Dr. B.'s Blog - A blog of rhetorical activities and discussions.

Just Desserts!; On the Democratic Nomination

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:09:45 -0400

While I am definitely in favor of all desserts (as long as there is no mingling of fruit and chocolate) I am hoping against hope that the desserts that I am thinking about right now don't come to pass. So here goes...

The big question today is whether or not Hillary Clinton's supporters will vote for John McCain in the presidential election once Barack Obama ultimately gets the democratic presidential nomination. Now it is no secret that I have had a politicrush on Barack Obama since watching him introduce John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. I was, at the time, looking forward to 8 years of Kerry and then 8 years of Obama, but we all know it didn't work out that way. Today we find ourselves based with a minimum of 4 more years of Bush or a minimum of 4 years of Obama. This campaign has gotten nasty quite quickly, most at the hands of the Clinton camp (regardless of whether or not she says it was without her knowledge and approval...yeah right) from Slick Willy's comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, to the red phone commercial (YouTube video), to the mysterious re-release of the "Muslim" dress pictures, to the "good blue collar white folks won't vote for a Negro" comments, and more recently to the Bobby Kennedy assassination comparison/comments it has been a whole batch of hatred and lies. I have lost all respect for the Clinton duo.

Folks have asked if I was voting for the African American or the woman and my answer has remained the same...I am voting for the person who most closely reflects my own political leanings and for me that was Barack Obama. It had nothing to do with the fact that he has melanin than Clinton or that I have spent the last 4 years crushing over the man, or that I am magnetically drawn to his rhetorical abilities. It has more to do with the fact that I am drawn to his policies on education, health care, energy and the environment, and several other things. There are things that Barack and I don't agree on and one day he and I may be able to sit down and chat so that I can help him see the light, but right now he just works for me.

But I digress, back to the question of whether or not Hillary supporters will switch camps and vote for McCain...I have to say that I am fed up. If, as Clinton says, the good working class white folks won't vote for McCain (or the older women or anyone else) I say that's their choice and as such they have to suffer the repercussions. If folks want to shoot themselves in the foot by voting for McCain so that they don't have to vote for an African American presidential candidate then in the end they will get what they deserve. If the last 8 years have taught me anything it's that we have no control over the political realm. Hell, sometimes the candidate that the most people vote for doesn't even win. I'd hate to have to suffer for other people's close-mindedness, but I fully recognize that this is always a possibility and say that they will get their just desserts.

As I watch the news tonight I see Clinton supporters talking about a dream team ticket that has Clinton as VP. Call me bitter, say I'm holding a grudge, or just label me cautious, but I would be hesitant to run with Senator Clinton as VP. I ain't saying she's dangerous or shady (ok, maybe I am) but I would definitely be looking to bring back food testers to the White House if I were President Obama. I'm just saying.

It's Back!

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:43:36 -0400

As ya'll may recall I have had issues with insomnia since I was a kid. Well it has been back for the last 3 weeks or so. I have been knitting, gaming, and watching LOTS of bad t.v. Well tonight (actually this morning) I watched my 4th bad game movie in a week's time. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Doom, and Dungeons & Dragons

I mentioned this to Lisa and she said it clearly means that I have not been playing enough games, so since it is only 4:45 and I am destined to be up for another couple of hours I guess I will go up and play some games. We can thank Lisa for that one.

Microblogging Killed the Blogger

Thu, 29 May 2008 23:54:06 -0400

Twitter has seriously cut down on the amount of time that I spend blogging. Not only is it easier and faster, but it gives me instant gratification. Rather than having to wait and see if people read the post and comment I get immediate response via Twitter. I even find myself responding to people's blog posts more in Twitter than on the blogs themselves (at least when people tweet that they have posted to their blogs).

When you add Twitpic to the mix and give me the opportunity to post pictures (or at least links to them) to twitter from anywhere I get drawn further into the darkside. Now if I could only get Brightkite to work from my phone I would be in like Flynn! In the meantime you might notice that right below the microblogging block on the left there is now a block for Twitpic!

WiiFit Thinks I'm Old, Short, and Fat

Tue, 27 May 2008 16:58:23 -0400

Not that any of that might not be true, but I don't appreciate being told that by my game console! Yeah, I got a Wii Fit at launch because I had to have it. I was wondering how delicate it would be and it wasn't very delicate at all. When I entered my height and weight it shrank my mii and made my belly hang out of my workout clothes (this mind you NEVER happens).

In a society that is far too concerned with impossible beauty standards and children "dieting" in elementary and middle school for no good reason I worry about the additional damage of being called obese and having oneself represented as a dumpy avatar. Now I have to go and lie to my Wii and see if the process and outcome is any different if I make myself a pre-teen girl.

Links I've Been Following Today

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:59:49 -0400

Funny Indexed post

A Stuff White People Like that (as usual) can be applied to the entirety of mainstream America

Clay Shirky's talk on Web 2.0

New Wiiware download, Lost Winds. Really digging the new downloads of games and demos for the DS bought a 2 GB SD card to accommodate my coming addiction.

Learning environments research on virtual environments

What Lisa bought me for my birthday

What I gave her

What I bought myself this weekend

This will catch you up on how I have been spending (most) of my net time today. Now don't you feel enlightened?

Paying Ransom

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:24:31 -0400

So it seems there is no such thing as a free lunch. I finally hit the limit with Flickr and they were holding my pictures hostage until I upgraded to their damned Pro account. Now I am willing to pay for services rendered, but the language that they used in their ransom note...I mean account notification was kind of harsh! "if you upgrade, they'll come back unharmed."!

That Time of Year

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:35:45 -0400

It is once again that time of year when I do too much traveling and not enough blogging. After C's there was the Shapiro Writing Festival and now the AP Review Commission. School ends next week so after projects have been graded I will once again feel a bit more human (I hope!).

I have been knitting a bunch of fun stuff just for the hell of it and Meredith is bugging me to open an Etsy shop, but I think that is just because she covets my mad knitting skills and wants all of the cool stuff that I knit.

I haven't been gaming nearly enough! I am currently playing Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS and Bioshock on the XBox 360. Bioshock has me really wanting to re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which I haven't read for over 20 years and I have no memory of, but the game is supposed to be based on the novel so I want to see for myself! Since it isn't available for the Kindle yet I may actually have to take that monstrosity on the plane with me to ATL.

Oh yeah, I got an Amazon Kindle about a week or so ago and can I just say that I love it?? I haven't been able to get home delivery of the NYT since I moved out to the sticks 2 years ago and now it gets delivered to me every morning again (straight to the Kindle) so that I can read it with my coffee. This electronic paper technology is pretty friggin' sweet and surprisingly easy on the eyes. The books are fairly inexpensive ($9.99 or less for most fiction) and I don't have to find somewhere to store the damned things when I am done reading them.

Now for the downside...the copylefter in me hates DRM. When I am done reading the book I can't just give it to someone else and the Kindle format (but it does also read pdfs and mobi files) is most definitely proprietary. There is also the question of the actual placement of the buttons on the machine. There are 2 next page, 1 previous page, and one back button and they are all awkwardly placed. They are impossible not to hit by accident at least once when you are holding the thing. And then there is the ambiguous naming of "Back" and "Previous Page". They are a bit confusing. While PP literally takes you to the previous page in the document and not the previous page that you were looking at and Back takes you back to the last storefront or "library" page that you were looking at. There had to be a better word or phrase to use for that button, but at least it is tiny compared to the other button. All things considered, I have definitely consumed the Kindle Kool-Aid and you'd have to fight me for and then pry it out of my cold dead hands and I just don't think you are that bad.

Gotta go teach now, I'll come back add links later.

On NOLA and a Sense of Loss

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:09:59 -0400

I fully recognize the need for tourists to go back to NOLA, but as a 20 year "regular" (pre-Katrina) I was sickened by what I saw and heard from the locals while I was at CCCC last week. I was afraid to go back and more and more I am wishing that I had not. The Quarter and the Convention Center area have been restored for the most part but the Ward and the East side are now (for the most part) non-existent. Natives trying to return to the area are finding that they have to leave again because they are no longer able to get the jobs that they have held for so long. I miss the NOLA that I knew, the corner bars and Po' Boy/Gumbo spots and the love of a people like no other.

This shit really pisses me off. Three years later we still see FEMA trailers and tent cities are popping up under overpasses. You still see houses marked with the mark of the dead. People are homeless, desperate, and hungry. While poverty is not something new to these folks they now find themselves alone with no community or family left to lean on. What pisses me off even more is the accusatory looks that I got from folks because African American natives chose me to speak to, converse with, commiserate with, share with...quit fucking whining about "discrimination" and understand (or at least don't share with me) because when I am faced with the REALITY of Katrina 3 fucking years later I can really give less than a shit if you are mad because a young African American woman hands me a flier for a poetry slam and ignores you or comes to me first at a counter or speaks to me on the street (did you speak to them first or clutch your pocketbook a little tighter when they rounded the corner?). Really???...is that your biggest concern about what you have seen (or chosen not to) while in New Orleans?

If you are offended by what I have written maybe you need to be. In the end, one can only pray that the real New Orleans can one day be resurrected.

Hacking the Body

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:57:39 -0400

Asinine hackers posted JavaScript based post on an epilepsy forum in order to trigger seizures and migraines in epilepsy patients with flashing animation.

This is the first time that I have heard of hackers doing something so physically malicious. The hack has finally breached the matrix.

via Wired: Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts.

Briefly

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:44:31 -0400

Just a brief announcement. Penny Arcade is sponsoring a scholarship for students interested in going into the games industry. It is not field specific, and I am really interested in seeing if they award it to someone in the humanities :-)

via GamingAngels

It's Over!

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:50:56 -0400

Where did Spring Break go? I woke up to St. Patrick's Day and now break is over...already! I was supposed to have a week of gaming and caffeine and somehow I ended up spring cleaning and working! Of well, summer is coming soon...right?

Finished!

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:15:38 -0400

I have not fallen off the face of the earth. It has been a busy week. There were dissertation prospectus defenses and sockday parties and web 2.0 community meetups. I have been a busy beaver!

I did manage to stay up until 4:00 on Wednesday and finish Professor Layton. I was really excited to get to the extra puzzles that were based on how completely you have finished the game, but I was sorely disappointed. Not so much in the game as in myself. The puzzles were the same puzzles that you find in the game (and one might argue a bit more difficult), but I found myself almost totally disinterested in them when they were not connected to or advancing an ongoing narrative!

Wow, now that says a lot. I found the puzzles too easy in most cases, but I continued to play the game because I wanted to see what happened next in the simple (yet engaging) story. There is definitely a lot to be said for a good narrative.

Oh well, it's almost 5:30 so I guess I really should head off to bed. DST really sucks for me right now!

Critical Thinking is the Key to Success! (aka Professor Layton and the Curious Village)

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:01:20 -0500

Don't you hate when you write a long post and it gets lost in the ether. Here's my attempt to recreate it before I go to bed.

So I've been playing a lot of Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my DS before I go to bed at night and I find it amusing that "Critical thinking is the key to success!" is one of the professor's key phrases. As a teacher, it would be great if all of my students thought that way, right?

Professor Layton is a lot like Brain Age with a narrative. You solve a series of puzzles to get clues from the villagers. The game offers an interesting cast of characters including the sloppy detective, the beautiful lady in distress, the flamboyant servant with purple lip(stick) to match his purple suit who interjects "Woo Hoo" in a Tourettes-esque manner during his speeches, matronly little old ladies, and an assortment of village idiots.

Oddly enough all of the villagers have puzzles that they want you to solve (and they can't solve them for themselves). You need the clues that they give you to solve a series of mysteries. There are disappearing artifacts, a murder, kidnappings, and more to come I am sure. I have finished 4 or 5 chapters of the game and the puzzles are starting to get a little challenging (either that or it's the cold medicine that I've been taking at bedtime). What is (so far) obviously absent from the game is word puzzles. Professor Layton 2 has already been released in Japan and a third is the works so hopefully the the developers at Level-5 will pull in some wordsmithy types to develop some word puzzles!

Additional game features?

In addition to the clues that you get from the villagers for solving the puzzles you can also earn money (picarats) that can be used to buy bonuses at the end of the game.

You can download new puzzles every week via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Wednesday Gaming @ GDC

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:53:26 -0500

While I spent far too much time touring the Expo at GDC I played a lot of games as well. Want to know what I played? Here's a quick list and my 5 word maximum first reactions!

Hellgate London- Really Liked It

Crysis- Liked It

Spore Creatures (DS-Pre-release)- It could grow on me

Wii Fit- Strangely addictive (and the Nintendo guy got me to hula hoop in public!)

Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Little Gamers (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Penumbra:Overture- Not for me

Warriors Orochi (Pre-release for the PSP)- A hack & slash feast. Gots to get me some of that!

Bionic Commando (watched a demo)- A Black, male, Lara Croft with dreads...not really my type of game this one.

Fez- A GDC Indie favorite...a cross between Echochrome and old school platformer

Tuesday GDC Notes

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:51:44 -0500

On Tuesday I went to sessions from both IGDA and the Serious Games Summits. You'll find those notes below the fold. :-)