[william’s blogging]
William Cole’s started blogging! I know William from Hypertext conferences, and it’s good to see he’s joined the blogosphere.
30/9/2003
[oops]
Yes, I’m blogging like crazy because I’ve cleared the whole day so I can concentrate on working on two pieces I’m writing and so I was just going to have a few minutes of surfing first… I’ll start concentrating on the essays now. Yup.
[newsgaming]
Gonzalo Frasca and friends have released Newsgaming, a site where political cartoons and games meet. The first game up is called September 12th, and is a simulation where killing terrorists spawns new terrorists. I like how after you fired a rocket you’re forced to wait for your rockets to reload, and during that wait you hear the wails of mourning women crying for the dead. The mourner stands up and hesitates, changing into a terrorist outfit, then back to her blue, civilian dress, and to and fro until always settling with the terrorist’s black and white. One of the FAQs is:
Are your games biased?
Of course they are. We do not believe in objective journalism. We prefer games that encourage critical thinking, even if the player disagrees with our game’s ideas.
Of course they are. We do not believe in objective journalism. We prefer games that encourage critical thinking, even if the player disagrees with our game’s ideas.
A chapter in my thesis is about political web games, and when a lot were being published, after September 11, I blogged a lot about it too. Gonzalo has always been at the forefront of political gaming, and anyone interested in it should look at his MA thesis and his other publications, which are listed in the sidebar of his blog, ludology.org.
Gamegirladvance also has a post on newsgaming, with a nice photo of Gonzalo showing the game.
[hijack]
You’ve noticed, perhaps, that Verisign have hijacked the net to show their website every time you mistype a .com or .net address so that your browser can’t find the server you’ve asked for? There’s some interesting, though complicated, discussion of this, monopoly and regulation of the internet in a Slashdot thread on this. And Verisign’s rewarded for it all by another big US government contract. (Boing Boing, via Andedammen)
[issn]
The national library in Norway refuses to give ISSNs to weblogs, although many weblogs clearly fit the definition of a periodical worthy of an ISSN: periodical, archived, dated, one title, some kind of serious (faglig) content, etc. Obviously the ISSN system, with its paultry 8 digits, was never intended for true mass publication of periodicals, and they’re worried blogs might flood the system. But as Jon writes, flatly refusing blogs entry confirms A. J. Liebling’s statement: “freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one”.
(more…)
29/9/2003
[relativity]
The theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less. It reads a little like Cat in a Hat, only with fewer rhymes and less impressive rhythm: “I can hear you say, “No way. That can’t be!” But I tell you it is.” compares quite poorly to “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun but you have to know how,” especially if you get into the beat when you read it. You need to draw your breath after the second “Look at me!” for maximum effect, and keep the pressure on the “me” of course, until you get to NOW! I suppose you already knew that, huh? “But I tell you it is” is good, you know, with the same insistence as “it is fun to have fun” but the phrases leading up to it don’t quite do it, do they?
Of course, Cat in a Hat, while metrically perfect, doesn’t explain the theory of relativity. (via Elouise)
[learning ABCs]
When we picked up Noah from the airport a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I brought along her ABC book so we could do her reading homework on the airport bus. On the way back from the airport, My daughter requested that Noah and I both type our complete names on the keyboard printed inside the front cover of the book. Actually, since she was two or three, she’s been pretending she has her own powerbook. The shiny, silver, folding mirror I keep in my purse was a favourite when she was a toddler: nowadays a book gives more realism to her games.
Though I swear at my powerbook often enough for its geriatric slowness, I’m quite amused to see it replicated almost exactly in a seven-year-old’s first school reading book. It doesn’t actually say it’s a mac, in fact, the publishers have put their logo, a tree, where my powerbook says “Macintosh PowerBook G3″. I suppose they have copyright clearance.
My daughter blankly refuses to put her digital photos on the web, and has yet to try instant messaging, but she can pick out emails by herself even on my real powerbook, which has keys so worn you can only read half the letters. And it’s obvious, really, isn’t it, to put a keyboard in a book of ABCs?
The website for the book is amazing too, full of the same gorgeous illustrations as in the book, and with games and puzzles and karaoke reading and voices reading and so on. Each page has hints for parents, with suggestions for what to do at home this week on the website. I like having a computer age schoolkid.
Actually, while keyboards in schoolbooks seem new to me, it could be seen as far more revolutionary, in Norway, that the letter O is represented by olives and oregano. A lot has happened in a generation. Thank goodness.
[grammar of categories]
Of course, putting the category at the bottom of each post leads to some funny sentences. I’ve not designed my categories for this grammar: “Posted by Jill to world at 8:59″ - well, yes, I suppose I am posting to the world. I could rename every category, organise all this by whom I’m addressing, or what emotions I’m expressing, rather than by what I think I’m talking about. “Posted by Jill to Apollo”, for instance, for clear-headed posts, or I could post to Diana when I was feeling chaste and forestbound. Thor for thundering fury. Buddha when seeking inner calm. Dionysos, obviously, after a night’s carousing. Aphrodite when in love.
What kind of posts would I address to you, though?
[deodorant]
Problems in Iraq: deodorant desparately needed.
[comment spam]
Extremely frequent visitors may have noticed that link-packed comments advertising various drugs keep popping up and disappearing here. They’re always comments to posts that have a lot of links pointing to them and thereby a high Google PageRank, which is obviously what the spammer wants to get in on - links from a site with high PageRank give the linked-to site some of that PageRank. I’ve been deleting them as fast as they arrive (or as fast as I see them) and banning the IP-numbers they were sent from but these - or this - spammer is annoyingly persistent, is obviously on dialup and so has zillions of IP numbers, and it’s really boring deleting spam all the time. Fortunately Liz links to a solution to all this that lets you blacklist certain URLs, which are then never displayed in comments, though other, benign, URLs are shown. Unfortunately this solution involves three plugins, tweaking, and slower rebuilds and comment processing. Maybe I’ll just keep deleting, for now.
If linklove describes linking to lovingly spread the goodness of one’s PageRank, and linkslutting is doing anything to get other people to link to you, what is this? Linkcoercion? Attempted linktheft? I’m not going to call it linkrape. It sure ain’t rape if you can delete it and its consequences completely.
27/9/2003
[newborn]
 |
He slept through my entire visit, so I didn’t get to hold him. But while his mother was unwrapping the soft cotton blanket I’d brought for him he opened his eyes a little, not quite awake, but looking steadfastly at me as I smiled to him, gazing into his deep, dark newborn eyes. He considered me, seriously, then slept again, without crying for the safety of his mother. I take this as a good sign. |
26/9/2003
[wireless abroad]
This morning I was writing when Mark pinged me in iChat:
There are definitely a few times I’ve been alone in foreign cities where I’d have liked to sit down, order a coffee, unfold a slim laptop and find a list of friends, online, and happy to chat.
[different stories]
Digitales2003 is calling for stories and texts about gender and technology. Different stories:
One often hears that girls are not interested in technical things because they are too cold and too systematic, but what about telling them that one of the pioneers of computing wanted to create a machine that would enable him to contact his lost loved one and that he died like Snow White after eating a poisoned apple : isn’t that a beautiful fairy tale?
That’s certainly a different way of telling Turing’s story. Do any of you know more about the lost loved one and how he hoped to contact him through his machines? (via Hilde)
[thinking a rhinoceros is a unicorn]
Reading an old copy of The Guardian’s Review section over breakfast, I found this that I want to remember:
When Marco Polo first saw a rhinoceros on Java, he recognised it as a unicorn. The creature had a single horn and the word for a one-horned animal was already in the language - in Europe a “rhinoceros” did not yet exist. (Hustvedt, Guardian Sept 6, 2003)
Siri Hustvedt (who’s practically Norwegian, we’re all quite proud of her) writes that she used this conundrum when teaching writing. It’d also be a good anecdote to explain why it’s necessary to consider and develop new vocabularies to describe new media. Otherwise we’ll end up thinking that rhinoceroses are unicorns.
Perhaps we already did.
[update, 11:12 am: You must read Anders’s continuation of this thought: not only does he recognise the Marco Polo story as one of Umberto Eco’s favourites, he adds platypuses and whales to the mix and has a well thought out argument for the usefulness of calling a whale a fish - for many purposes. This, of course, all figures in the how-do-we-study-new-media and what-do-we-call-it debate. Lovely.]
