ENGL 680M: New Media

"Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable."

I am terribly impressed that some of you are getting together during studio day this week. We are our own best resources, right? I can't wait to get back and see the progress that ya'll have made. I have personally been doing lots (and I do mean lots) of talking about games, but have had no time to play them while I've been in Vancouver and am feeling deeply depressed about that.

So instead of grading papers or doing my dishes or saving the world...and since Wendy is too busy playing WoW to talk to me on the phone, I've been seeing what's new on the Internet today. There's lots of stuff out there, People, you should go!

Anyway, as I often do I was checking out I Can Has Cheez Burger, which is a very funny site should you be into the silly captions of animals caught on film. In looking around the site I came across a short

Thinking about blogs last week gave me an idea for my studio project. One of the things that occurs to me is how blogging and the web could make for a very interesting and transparent research process. For example, if I am conducting research on how the web and ubiquitous computing affect archives, then the combining the use of a blog on a website could essentially serve as a documentary of the research writing process.

I beat Ayiti using the strategy that someone's (I can't recall whose) student came up with - volunteerism.

It should be a bit embarrassing to us that we failed to analyze the author of our "text" and realize their likely message.

Also, I've started reading The Diamond Age again. I'd almost forgotten how amazing that book is.

Finally, take a look at Anda's Game for a really great short story about avatars and gold farming.

This morning as I was waking from my Nyquil-filled sleep, i had an ephiphany (at least I think I did) about my project. I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for talking with me about it-it got my brain running and now I have more than I can chew, but storyboards here I come! We'll see if it "pans" out.

munster, anna. (2006) materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics. hanover, nh: dartmouth university press.

Here are some links to the places I've been getting my games for Mac.

Azada is fun coz it has different kinds of puzzle games to solve which collectively "beat" the game. It's free to try but 20 bucks for the full version. I don't remember where I got it but it comes from Big Fish.
http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/1755/mac/azada/index.html

This site has freeware. I've played Frozen Bubble. Typical aim & shoot kinda thing.
http://www.macgamesandmore.com/best_freeware.html

On this site I tried playing Democracy. Yikes.
http://www.winterwolves.com/

Here's a link to my witchcraft bookmarks on de.licio.us . Lots of these are to love spell sites, which are by far the predominate types of witchcraft sites.

I plan on using Transana to assist with the the analysis of my aduio/video files from Dungeons and Dragons online. Transana allows for coding of video clips, associating them to nodes for anlaysis, and the stroing of transcripts and ethnographic field notes.

You can find out more about it here: http://www.transana.org/