a lot, and Peter David's Sir Atropos of Nothing explores a similar area. The other route to go is to make your hero some sort of super being, performing one amazing feat after another. The risk with this path is that the author has to not only continually one-up the last amazing feat, but keep the reader interested in the action of this uber-man. Two relevant examples here are the aforementioned Harry Potter (who also tries to play the "ordinary" card, with mixed success) and Geralt of Rivia in the Witcher series. Rothfuss is mostly trying this second tact, starting his character off in a sort of Potter mode of "amazing youth," but, as we see through the framing device, Kvothe will be becoming the Witcher soon enough.

I enjoyed the book, to the point where my complaints feel petty, but that doesn't make them any less valid. First, as you might guess from above, Kvothe's heroic balance isn't always in place. Usually, his valiant actions are appropriately valiant, but sometimes they're so idealized as to be eye-rolling. And the opposite problem is at work too--if you construct a hero that's supposed to be superhuman, then explaining away their stupider actions becomes a little harder. Rothfuss can blame most of Kvothe's errors on youth and tragic circumstances, but some of them get a little wearing. And with all the focus on Kvothe, that means that the other characters are given a bit of a short thrift--but many still shine through, from the mentally scarred magic teacher to Kvothe's own parents to his first tutor in the academic arts.

Speaking of unrealistic narrative actions, though, here's a complaint I never thought I'd be making in a post-Game-of-Thrones fantasy genre: there's not enough sex. Not enough, at least, for the way the character is set up. The book has at least four attractive potential love interests: the beautiful scholar whose life he saves, the scatterbrained wild girl, the sultry older woman who was thrown out of school in disgrace, and the shady girl who will, as we know from the narrative frames, be the love of his life. Because of his masterful ways, at least three of these are clearly interested in him, and he is an extremely handsome, late teens male growing up in a fantasy world, a genre where the age standard for these things is somewhat lowered. And yet the story tells us nothing happened. Either we're supposed to see an untrustworthy narrator (and there's not a lot of evidence to support that), or we're supposed to buy his excuse that he was "inexperienced with women." As a former teenage male myself, I can tell you that for your average teenage male, if a plurality of attractive girls were throwing themselves at you, it wouldn't matter how inexperienced you were--you would learn. You would make a point of the learning.

Ahem. My final problem with the book is the same as can be levied against my review posts--too damn long. There seems to be an issue with fantasy novels, especially recently, where length is equated to quality. If the stories were of the same quality as their shorter brethren, then it would be a simple matter of improved value. But in many cases, they're not. It's why you get things like the 16th book of the Wheel of Time series: forced to add such size to the proceedings, what the authors produce is really a lot of padding. Great swathes, in my humble opinion, could have been exorcised from the latest book in the aforementioned Song of Ice and Fire series. And at over 700 pages, some of The Name of the Wind could have been lost without me shedding a tear. I mean, it's 50 pages into the book before we're even finished setting up the framing device.

And yet. This isn't a book like Infinite Jest where every page must be pored over, the mood constructed laboriously sentence by sentence. While The Name of the Wind aims for, as the quotation above suggests, a literary quality higher than your average fantasy novel (and generally hits it), it is, for the most part, a quick read. There's a lot of dialogue, which flows pretty quickly, and a lot of action, which keeps moving as well. Despite all my complaints, I read it cover to cover in four days. That speaks to a pretty compelling read. So, while the hero balance issue may become greater in future volumes, in here, everything works out pretty well. If you're a fan of the genre (and you're either a quick reader or have a lot of time), it repays you nicely for your effort.

Later Days.

Blood on the Plumber's Hands

2011-10-18T18:50:00.006-04:00

I'm poring over old video game instruction manuals for my dissertation research. The why is neither here nor there; at the moment, I'd just like to share my findings on Super Mario Bros. It's pretty typical of Nintendo games of the era; there clearly wasn't a huge amount of effort put into it, and it's questionable whether anyone was ever expected to read it or not. But what I found surprising was the backstory of the game. First, I was surprised that the game had an actual backstory. All right, everyone knows the basic set-up: Lizard monster kidnaps princess, plumber saves her. Repeat, repeat, and repeat, on a dozen different game systems over 30 years. But here, Bowser (or Bowser, King of the Koopa, to give the full title) had a reason to kidnap royalty, beyond the amorous intentions later attributed to him. According to the manual, Bowser is part of a clan of black-magic practitioning turtles, and they've transformed everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom not loyal to them into common everyday objects--bricks, blocks, and the like (you may already see where this is going). And the princess is the only one who can reverse the spell en masse, so Bowser keeps her under lock and key.

The weird part is that whenever Mario finds an invisible block or breaks a bit of wall with his head, he is, according to the instruction manual, freeing a mushroom inhabitant. And when he gets a power up from hitting these blocks, it's a gift the mushroom people gave him in gratitude for their freedom. I guess someone at Nintendo decided that the game needed a diegetic reason for these blocks and power-ups to be there. It still doesn't explain why a flower gives you fire powers, or why collecting coins gives you a shot at avoiding death, but it's trying. (That, or I'm misreading the passage. ...It's very possible I'm misreading the passage.)

Backstory-wise, the really interesting implication, for me, is that it means that the Goombas are really mushroom kingdom inhabitants that accepted Koopa's rules. According to the manual, there's no question in how to deal with these former citizens:

"ONE STOMP AND HE DIES." No mercy for collaborators: that's the harsh, unyielding law of the plumber.

Later Days.

Because if your life's more nuanced than single sentence phrase, however will you tweet it?

2011-10-18T13:03:00.002-04:00

A year or two back, I posted the single sentence quotation that sums up my approach to ethics. Here's one that sums up my personal research strategy, and academia in general: "Eventually, you read everything." It's got a nice world-weary naivety to it. Now there's a combination you don't see every day.

Later Days.

Short and Tantalizing

2011-10-18T11:06:00.003-04:00

More Spam. What can I say? It amuses me.

From: Liu Wang
Reply-To: Liu Wang

Subject: partnership:
I am Mr. Liu Wang from Taipei, Taiwan capital. I seek your partnership

What I like about this one is the brevity combined with the ambiguity. One sentence for context, one sentence for purpose. And no articles--this is a man/bot who doesn't have time to waste on such unnecessary frivolities. But at the same time--there's a mystery. What kind of partnership? Business or... something more? Oh, Mr. Liu Wang, your circumspect coyness intrigues me.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Games Never Do the Dishes

2011-10-14T13:52:00.003-04:00

"Beth and Lorna, in contrast, have different relationships with the game. It is variety that the game offers, and this does not necessarily equate with progression (indeed, in Lorna's case, it resulted in the cessation of play). The power relation is figured differently, with the game providing variation rather than rewarding them. They not only conceive their own ability differently (despite being competent and frequent gamers), but the relationship they have with the game is much more negotiated. It is the game, arguably, which is figured as the more 'powerful' partner in their relationships. Just when the player decides to cease gaming, the game 'offers' then something more. This is quite a playful relationship, based on the mutual desire of machine and gamer to keep playing. Furthermore, it is the promise of pleasure--pleasure deferred--which keeps them entertained. this is the promise of pleasurable fulfilment before the 'end' of gameplay, and a large part of the pleasure is the expectation of the fulfilment of it. What is also interesting is not only that pleasure has to figure into the relationship, but that the machine has to be rationalized as fulfilling gamers' needs and desires. In some senses, figuring gaming as a relationship normalizes it, to the extent that pleasure becomes non-threatening and contained. These are not the rampant urges of sexually available individuals. Rather, they are figured as normal, social relationships in which desire and pleasure are both simultaneously contained and fulfilled: they are closed, safe relationships of heterosexual couples."
--Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative, and Praxis by Helen Thornham

Princess Maker 2 LP: So Where's the LP?

2011-10-12T14:01:00.003-04:00

Astute readers may notice that the promised long play never materialized. There are several reasons for this, including, but not limited to, Thanksgiving feasts with friends, a bottle of sherry, an attempt to complete Dragon Age in a minimal amount of time but still get the level max achievement, and a viewing of X-Men: Last Stand. Also, I spent the last day at the university grading my students' papers. It's not all fun, folks.

The Princess Maker 2 LP is still going to happen, though. It will merely be somewhat fragmented. Granted, given my track record with long term blog series, I can imagine that this announcement is met with trepidation by those who actually wanted me to complete this. Have faith, folks. Have faith.

For now, I'll explain the premise of the game.

Backstory: The game's prologue defines the player as a hero who slayed an ancient evil, and was handsomely rewarded with a small pension by the local king. Already, then, we have a break from traditional gaming, as this game starts after the happy ending. Anyway, at one point in the hero's blissful retirement, the skies open up, the goddess appears, and down travels a ten year-old girl. The goddess tells you to raise her well till the age of 18, and flies away. Because apparently, in this Japanese port, that's where babies come from.

The actual game is the act of raising this girl (I'm going to name mine Joan, so we'll call her that) for the next eight years. Essentially, you direct her education. The catch is that virtually everything you do either requires money or (more rarely) makes money. So it's a mix between Rousseau's Emile and capitalism. And really, isn't that what education is?

It's a very stat-based game. As per your usual JRPG, Joan's health, magic points, strength, and defense are all given. But so are stats such as her etiquette, diligence, maternal instinct, statecraft, and so forth. The game measures the changes you make to these stats, as well as how you go about changing them (raising strength by doing farmwork is different from raising it by fighting monsters). And based on these factors, Joan chooses a career on her eighteenth birthday. I think the game's title makes it pretty clear which job it's favoring.

The game is very similar to the Sims, in that it's all based around people management and money. But it felt more personable to me, for a number of factors. There's less time spent on spatial designing (no house to build) and less focus on material accumulation. And you have only a single tenant, rather than potentially a whole family to manage. The game also has a clear goal, unlike the Sims, which never ends. You, the player, have a clear avatar rather than an abstract godlike position; I imagine if your Sims addressed you as "daddy," you'd be much less likely to let them wet themselves. (Or maybe more so. I'm not here to judge.) Finally, I felt more invested in the game because I felt like I had less control; Joan's ultimate choice is determined by more factors than I can keep track of, and events I have little control over. In that much, at least, I think the game simulates a key aspect of fatherhood (and yes, it's very clear on being about fatherhood rather than a more gender neutral parenthood): you have an enormous, even intimidating, amount of control over your child's life, but in the end, their choices are their own. And the game accurately depicts how stressful that is.

To demonstrate, I'll conclude this post with a quick summary of my first playthrough. In the opening parts of the game, I spent a lot of time focusing on housework--it was the least stressful job, as failure didn't Joan doesn't get paid, because Joan isn't actually making any money. (It made sense at the time.) Eventually, I switched over to the bakery, and the hair salon, and alternated between them. The latter gave Joan some skill in conversing, which I leveraged into the climbing the social ladder at the castle, from conversing with the gate soldier all the way up to chatting with the King's Mistress. (A position ranking below only the King and Queen.) The baking was our chief means of financial support--with a little practice, Joan was soon winning the yearly cooking contest with ease. I use the funds to support her education, mostly in statecraft and court knowledge. I was, in my mind, building a just and wise princess.

(And I'd like to state here for the record that, yes, I realize how problematic this game is, gender-wise. You're a male authority figure forcing a young girl to conform to your wishes. From princess to attendant at hair salon, stereotypes of femininity aren't so much trotted out as dragged into the center of the room in the form of an elephant. But we'll get to all that later, I promise.)

Then the 18th year rolled around, and Joan informed me that our opinions on what she was being raised for differed greatly. Apparently, all that initial time on housework and cooking had an effect I wasn't expecting. She told me, in short, that she wanted to be a housewife. The game's epilogue tells the rest: she finds a merchant, settles down, raises children. The goddess who bestowed her on me delivers what I can only imagine is the game's assessment of my child-rearing abilities: "She's happy, so that's good. But it does seem a bit of a waste of potential for a destiny-bound, god-created star child."

The most interesting thing wasn't so much the game's response, but mine. I was bitterly disappointed. Why, I couldn't say. I certainly don't have anything but respect for someone who adopts the housewife role. After all, since my avatar did nothing but direct this girl for 8 years, child rearing is clearly a full-time occupation in itself. I think it was the huge gap between what I expected her to be and what she chose to be. It was so far from my image of her that the difference made me a bit resentful. To think of all the money I spent on her statecraft lessons! And all the effort that had been put into her baking skills!

I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for my parents, with a child still in school after ten years of education. And if nothing else, the game succeeds on a level of, as Ian Bogost would call it, procedural rhetoric, in conveying, through simulation, some real event: after being so bitterly thwarted in my attempts to direct the course of my progeny, I felt I had experienced some small part of parenthood.

Next time: I delve deeper into how the game works.

Later Days.

Princess Maker 2 LP: So What is an LP?

2011-10-08T10:52:00.003-04:00

I decided to take advantage of the long weekend by doing something I've wanted to do for a long time: A Let's Play of Princess Maker 2 (whether I'll finish it this weekend is another matter. I have a feeling these take a while). An LP is essentially a written (often with visual aids; occasionally video rather than written) account of a videogame playthrough. If you're interested in some examples, I point you towards the LP Archive website. I'm not going to secondguess people's motives for creating the LPs, but I imagine it has to do with the nature of videogames. In general, playing a game is a rather ephemeral condition. You have a piece of software whose programming is generally set in stone, but your own playthrough of it is both unique and temporary. The LP allows players to share that experience. There's also an element of what Mia Consalvo calls "game capital"--a humorous, engaging description of a game playthrough nets its creator some prestige within (certain) videogame communities. In my case, they're useful for analysis, as they provide a text that basically documents player experience. They're often a bizarre combination of role-playing and game explanation, as the player jumps back and forth between documenting their role as the character and their role as player. I'm doing an LP myself to get a sense of what they're like to compose.

They're also known as player diaries, and after-action reports. If you're interested in reading/watching up on some good ones, I recommend the group-authored LP of Dwarf Fortress, Boatmurdered, game journalist Tom Francis' LP of Galactic Civilizations 2 (which I've mentioned before), and in the off-chance that you still want more after that, there's a list of choice LPs at TVTropes.org.

So that's the LP. Next up: What's Princess Maker 2?

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Let's Get Things Started

2011-10-07T14:48:00.001-04:00

"I was going to get the ball rolling with something self-referential, some sort of long and winding narrative about how this is my first time doing a blog, how I'm not sure exactly what I want to do with it, etc. But there'll be plenty of time for that sort of thing." --Person of Consequence, September 17th, 2008

Later days.

500: So Many Posts, So Many Spelling Errors

2011-10-07T14:07:00.012-04:00

We have a milestone here, folks: I've reached my 500th post. To celebrate, I added some new features. First, you'll notice the addition of the media tab at the bottom of each posts. I added this mostly for the +1 like feature; I figure that if no one feels comfortable in commenting, they might at least feel comfortable in anonymously indicating they liked a particular piece. And at least that way, I know someone is responding. So please use that.

You'll also notice that there is a new "tag" sidebar. The idea for this 500th post was that I'd amass a top 10 list of my favorite posts, in the process of sorting these tags a bit. It was interesting to see what tags bubbled to the top after I started organizing them. "Friday Quotations" and "book reviews" were easy guesses, but "personal," "theory," and "Comic book Wednesdays" were a bit of a surprise. But after a few days of tag sorting, I've decided that this is an ongoing project, not something I'd finish for this post--if nothing else, I had to stop in order to get the post done before the Friday Quotations was due. Oh, the arbitrarily set burdens of the hobbyist blogger!

In no particular order, then, here are 10 blog posts that I came across while sorting that I feel best represent me over the past 500 Posts:

- Yeah, So This Is A Thing Now. The very first Friday Quotation. A legacy begins.

- How to Change a Bike Tire. The culmination of many, many posts on the horrible times I had with my old bike. If there's a lesson here, it's that having broken things doesn't mean you're a broken person.

- They're Not Clouds, But They Are Fluffy and Soft. A piece on family and food. When I think of the traditions I'd want to pass down to my children, this is what I think of.

- WORDS WHAT BOTHERS ME. I think the title's pretty self-explanatory. And pretty bad grammatically. I'm glad I got that "fair enough" thing off my chest--I've been composing that rant for years.

- Spoileriffic Movie Review: Bedazzled. Because frankly, Petter Sellars deserves more attention. "Be careful what you wish for" really is a repeated trope in Western culture. Something in our cultural composition really hates the notion of a shortcut.

- A Punisher Retrospective. An in-depth examination of the Punisher as a character, and particularly Ennis' run. I'm proud of this piece. It still gets a large number of views, though that may be more for the pictures than the content. Someday, I'll write another respective on Hellblazer's John Constantine.

- Dual Book Review A dual book review of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey and Ethel Wilson's The Equations of Love. I love the sheer audacity of the dual book review--it takes what's already my longest type of post, then nearly doubles it by looking at two books instead of one. I like the idea of contrasting themes, but this particular mash-up is insane. I like the final thought, though.

-Light Snow. A reflective piece on snow and the city at night. This essay reminds me of the early days, right around when I was switching from a course blog to a personal blog, and wasn't sure what that meant to me yet. I'm trying a little hard here, but I think that makes it endearing.

Shadow of the Bat, or, the Story of the Unsensible Purchase . In which I detail the ridiculous lengths I went to in order to get Arkham Asylum. It wouldn't be a proper blog list if it didn't have something on both video games and my "adventures."

Welcome to The Daily---: A Story of Delayed Gratification. A discussion about the format of the Daily Show, inspired by watching it on a jerky live-stream during a work-out session. I think this post nicely encompasses my pop culture side and my analytic side.

And that's ten. Thanks for reading, folks. Here's to another 500.

Later Days.