Tuneage

As in: In the Stereo

This week's music:

• Bob Dylan, Another Side of Bob Dylan
• Counting Crows, August and Everything After
• Audioslave

Sunday Morning Silliness

As in: Flotsam

• In my effort to stop sucking eggs at Age of Mythology, I've been playing against the computer, which means I can quit when I'm losing. After soundly whumping Isis on "Hard" mode yesterday, I swtiched to playing against Poseidon and learned a wholly new way to suck. The battle continues.
• Get Fuzzy gets funnier by the day.
  
  
• All Moby and Fatboy Slim today.
• I'm not excited about the Oscars tonight. Meg Norcia, I miss your parites.
• I'm playing with PERL again for my random comic, and I'm loving it.
• Currently Reading:
  Lynch, The Image of the City
  Rucka, Queen and Country, vol 6
  Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth Century Chess-Playing Machine
  PC Gamer, newest issue

Freud and Internet spirits

As in: Hypertext

I'm working on a random web generator that uses google and a bunch of filters to grab stuff. As part of the test phase, I'm using lots of different test phrases to see how it reacts to a variety of input, and one of the test phrases I put in was "subway muggings". After it filtered and shuffled around some pages, this was the fifth-rated response:

Next up in our Earthlink sponsored series on the "Future of Wireless" - Corante profiles Chaska, Minnesota. The small city rolled out its municipal Wi-Fi offering in November and has already seen more than 10% of its residents sign up for the service. It's also attracting a lot of attention from big cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco that are eager to hear its lessons learned. Read the article interview here.

This passage epitomizes the unheimlich of randomness and the web. Who knows why I was interested in subway muggings (I ate lunch at Subway yesterday), but the search and filters (which have no intentional bias toward Minnesota) yielded a passage about the town I grew up in. Weird. I emailed a few fellow Chaskans about this, and they suggested that:

• "I'll bet you experienced some Freudian coding into your java. That is too weird. "
• "...and maybe some input from the internet google spirits."

I love those ideas too. Freud and the Internet spirits. Rings of Ulmer's Internet oracles.

Vocab lesson

As in: Reading

It's rare that I read a book whose author regularly uses words I'm unfamiliar with. Thus, I present my list of new words from Avatars of the Word. (Bonus game for you: see how many you know without looking them up!)

rebarbativeness, page 3.
lability, page 10.
etiolated, page 94.
cynosure, page 101.
bumptious, page 116. This word (quite rightly) makes me think of the Bumpuses and their hounds in A Christmas Story.
suasion, page 169.
velleity, page 188.

Does anyone else think it's lame that the OED Online isn't free anymore?

Quotables

As in: Media

Two enjoyable moments from my media-viewing yesterday:

1. Jack, lamenting about Miles' failure to publish his novel thus far in Sideways:
   "F— the New York publishers, Miles. Publish it on your own. Hell, I'll chip in. Just get it out there, get it reviewed, get it in libraries. Let the public decide."
   My new motto for the web.
2. From the sorely under-watched Veronica Mars:
   Wallace: Man, this is boring. I thought this private eye stuff was all about shooting bad guys and making out with sexy widows.
   Veronica: The sexy widows come later.

21 Feb, Baby!

As in: In the Stereo

• Bill Morrissey, you'll never get to heaven
• Lou Rawls, The Legendary Lou Rawls
• Fatboy Slim, Palookaville

Not the Wild Wild West

As in: Hypertext

One of my students (thanks, Robert!) sent me this clip of someone--purportedly Harlan Ellison--talking about the Internet. I don't distrust my student, but you never know; the Internet is, after all, the Wild Wild West.

Download mp3 file (600kb)

I find this clip interesting, mostly because it reveals such a venom from someone ensconced within the gates kept by the print culture. Rather than suggesting ways to deal with the question, Ellison just rants that the Internet is pretty much worthless.

And Bukatman thinks science-fiction is conservative.

Spam-alot

As in: Blogistry

I'm not sure what's going on out there in the web, but in the last six hours I've gotten approximately 30 spam postings on my blog. That far exceeds my average of ten or so a day. When I got up this morning I deleted about 20. Dang.

I've disabled commenting for a bit—I'm going to see if I can figure out how to stem the tide. I feel a bit like Casper Van Dien and Jake Busey looking out over the approaching swarm of 'bugs.' HOLD THE LINE! (Current banned IP total: 339)

<< Addendum > > After twenty minutes, I've re-enabled the comments. Using a few of the suggestions I found here, I may have made some progress. We'll see how it goes.

Skepticism

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

The other day, I had a long chat with a colleague about electracy, new media, and many other things. I described my theory about Future Shock (at the bottom of the page), and she agreed; she also added that in her experience, it was with generation X that students started being consistently skeptical of not only texts, but symbols, explanations, and conversations about those texts. This is not to say that they were not skeptical before, but rather that a sea change had occurred in which many more were skeptical now than were in the years before the Gen Xers hit college.

Then I read this in Avatars of the Word:

The underlying insight of this strategy [of "teaching the arguments of the field"] is that ours is already a culture permeated by irony. Skepticism about received messages is rampant, leaving any system that depends on transmitting those messages vulnerable. To use the space of the classroom to teach both the message and the critical reception and evaluation of the message is to create an opportunity to reach students at multiple levels. (119).

I'm not sure what I want to do with that passage, but I found the synchronicity pleasing.

Dang kids!

As in: Blogistry , Hypertext , Reading

Quoted in Avatars of the Word by James O'Donnell:

They have chopped up the text into so many small parts, an brought forth so many concordant passages to suit their own purposes that to some degree they confuse both the mind and memory of the reader and distract it from understanding the literal meaning of the text.

That's Nicholas of Lyre, lamenting the proliferation of manuscripts in the fourteenth century. This passage struck me as hilariously apt (as it obviously did O'Donnel). More later.

Class starts this week

As in: In the Stereo

• Flogging Molly, Within a Mile of Home
• Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Live 1961-2000
• Cities 97 Sampler 16

Feed the Idiot Box

As in: Flotsam

A list of television-y things:

• Numb3rs: It's like Pi meets L&O: Criminal Intent. I like it. Rob Morrow, Judd Hersh, Sabrina Lloyd, and I even like David Krumholtz. Whee!
• Murder, She Wrote: everyone knows I love this show. (My secret fantasy: Jessica is a master hypnotist and serial killer. What a twist ending that would have been!) I finally saw the first episode, "The Death of Sherlock Holmes"—very "meta." Jessica investigates the costume-party murder of an acquaintance. Also, we see her first book published.
• Alias: I still think Jack's the best character.
• Murder, She Wrote, part 2: Apparently they're releasing the first season (23eps) on DVD for $60. Who's gonna pay $60 for that? I might pay $20, but $60? The commercial was ultra-cheesy, btw.
• The Simpsons: still funny.
• The Daily Show: have you seen the crossfire clip?
• Boston Legal: I love the first season or two of any David Kelly show. I miss Keen Eddie—Mark Varney was far more interesting on that show.
• Arrested Development: I know I should be watching this.
• The Office: apparently they're producing an American version of this show, with Steve Karrel as the oafish boss. I wish they wouldn't do that. Just re-broadcast the British show. Was awesome.

Dang, that's a lot of TV.

Concept comics

As in: Prognostication

Warren Ellis has produced four comics under an interesting premise. He writes:

Years ago, I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today.

...

The other day, I was thinking about response songs. Rappers taking shots at each other, covers that answer something in the original, art made in reaction to art. Which, you kind of hope, is not the same as being reactionary.

The small music labels 555 Recordings and Dark Beloved Cloud have singles clubs. People play down the importance of singles these days -- they don't sell the way they used to, downloads bother the music business -- but I love them. Sometimes one song contained on one object is all you need to move the axis of the world. Self-contained and saying all that needs to be said.

Ellis produced four comics, released under the imprint Apparat. They suggest an alternate history of comics--what would comics look like today if superhero comics had not emerged in the thirties? I particularly like Frank Ironwise.

I think the apparat books would make a great course assignment. As always happens when I'm a short spit away from a semester (starts Monday), I have ideas for "something completely different." Thus, I give you a future research arc for one of my Composition 2 courses (feel free to poach):

In Warren Ellis' Apparat comics, he considers what the media of his discipline, comics, would look like if one of the major moments in the medium did not happen. His comics draw on an older tradition and project into the future the premises they suppose. During this course, we will use Ellis' project as a model to produce three small hypertext "singles" that explore your discipline in a divergent future. These explorations will ask what if a key moment in your discipline had never occurred? What would your discipline look like now?

The course would use the Ellis books, of course, as well as a history of comics to explore how Ellis made these conclusions. We'd use Rice's Writing About Cool as our rhetoric and perhaps read The Man in the High Tower to talk about how alternate histories might or might not work.

A decisive blow to spambots

As in: Blogistry

Well, maybe not. But I'm up over 200 now...

So apt!

As in: Composition

From Matthew Pearl's enchanting The Dante Club:

The mind of our country is moving with the speed of a telegraph, Osgood, and our great institutions are stagecoaching behind it. (16)

This passage seemed particularly relevent given the recent discussion on WPA. Plus, I think it's damn funny. It appeals to the part of me that fetishizes old technologies—cogs and levers look so much cooler than circuitboards.

City of Quartz 2

As in: Reading

Some more bits of Davis' book I like:

What a 'real' Marxist Hollywood film would have looked like remains a matter for arcane conjecture. Perhaps the best potential candidate was the remarkable screenplay of An American Tragedy which Sergei Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu wrote in 1930 during the Soviet director's brief and troubled stay in Hollywood. Dreiser supposedly loved the script, but Paramount — alarmed by its 'monstrous challenge to American society' — killed the project. (92)

I'm captured by the phrase "monstrous challenge to American society." It seems like something to strive for, as a cultural critic.

"As late as 1883, local seers envisioned a purely parochial future [for Los Angeles]. Ostrich raising was still described as a 'prominent industry' and naturalist John Muir saw the region's best hope in beekeeping"(111). C'mon! Does it get any better than that? Ostrich raising!

Class starts next week

As in: In the Stereo

This is the last week of working from home. Alas!

In the CD player this week:
• They Might Be Giants, The Spine
• Interpol, Antics
• Moxy Fruvous, Thornhill

City of Quartz

As in: Reading

I'm reading Mike Davis' 1991 book on the train in the next couple weeks. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but it was always checked out of the UF library, and I never needed it enough to recall it.

Some passages I've enjoyed so far:

Sometimes film noir is described in shorthand as the result of the encounter between the American hardboiled novel and exiled German expressionist cinema—a simplistic definition that leaves out other seminal influences, including psychoanalysis and Orson Welles. (40)

I like this description because I thoroughly enjoy German expressionist cinema. My master's thesis turned on the idea that Hollywood took the techniques from German expressionist cinema (madmen and dramatic mise-en-scene) and used them to create horror films, which turned the "madman" into the "psychopath."

Writing about James Ellroy's Los Angeles Quartet:

The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest. (45)

I feel like this passage applies now just as much as it did in the early 90s, perhaps moreso. I'm also reminded of Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which Miller plays the "good" fascism of superhero might-makes-right against the "bad" fascism of Reagan/Bush/Corporate America.

Finally, for today:

[When Adorno and Horkheimer were in America], they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism's future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe. (48)

It seems like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash exemplifies the final state of L.A.-as-capitalism's-future. In it, he describes L.A. not as an urban wasteland, but a suburban one in which all space has been bought, built upon, and commodified. He describes a place where one could drive hundreds of miles without ever driving on a street—one merely goes from parking lot to parking lot. Davis draws a distinction between 20s-30s noir, which focused on the dark underbelly of suburban life, and 40s noir, which fastened on to the urban hellscape of downtown L.A.. Stephenson clearly plays into the former apocalypse.

Comments fixed

As in: Blogistry

If you've tried to enter comments in the last ten days or so, you've probably been DENIED. Turns out that I accidentally entered a banned IP address with no number in the address box. Apparently doing so bans everyone.

It's fixed now. Oddly enough, I discovered the problem because I wasn't having to ban any spam-IPs any more. Funny, huh?

Machinima and art

As in: Games

I'm the first to admit that I'm behind the curve in enjoying machinima. That said, I find The House in the Middle really creepy. The couch image in particular freaks me out. The artist doesn't really intend creepiness, but the idea of unexplained violence works pretty well here.

Half-Life 2 is rife with such images, particularly in odd places. The designers there have done a nice job building a world in which numerous previous people have tried and failed to defend themselves. Yesterday I encountered a prison cell (another entry on the game's use of the prison some time) with a bed tipped on its side, like a barracade. I also found a small bathroom splattered with mysterious blood.

These types of images, which Bichard makes strong use of in his exhibit, work so well because they portray history and invite curiosity/investigation. Perhaps that's what makes Half-Life 2 so intriguing, despite its "rail-shooter" setup: it uses the adventure-game motif of developed environments shrouded in mystery to evoke curiosity. Thus, HL2 returns us to the excitement of Myst while still keeping our fingers twitchy.

The contrast between HL2 and traditional "Adventure games" stands out particularly strongly right now for me because Jenny and I are working our way through The Crystal Key. CK strongly focuses on art over narrative. In terms of its story, it falls far behind even Myst, but some of its visuals are pretty good anyhow.

Machinima, particularly "still photos" seem to be at the same pole as The Crystal Key. If adventure games move in one direction, they become more like Half-Life2, if they move in the other, they become more like "The House in the Middle."

Cross-posted on Academic Gamers

I got you babe

As in: Prognostication

So there was no shadow this morning here in Oak Park. I suppose it depends what time the groundhog looks—if he checked right now, there'd be a shadow, I think.

You'd think groundhog.org would be prepared to handle a higher traffic load today, but I'm getting timeout messages.

The Wisdom of Python

As in: Flotsam

"Quite frankly I'm against people who give vent to their loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution."
— Monty Python's Flying Circus, "It's the Arts!"

Isn't that a fantastic description of blogs?