ENGL 680M: New Media

this idea of "layers" strikes me as more a convenient way to conceptualize new media rather than a defining principle of it.

my desktop says "do your money!" to remind me to update my financial spreadsheet. other than that, it is black. :-/

before that, though, it was a cool swirly thing using vista's active background feature. that background says about me "you like shiny techie things."

these keyboards are unnecessarily noisy.

note to self - wikipedia game!

excel vs WoW - when somebody whose name escapes me, a virtual worlds expert from indiana university, came to speak at rose-hulman, i asked him "how can we trick people into doing real work for free with a 'game' like WoW?"
he gave me a funny look and said, "i'm afraid i can't talk about that, i'm under an NDA on that topic."
hrmm...

white easel, very cool. i start with black, because i was never exposed to canvasses when young, i suppose. i think of black as "empty" and white as "full". it's my sci-fi thing, i guess.

it seems illogical that mario 64 was the first human-controlled camera... i could almost swear i'd played something before that implemented some sort of user camera.

when i walk around this campus, about 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 people is talking on a cell phone. i'm less interested in the cultural meaning of this behavior than in the question, "who are they talking to, and about what?"

or maybe they're just pretending to be on their cell phones... hmm.

low-tech solutions certainly have their place. i love the chalkboard, too, though i hate the amount of chalk dust sitting in the chalk tray...

technology like flash is really hard to teach... my method of learning flash was to sit down at about 8am with a project in mind, and just keep working at it until it was right. now, i'm more tech-savvy than average, but it was still a 6-hour job.

what i'm getting at, i guess, is that some of this stuff is just hard, and if you want to learn it, you have to work at it!

i'm results-oriented. if you give me something template-based and perfect, i'm going to call it perfect. if you give me something handmade and perfect, i may be more impressed, but unless the assignment was "handmade", you're getting the same grade as the template dude over there.

fun article i just read. the article talks about the sales differential between games with and without online components. kinda tangential.