Print len(python) from datetime import datetime
9 years ago
Monday, July 12, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Also, quite obviously, I lost all momentum re: the Metal Gear thing. What was going to be a detailed look at every aspect of the franchise and how each insane facet reflected a brilliantly coherent whole (or vice versa) did not materialize. It was not to be.
I don't think anyone could do it alone. You'd need teams of people, working day and night, to map each subtle contour of Hideo Kojima's case of the raving crazies.
I don't think anyone could do it alone. You'd need teams of people, working day and night, to map each subtle contour of Hideo Kojima's case of the raving crazies.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Is Metal Gear Badly Written?
I'm just dipping my toes in the water with this post. I've been mulling it in my head for a few days, and this is a little venting of the valves! We'll see what comes of it.
Is Metal Gear badly written? Honestly, I can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Can a narrative as a whole be serviceable though it be marbled through with cringe-worthy dialogue, like gristle and veins of fat in a decent cut of meat? Can the strength of characterizations carry the day when the chronology has been tweaked and retconned so many times that Hideo Kojima himself has admitted he doesn't know exactly what all went on? Can the hint of irreverent absurdity excuse a lot of the issues people have with the game, though that may be a disservice to those who want to treat it as Serious Business?
TV Tropes calls the dialogue, at least, "weirdly stylized" and that is about as neutrally as I've ever heard it described. The narrative's chronology suffers from constant reshuffling, overwriting, and retconning. The characters in the games can be ludicrously over-the-top in speech, action, and design, but more often than not they come across as completely and
believably human characters. The set pieces are epic while simultaneously being epically ridiculous.
The foremost target for complaint is the repetitive nature of the dialogue. I think there's two dimensions to this issue. One, the micro dimension, wherein characters will repeat phrases after one another with little variation, or a single character will muse repetitively. I believe this comes down not so much to Kojima's writing, but the localization.
An example, you say?! Sure! There's a reason L says 'dramatically' to Light: "I would like to tell you that I am L." Many English-speaking fans giggled at this moment, which is so dramatic
in Japanese, because of L's needless wordcruft. There's a translation issue at play here, though, that has nothing to do with L or the author. "Watashi wa L ('ellu') des" contains a lot more
phonemes than the English phrase "I'm L." His lips were still flapping, he couldn't just say "I'm L." and leave it at that. He'd look like a badly out-of-sync ventriloquist doll. A certain amount
of the awkwardness of the scripts - which are not written in English - can probably be attributed to these oddities that invariably sneak into dubbing.
Now I have to start to reach, not being a Japanese speaker. Forgive the foray into baseless speculation. I take this next line of thought from my own experiences translating between Old
English and modern English.
Some of the clumsiness may also be the result of trying to translate not just the discrete units of phonemes called words, but the constellations of connotations that words entail. When
there's no ready list of precise and appropriate synonyms, it's easy to fall victim to repetition. As well, even fluent bilinguals may have some blindness or clumsiness when it comes to transposing a linguistic symbol or spectrum of connotation from one language into another, like a square peg and a round hole. Maybe that's just crap. Who knows?
Time to go buy some scholarly books about bilingualism, language theory, and translation convention!
Next time - characters who are in on the joke. Stay tuned, or something.
Is Metal Gear badly written? Honestly, I can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Can a narrative as a whole be serviceable though it be marbled through with cringe-worthy dialogue, like gristle and veins of fat in a decent cut of meat? Can the strength of characterizations carry the day when the chronology has been tweaked and retconned so many times that Hideo Kojima himself has admitted he doesn't know exactly what all went on? Can the hint of irreverent absurdity excuse a lot of the issues people have with the game, though that may be a disservice to those who want to treat it as Serious Business?
TV Tropes calls the dialogue, at least, "weirdly stylized" and that is about as neutrally as I've ever heard it described. The narrative's chronology suffers from constant reshuffling, overwriting, and retconning. The characters in the games can be ludicrously over-the-top in speech, action, and design, but more often than not they come across as completely and
believably human characters. The set pieces are epic while simultaneously being epically ridiculous.
The foremost target for complaint is the repetitive nature of the dialogue. I think there's two dimensions to this issue. One, the micro dimension, wherein characters will repeat phrases after one another with little variation, or a single character will muse repetitively. I believe this comes down not so much to Kojima's writing, but the localization.
An example, you say?! Sure! There's a reason L says 'dramatically' to Light: "I would like to tell you that I am L." Many English-speaking fans giggled at this moment, which is so dramatic
in Japanese, because of L's needless wordcruft. There's a translation issue at play here, though, that has nothing to do with L or the author. "Watashi wa L ('ellu') des" contains a lot more
phonemes than the English phrase "I'm L." His lips were still flapping, he couldn't just say "I'm L." and leave it at that. He'd look like a badly out-of-sync ventriloquist doll. A certain amount
of the awkwardness of the scripts - which are not written in English - can probably be attributed to these oddities that invariably sneak into dubbing.
Now I have to start to reach, not being a Japanese speaker. Forgive the foray into baseless speculation. I take this next line of thought from my own experiences translating between Old
English and modern English.
Some of the clumsiness may also be the result of trying to translate not just the discrete units of phonemes called words, but the constellations of connotations that words entail. When
there's no ready list of precise and appropriate synonyms, it's easy to fall victim to repetition. As well, even fluent bilinguals may have some blindness or clumsiness when it comes to transposing a linguistic symbol or spectrum of connotation from one language into another, like a square peg and a round hole. Maybe that's just crap. Who knows?
Time to go buy some scholarly books about bilingualism, language theory, and translation convention!
Next time - characters who are in on the joke. Stay tuned, or something.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Learning to be Succinct
Because I hate being one of those people on forums who drop walls of text all over the place. How shall I learn to be succinct? Reading books makes my sentences balloon, maybe reading Twitter feeds will help my prose shrink?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Greetings, Futuremen
The minutia of day-to-day existence in the early 21st century will no doubt be of interest to all futuremen who will have access to the archives of Blogger. In the far-flung hundreth century, presuming these words are still intelligible, such a detailed account may be of interest to school children or historians wondering what a book was.
Today, I was awakened at eight o'clock (as determined by the timekeeping system we earthbound-humans adhere to, which was originally based on the sun, Sol) by the alarm on my cellular phone (a primitive interpersonal communications interface, held in the hand, and under the hegemony of the phone utility company known as US Cellular).
I did some laundry, which involves putting garments made of polymers into a "washing machine", a top-loading device with a spinning bin that floods with water and detergent, and unloaded some fresh laundry from the "dryer", a front-loading machine that heats up to assist in the drying of the garmets that are spinning around inside of it. I placed all of these fresh, dry garments into a basket with my own two hands, as we do not yet have the robot slaves that make your lives so easy and carefree.
Forgive my use of "robot", as I am projecting a 20th century vision of the future onto your time. Robots were mechanical devices that could be programmed to do certain tasks. We use them to build cars, explore Mars (in the days before it was terraformed and populated - you futuremen fellows have gotten around to that, haven't you?), and other such tasks that would fatigue our fleshy, weak bodies.
My breakfast was a slice of whole-grain bread with peanut butter, a substance made from grinding and blending peanuts with oil and salt.
I then got into my car, which is made of metals and plastics, has four rubber tires, and an internal combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and went to a library, a vast warehouse for the "books" we rely on so much, to return some already-read books and pick out some new ones. Books are dangerous and you are well lucky that you have done away with them - the pressed paper pages can cut one's fingers, and too much reading of a fixed-size font can cause eye strain and headaches. Reading was a much more exhausting physical activity. The first e-ink displays are on the market right now, but they are very expensive, rather like exotic spices to those of centuries past. It was and will be ever thus. I'm sure there are those among you who cannot afford brain-links to the core-hive.
When I arrived home, I had some homework for classes. How quaint it will seem to you all, to know that we one inscribed our homework on pieces of paper bound together in a notebook, and then brought it to the classroom the next day to physically hand over to the instructor, rather than just hyper-flashing it to their dedicated brainspace. I envy you futuremen, for ours is a cumbersome system and transporting notebooks in the rain can be a tricky business.
Then, of course, I got bored of homework - a form of electronic Attention Deficit Disorder seems to define our age, as having a whole world-wide Internet at our fingertips is still a new and shiny thing from a cultural standpoint - so I decided I would pen this record, just for you.
Today, I was awakened at eight o'clock (as determined by the timekeeping system we earthbound-humans adhere to, which was originally based on the sun, Sol) by the alarm on my cellular phone (a primitive interpersonal communications interface, held in the hand, and under the hegemony of the phone utility company known as US Cellular).
I did some laundry, which involves putting garments made of polymers into a "washing machine", a top-loading device with a spinning bin that floods with water and detergent, and unloaded some fresh laundry from the "dryer", a front-loading machine that heats up to assist in the drying of the garmets that are spinning around inside of it. I placed all of these fresh, dry garments into a basket with my own two hands, as we do not yet have the robot slaves that make your lives so easy and carefree.
Forgive my use of "robot", as I am projecting a 20th century vision of the future onto your time. Robots were mechanical devices that could be programmed to do certain tasks. We use them to build cars, explore Mars (in the days before it was terraformed and populated - you futuremen fellows have gotten around to that, haven't you?), and other such tasks that would fatigue our fleshy, weak bodies.
My breakfast was a slice of whole-grain bread with peanut butter, a substance made from grinding and blending peanuts with oil and salt.
I then got into my car, which is made of metals and plastics, has four rubber tires, and an internal combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and went to a library, a vast warehouse for the "books" we rely on so much, to return some already-read books and pick out some new ones. Books are dangerous and you are well lucky that you have done away with them - the pressed paper pages can cut one's fingers, and too much reading of a fixed-size font can cause eye strain and headaches. Reading was a much more exhausting physical activity. The first e-ink displays are on the market right now, but they are very expensive, rather like exotic spices to those of centuries past. It was and will be ever thus. I'm sure there are those among you who cannot afford brain-links to the core-hive.
When I arrived home, I had some homework for classes. How quaint it will seem to you all, to know that we one inscribed our homework on pieces of paper bound together in a notebook, and then brought it to the classroom the next day to physically hand over to the instructor, rather than just hyper-flashing it to their dedicated brainspace. I envy you futuremen, for ours is a cumbersome system and transporting notebooks in the rain can be a tricky business.
Then, of course, I got bored of homework - a form of electronic Attention Deficit Disorder seems to define our age, as having a whole world-wide Internet at our fingertips is still a new and shiny thing from a cultural standpoint - so I decided I would pen this record, just for you.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Hideo Kojima Respects Mr. Miyamoto Too
...As anyone who played The Twin Snakes with a Nintendo game saved on their memory card can tell you. And who wouldn't give mad respect? Miyamoto is the designer who invented many of Nintendo's beloved mainstays, and is as a god and father to those who grew up with a Nintendo as one of their closest friends. And he's always... always... grinning. ("Microsoft is unveiling Project Natal and somewhere, Shigeru Miyamoto is laughing. Of course, that's true as a rule.")
He is, in some ways, the anti-Craig. Scowly vs Smiley. I think he could take Craig's Bond. He'd even bring help. Perceive:
And here's a picture of Mr. Miyamoto with some candy.
How sweet it is to be smiled at by you, Miyamoto-sama.
Thanks for the pics, Google Image search.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Five Moderator Points! Use 'Em or Lose 'Em!
I just love getting moderator points over at Slashdot. I don my cape (it has Woodward and Bernstein's faces on it!) and go digging through the -1 inferno seeking moderator injustices to set right.
Of course, I'm always disappointed. One can only read so many trolls before a spark of their faith in humanity is extinguished and they fall back on the tried and true method of expending mod points by bumping a lot of +3 Funny to +4 Funny. Slashdot at -1 is where idealism goes to die. At least the cape is handsome.
Oh, and I found a picture of Daniel Craig emoting!
Behold! This can only mean...
Of course, I'm always disappointed. One can only read so many trolls before a spark of their faith in humanity is extinguished and they fall back on the tried and true method of expending mod points by bumping a lot of +3 Funny to +4 Funny. Slashdot at -1 is where idealism goes to die. At least the cape is handsome.
Oh, and I found a picture of Daniel Craig emoting!
Behold! This can only mean...
CATNAROK IS NIGH.
Looking For New Ways to Share (And Laziness Marches On)
I do a lot of collaborative writing. Back when the world was young, my tech solutions of choice were private FTP servers or shared folders on a network. These days the hobbyist writer and her co-authors are better served by dynamic, web-spanning, free services like DropBox or Google Docs.
Gone are the days of endless e-mail attachments with incremental yet important revisions and the nightmare of enforcing naming conventions. The other day I stumbled upon (literally, with my StumbleUpon button) a nifty add-on for Microsoft Office-Google Docs interoperability called OfficeSync.
I'm not convinced that OfficeSync will revolutionize the way I use Google Docs, but it is a huge convenience to open online documents right from Word's interface instead of groping for Firefox.
Downloading and displaying seemed to work seamlessly, but saving back to Google Docs wasn't so fortunate. The updates arrived on Google Docs, but only after it took so long to upload via Word that I wasn't sure if the process had hung or not. If any of my associates want to give this a try, we can probe the perimeters of usefulness for people who aren't me - i.e., those who don't install cool but impractical add-ons like mouse gestures simply because they *can*.
Technical stuff:
OfficeSync requires Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and, obviously, a Google account.
We'll discuss the potential consequences of handing over precious data to a corporate entity in another post.
Gone are the days of endless e-mail attachments with incremental yet important revisions and the nightmare of enforcing naming conventions. The other day I stumbled upon (literally, with my StumbleUpon button) a nifty add-on for Microsoft Office-Google Docs interoperability called OfficeSync.
I'm not convinced that OfficeSync will revolutionize the way I use Google Docs, but it is a huge convenience to open online documents right from Word's interface instead of groping for Firefox.
Downloading and displaying seemed to work seamlessly, but saving back to Google Docs wasn't so fortunate. The updates arrived on Google Docs, but only after it took so long to upload via Word that I wasn't sure if the process had hung or not. If any of my associates want to give this a try, we can probe the perimeters of usefulness for people who aren't me - i.e., those who don't install cool but impractical add-ons like mouse gestures simply because they *can*.
Technical stuff:
OfficeSync requires Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and, obviously, a Google account.
We'll discuss the potential consequences of handing over precious data to a corporate entity in another post.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Recalibration
Over the next few weeks I'll be re-branding this blog and bringing it more in line with the trivialities of my day-to-day existence. Let's begin with a link to this blog's sister-site:
Trivial Book Lover's Pursuits
Trivial Book Lover's Pursuits
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Final Blog Entry... Or Is It?
In all likelihood, it probably is. I have never been much into blogging aside from an OpenDiary phase back before "blog" entered the vernacular. It was fun at fourteen, but then I turned fifteen and discovered I had other things to do. Like reading. And Dark Age of Camelot.
Of course, my egotism knows no bounds, so who can say? :)
It's been a pleasure getting to know all of you and reading all of your blogs! This course was really interesting and exposed me to a lot of material that I'm sure will stick with me. I hope everyone's papers go well, and good luck with final exams!
We did it, kitty! We learned us a blog.
Of course, my egotism knows no bounds, so who can say? :)
It's been a pleasure getting to know all of you and reading all of your blogs! This course was really interesting and exposed me to a lot of material that I'm sure will stick with me. I hope everyone's papers go well, and good luck with final exams!
We did it, kitty! We learned us a blog.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Reflection
The wiki project was an interesting experience. I had never actually built an article from scratch, but it turned out to be really intuitive. I guess familiarity with MediaWiki’s software helped in this instance. It was kind of like learning… uh… a new dive, when one already knows how to swim.
For my article on Avidemux, the easiest parts were the technical requirements and what scant history of the project is available online. The brief analysis and overview of strengths and weaknesses for writing classrooms took a bit more thought. I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with theory – I know the audience is meant to be teachers of the English language, but whether they would have the same background in the material that we now all have wasn’t quite clear to me. I erred on the side of caution and chose to address Avidemux’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on writing as simple as possible. If the wiki is aimed at people with the philosophical/phenomenological basis that we all share, then they may find the strengths and weaknesses a bit too simplistic to be fully informative.
Building the Avidemux page wasn’t necessarily “difficult” but it was a tiny bit time-consuming. Since I’m old-fashioned, I tended to do my drafting in Google Docs or Word, just to keep everything safe in the event of unfortunate catastrophic network failure! It’s not that I don’t trust the wiki, but it’s never a good idea to let too much of your hard work sit unsaved on the preview page! That was the most interesting part of the process of forming the page, really, aside from going through many other articles and generalizing a template that would fit the look of the Writing Technology Wiki.
My main focus was the entry for Avidemux. I think our group spread the work very evenly and fairly – while Avidemux was my main responsibility, I also had good suggestions from my groupmates. We all pitched in to modify the category page, and Addison did a great job wrangling the Wax entry into shape. I mostly just tried to give suggestions and not step on others’ toes when it came to the other entries, since my focus was elsewhere.
I’m not sure what remains to be done this semester. In future semesters, I imagine continued maintenance of the wiki entries to keep them up to date will be a primary concern, and perhaps tweaking the strengths/weaknesses sections if the clientele for the Writing Technology wiki changes. Adding new entries is, I imagine, one of the major goals of the wiki, and since new video editing software is being created all the time there should be plenty for future collaborators to work with.
For my article on Avidemux, the easiest parts were the technical requirements and what scant history of the project is available online. The brief analysis and overview of strengths and weaknesses for writing classrooms took a bit more thought. I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with theory – I know the audience is meant to be teachers of the English language, but whether they would have the same background in the material that we now all have wasn’t quite clear to me. I erred on the side of caution and chose to address Avidemux’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on writing as simple as possible. If the wiki is aimed at people with the philosophical/phenomenological basis that we all share, then they may find the strengths and weaknesses a bit too simplistic to be fully informative.
Building the Avidemux page wasn’t necessarily “difficult” but it was a tiny bit time-consuming. Since I’m old-fashioned, I tended to do my drafting in Google Docs or Word, just to keep everything safe in the event of unfortunate catastrophic network failure! It’s not that I don’t trust the wiki, but it’s never a good idea to let too much of your hard work sit unsaved on the preview page! That was the most interesting part of the process of forming the page, really, aside from going through many other articles and generalizing a template that would fit the look of the Writing Technology Wiki.
My main focus was the entry for Avidemux. I think our group spread the work very evenly and fairly – while Avidemux was my main responsibility, I also had good suggestions from my groupmates. We all pitched in to modify the category page, and Addison did a great job wrangling the Wax entry into shape. I mostly just tried to give suggestions and not step on others’ toes when it came to the other entries, since my focus was elsewhere.
I’m not sure what remains to be done this semester. In future semesters, I imagine continued maintenance of the wiki entries to keep them up to date will be a primary concern, and perhaps tweaking the strengths/weaknesses sections if the clientele for the Writing Technology wiki changes. Adding new entries is, I imagine, one of the major goals of the wiki, and since new video editing software is being created all the time there should be plenty for future collaborators to work with.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Perils of Studying English
No blog post is necessary this week, so apparently I'm going to make two.
Anyway, I've discovered a new danger to being an English major: dissociative episodes. There should be some kind of FDA warning against reading the finale of both Middlemarch and 1984 in one sitting. It's impossible to explain the feeling of oneself being simultaneously annihilated and joyously reaffirmed.
Anyway, I've discovered a new danger to being an English major: dissociative episodes. There should be some kind of FDA warning against reading the finale of both Middlemarch and 1984 in one sitting. It's impossible to explain the feeling of oneself being simultaneously annihilated and joyously reaffirmed.
Monday, April 13, 2009
MLA Changes
Ars Technica ran a story today about "print no longer being the default" for MLA citations. I guess print really will some day go the way of the dodo. The biggest change the article covered was that URLs are no longer necessary for online sources. I guess we no longer need "stable URLs" a la JSTOR. I suppose this makes it easier for everyone, from students such as ourselves to the code masters of archives who no longer have to be concerned with implementing such systems. The habit is kind of ingrained, though! Will I be penalized for including URLs?
So, what's the procedure in academic circles? Is the new MLA immediate law - thus it is written, thus it shall be done? (Sorry, I watched The Ten Commandments over the weekend.) Or can professors choose to take a while to "catch up"?
So, what's the procedure in academic circles? Is the new MLA immediate law - thus it is written, thus it shall be done? (Sorry, I watched The Ten Commandments over the weekend.) Or can professors choose to take a while to "catch up"?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Contingent Cooperation in the Face of Zombie Hordes
Lately I've gotten back into Urban Dead. It's a text-based browser-based MMO, free to play, in which a player is either a human survivor or a zombie in a quarantined city.
There is a very robust meta-game, which is Serious Business(tm). There are free agents as well as enclaves of survivors and hordes of zombies who collaborate on password-protected message boards, stuff like that. There is also a wiki that is as central as Urban Dead gets, which includes the all-important suburb Barricade Plans, which leads me into a discussion of "contingent cooperation".
I'm going to skip a lot of background here, because it's too lengthy. It takes a long time to explain free running, barricade levels, and the sin of overcading to the uninitiated. :)
Suffice to say, Barricade Plans are created to ensure that new survivor characters have access to hospitals where they can get first aid, police stations where they can get weapons/ammo, etc, while simultaneously maintaining extremely heavily barricaded fortress-like hideouts that can withstand assault. The Barricade Plans tend to evolve and change as groups leave areas and new groups establish headquarters, stuff like that.
You see contingent cooperation when an old group disperses (or is dispersed by a particularly large zombie horde) and new survivors move in. Initially, it is chaotic in the suburb, with buildings 'caded to varying degrees with no rhyme or reason. However, when a few people - sometimes part of a coordinated group, sometimes a few early "settlers" who spontaneously collaborate - use spraypaint to tag buildings according to a Barricade Plan, characters in the area generally all fall in line. The will to cooperation is there, contingent on the first actors who set the plan in motion. The amount of people who are adhering to the early Barricade Plan depends - just as Rheingold's article describes - on the amount of cooperation they see in others.
There is a very robust meta-game, which is Serious Business(tm). There are free agents as well as enclaves of survivors and hordes of zombies who collaborate on password-protected message boards, stuff like that. There is also a wiki that is as central as Urban Dead gets, which includes the all-important suburb Barricade Plans, which leads me into a discussion of "contingent cooperation".
I'm going to skip a lot of background here, because it's too lengthy. It takes a long time to explain free running, barricade levels, and the sin of overcading to the uninitiated. :)
Suffice to say, Barricade Plans are created to ensure that new survivor characters have access to hospitals where they can get first aid, police stations where they can get weapons/ammo, etc, while simultaneously maintaining extremely heavily barricaded fortress-like hideouts that can withstand assault. The Barricade Plans tend to evolve and change as groups leave areas and new groups establish headquarters, stuff like that.
You see contingent cooperation when an old group disperses (or is dispersed by a particularly large zombie horde) and new survivors move in. Initially, it is chaotic in the suburb, with buildings 'caded to varying degrees with no rhyme or reason. However, when a few people - sometimes part of a coordinated group, sometimes a few early "settlers" who spontaneously collaborate - use spraypaint to tag buildings according to a Barricade Plan, characters in the area generally all fall in line. The will to cooperation is there, contingent on the first actors who set the plan in motion. The amount of people who are adhering to the early Barricade Plan depends - just as Rheingold's article describes - on the amount of cooperation they see in others.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wiki Workshop Week
So... I've been slowly but surely building a page about Avidemux that will ideally serve as a warning to all those who may come after. Here be monsters!
Kidding, kidding - after all, that "The neutrality of this article is disputed" tag isn't very handsome.
In gathering references for my annotated bibliography, I found several articles I can't wait to devote more time to - phenomenology is about as concrete as philosophy is capable of being, and I've found a few pieces that address phenomenology and digital scholarship that should provide good material for the research paper. It seems like a very complex, nebulous area to probe, but armed with enough sources I'm convinced I'll muddle through. I'm very excited to use the specific example of manuscripts in digital archives like JSTOR as the basis for an analysis in the spirit of Idhe or Hayles.
But first, I have to finish warning casual users off of Avidemux. Don't be fooled by its easy-going system requirements and promiscuous OS charm. That's how it gets you.
Kidding, kidding - after all, that "The neutrality of this article is disputed" tag isn't very handsome.
In gathering references for my annotated bibliography, I found several articles I can't wait to devote more time to - phenomenology is about as concrete as philosophy is capable of being, and I've found a few pieces that address phenomenology and digital scholarship that should provide good material for the research paper. It seems like a very complex, nebulous area to probe, but armed with enough sources I'm convinced I'll muddle through. I'm very excited to use the specific example of manuscripts in digital archives like JSTOR as the basis for an analysis in the spirit of Idhe or Hayles.
But first, I have to finish warning casual users off of Avidemux. Don't be fooled by its easy-going system requirements and promiscuous OS charm. That's how it gets you.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Reduction
When reading the assigned chapters from Idhe's work, I found myself wondering why sovereignty of the perception of reality was reserved for our senses. The "human" part of Idhe's equation never alters, even as tools pass from present-at-hand to transparent. What about our senses makes them the best judge of reality? Our sense of sight can be faulty. Tiny variations in photoreceptive cells from eye to eye lead to subtle, yet different, realities for each person who looks through a telescope or microscope. Idhe considers the translation of audible sound into visual waves to be reducing its dimension - but perhaps it isn't so much "reducing" as "exacting" or "refining." No longer are a person's inner ear bones or nerves responsible for interpreting sound, it is displayed with precision in digital format. Anyway, that was what went through my head when we discussed tools and their place between humans and the world. Our own senses, which phenomenology seems to reguard as sovereign, are hermeneutic. Where does that lead us?
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Spring Break!
I really enjoyed seeing everyone's presentations. Well done all! They were cool, funny, and thought-provoking. There isn't a lot more to say about class this week. If you want to post and tell me about your spring break, feel free! I'm sure you'll all have a more exciting time than I. :) Have fun and be safe! See you all after break.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
On Breaking the Fourth Wall
Lexia to Perplexia reminds me of a text adventure game without the game. As well, the idea of merging human grammar with computer grammar reminds me of breaking the fourth wall, especially in the context of video games. That is the mental analogy I used to try to make sense of what I was experiencing: I was the avatar in the digital world, but the veil had been lifted and I could see what was going on behind the clean-skinned representation of the world and into the code working under the hood. (Sounds like The Matrix, probably - I've never actually seen The Matrix.)
There's an interesting article about immersion, postmodernism, and breaking the fourth wall with a lot of focus on Metal Gear Solid in "Press the ‘Action' Button, Snake! The Art of Self-Reference in Video Games". It is an interesting, if a tad superficial, examination, but doesn't seem to include much about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. That's a rather glaring omission, as MGS2 is one of the few games I've played that I would consider postmodern. For example, at the end, the player's usual sense of control is completely subverted. It's one of the few games where you feel you personally are being forced to do things you don't want to do. It's different than the understanding most gamers have that they must fulfill specific criteria to achieve a winning, endgame condition.
One of the central themes of MGS2 also ties in, I think, with our discussion of modes of communication, and how we interact with them and how they manipulate us and our understanding. The main character (spoiler, not Snake) is a study in how much of a "self" actually exists in a person, and how much is externally dictated. How are our beliefs shaped by the external world, and do we have any choice in what we believe? This carries over to how we interpret messages: how much of the message is dictated by the medium? Quite a bit of it, I think Hayles is arguing.
Anyway, the MGS series is famous for referencing the system that the human player is interacting with, much like Lexia to Perplexia highlights the system that the reader is interacting with, to point out the materiality of the message medium.
There's an interesting article about immersion, postmodernism, and breaking the fourth wall with a lot of focus on Metal Gear Solid in "Press the ‘Action' Button, Snake! The Art of Self-Reference in Video Games". It is an interesting, if a tad superficial, examination, but doesn't seem to include much about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. That's a rather glaring omission, as MGS2 is one of the few games I've played that I would consider postmodern. For example, at the end, the player's usual sense of control is completely subverted. It's one of the few games where you feel you personally are being forced to do things you don't want to do. It's different than the understanding most gamers have that they must fulfill specific criteria to achieve a winning, endgame condition.
One of the central themes of MGS2 also ties in, I think, with our discussion of modes of communication, and how we interact with them and how they manipulate us and our understanding. The main character (spoiler, not Snake) is a study in how much of a "self" actually exists in a person, and how much is externally dictated. How are our beliefs shaped by the external world, and do we have any choice in what we believe? This carries over to how we interpret messages: how much of the message is dictated by the medium? Quite a bit of it, I think Hayles is arguing.
Anyway, the MGS series is famous for referencing the system that the human player is interacting with, much like Lexia to Perplexia highlights the system that the reader is interacting with, to point out the materiality of the message medium.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Star Trek
I'll tie this into course material, I swear. A trailer for Star Trek '09:
Yeah, it's old news, but I personally hadn't seen this one before. I'm not entirely sold on the "Star Trek Muppet Babies" concept... Sorry, that's beside the point. If I go off on a nerd rant we'll be here all night. I don't know how many of you watch Star Trek. (I come from a background of Trekkie nerds. Some of my earliest memories are Friday pizza/TNG nights, hosted by my parents.)
Even if you've never seen the show, I'll try to make this blog post worth your time!
The idea of "revitalizing" the Star Trek franchise - screwing once again with all canon and established continuity, like the travesty that was Enterprise* - can be connected to our recent discussions about augmenting subjective reality. Fiction, in this case the Star Trek franchise, serves as an analogy for the perceptions of reality that we all make for ourselves in our day to day lives: what we see from our perspective isn't exactly what someone else sees, who knows if we all see the exact same shades of particular colors, etc. Likewise, the Original Series character I think of when someone says "Kirk" will not be the same mental construct that a person will develop if Star Trek 09 is their first taste of the franchise and the character.
Where, then, does the "truth" lie? Well, apparently not in my head, and apparently not externally, either, as we are discussing a fictitious entity. The constant shifting and reinterpreting of a fictional history is perfectly acceptable (and can be exciting), but we must remember that the same shifting and reinterpretation is applied to history and self all the time.
With the idea of cyborgs, we are at a moment where we have the ability to reinterpret our reality at an unprecedented pace. With man-machine interfaces, we can even shift and reinterpret our own sensory experiences, which until relatively recent times have been the final, unassailable frontier. No longer is reinterpretation something that must be done with an eye backwards: becoming a cyborg means being able to reinterpret in real-time, obliterating any claim to "truth" that we might make in the process.
*Okay, seasons one and two of Enterprise were kind of awful, especially waiting for Archer to leap out or say "Oh, boy" but when they ditched the Temporal War stuff it got a whole lot better. Season four was good, but it was too late.
Yeah, it's old news, but I personally hadn't seen this one before. I'm not entirely sold on the "Star Trek Muppet Babies" concept... Sorry, that's beside the point. If I go off on a nerd rant we'll be here all night. I don't know how many of you watch Star Trek. (I come from a background of Trekkie nerds. Some of my earliest memories are Friday pizza/TNG nights, hosted by my parents.)
Even if you've never seen the show, I'll try to make this blog post worth your time!
The idea of "revitalizing" the Star Trek franchise - screwing once again with all canon and established continuity, like the travesty that was Enterprise* - can be connected to our recent discussions about augmenting subjective reality. Fiction, in this case the Star Trek franchise, serves as an analogy for the perceptions of reality that we all make for ourselves in our day to day lives: what we see from our perspective isn't exactly what someone else sees, who knows if we all see the exact same shades of particular colors, etc. Likewise, the Original Series character I think of when someone says "Kirk" will not be the same mental construct that a person will develop if Star Trek 09 is their first taste of the franchise and the character.
Where, then, does the "truth" lie? Well, apparently not in my head, and apparently not externally, either, as we are discussing a fictitious entity. The constant shifting and reinterpreting of a fictional history is perfectly acceptable (and can be exciting), but we must remember that the same shifting and reinterpretation is applied to history and self all the time.
With the idea of cyborgs, we are at a moment where we have the ability to reinterpret our reality at an unprecedented pace. With man-machine interfaces, we can even shift and reinterpret our own sensory experiences, which until relatively recent times have been the final, unassailable frontier. No longer is reinterpretation something that must be done with an eye backwards: becoming a cyborg means being able to reinterpret in real-time, obliterating any claim to "truth" that we might make in the process.
*Okay, seasons one and two of Enterprise were kind of awful, especially waiting for Archer to leap out or say "Oh, boy" but when they ditched the Temporal War stuff it got a whole lot better. Season four was good, but it was too late.
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