jill/txt

Via Lisbeth, who’s researching the deaths of characters in online gameworlds like Everquest: The Last Email, a website that stores those emails to your loved ones (and others) with the things you could never tell them while you were still alive.

It seems like a service begging for a story consisting of those last emails. Of course they wouldn’t simply be messages of love. No, no, far more complicated. I guess Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse kind of does this, actually.

At a very pleasant dinner last Tuesday with Matt Locke, Tim Wright and Martin Trickey, someone mentioned Barcode Battlers, handheld games with barcode scanners. You collect monsters by scanning groceries - real groceries, see Campbell’s soup might be the coolest monster - and then you can battle your friends’ scanned barcodes. Isn’t that weird? I actually thought it sounded kind of cool in a surreal way, but this merciless sendup of the packaging, backstory, and well, everything about the game, set me straight. It seemed someone (unsuccessfully?) tried to revive the Battlers with a copycat game called Scannerz - which in fact, was reported on Boing Boing just two weeks ago. Circles, circles, circles.

Kaye notes that Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the Democrats’ candidate for Vice President in the upcoming US elections, reads blogs. And writes in the Kerry-Edwards campaign blog. Actually the whole blog is pretty interesting. Coming from a country where we elect a political party to lead us rather than a husband-and-wife team, I’m surprised at the way in which Teresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards are presented as almost as important as their husbands - look at the “Get Informed” section up in the left corner. I found the travelogue and the First Person posts particularly interesting as examples of how politicians are starting to use personal voice online - and contributions from bloggers. There’s also plenty of posts using the official, boring-authoritative-voice. I’d love to see an article analysing a politician’s blog like this thoroughly and comparing it to the traditional ways of promoting political parties, and to the other ways the Kerry campaign is currently promoting itself. Has anyone written that article yet?

Oh look, Mark Glaser’s virtual roundtable for this week includes US soldiers in Iraq who blog and Iraqi citizens who blog. Interesting.

A journalist asked me about the degregation of language in electronic communications, so I told him about the eloquence of blogs and the subcultures of leet and the art of codework and machine English. I looked up a piece I wrote mentioning NN and Mez’s emails, and found this quote from NN:

From: integer@www.god-emil.dk
Subject: [!nt]n2+0

mor konfusd kr!!!!ketz. ! sh!ne m! metal!k zurfazez modulated b! 01 z!lnz Envelope + ztep at dze edge + uat !z ! z +? Dze modulaz!on korezpondz 2 dze beat!ng patern. !

I ignored emails like these (sent like spam to listservs) for ages, assuming they were garbage. When Amanda Steggell finally interpreted them for me, explaining that you just read ! as i, k as c and z as s, I began to see their beauty, though I still struggle to translate them. Amanda and her collaborators used NN’s words as part of the text for their performance Please try to speak English!, and she read them so beautifully!

I think the words above say the following:

More confused critics (crickets?)
I shine my metallic surfaces modulated by silence.
Envelope and step at the edge
+ uat !z ! z +?
The modulation corresponds to the beating pattern

There is beauty in this, and such a fittingness, that the words of a cyborg or of a machine (a being with metallic surfaces) should speak a language we must strain to understand. There is a beauty too in the idea that such a creature, should it exist, might spam mailinglists with its infuriatingly incomprehensible poetry. Who is NN? Grethe Melby wrote a wonderful article about her, them, it, in Norwegian. Salon wrote about her, too.

Can any of you read “+ uat !z ! z +?”? And is it true, that with practice, you can read words like these as easily as English?

We’re doing textual analysis and close reading this week, and while I had a nice thorough article about this in Norwegain, I needed to find an English one for our exchange students. Alan McKee has written a book called Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide, which is likely good. A few years back he wrote a short article outlining how to do textual analysis. It’s still available, in PDF via The Wayback Machine, and provides a decent introduction to students. Here’s the intro in HTML in case you hate PDFs. VirtuaLit provides really good tutorials on close reading poetry and short stories, looking at formal aspects as well as cultural and critical approaches. I think I’ll start with the more general media studies style textual analysis in McKee’s article though. Nobody’s actually written one of these how to read this guides for new media yet, have they?

I’m still surprised each semester when I realise most of my students have never, ever done textual analysis. I’ve also realised it’s my job to change this, so next semester’s Web design and web aesthetics is going to involve a lot of interpreting stuff on the web. Sure, we did some of that last semester, but not nearly systematically enough.

The paper version of my AoIR talk on distributed narrative ended up far too long, but no matter, it’s useful to me as an initial survey of what I think distributed narrative is, and I love having started. I put the PDF online, as well as the slides I used. Just images and screenshots, really, hardly any words.

Now I need to cut it to less than half the length by Friday so I can submit it for consideration for inclusion in the best of AoIR 5.0 book. I think it’s probably far too inconclusive and early-researchish to get in, but then again, a lot of people never wrote up their papers, even more will just not get around to submitting, plus you know, it’s a cool area, surveys can be useful, they might need a token humanist and regardless of its chances of publication, it’s useful discipline for me to keep writing about this to deadlines. So I’ll do it.

There’s another deadline I want to make on Friday too: trAce wants to publish a book of criticism of works of electronic literature that’s affiliated with trAce, and they want abstracts by Friday. Just abstracts. 2-300 words.

Terrorjesus is a hypercomic that really does have several paths through it - click the funny little curly arrows and you get a new, different page of comics. I enjoyed the loops of misunderstanding, though I only read for ten minutes or so. No time. Not today.

Interesting opinion piece from Rune Klevjer in Dagbladet.no (in Norwegian). It’s great that the Norwegian goverment is funding Norwegian game development now - though kind of silly that they’ll only fund kids’ games. Rune’s main point is important: games still aren’t seen as culture. Torill has a more thorough commentary than I’m likely to offer.

I had been wondering why women have felt the need to start up their own gadget blogs. After reading Engadget this morning, I know exactly why. First there were the weak jokes about wanting sexy “nurse bots” instead of functional transportation devices. But what really got my adrenalin racing was the report on the new portable PlayStations, where the tits of the women carrying the devices got more comments than the gadget itself. The reader comments were even worse. I furiously wrote a comment.

What the hell? This is such a pathetic example of sexism I’m astounded you guys can do this and not blush.

I’ve gotta assume the only reason is you think you’re in the boys’ showers at high school and there are no girls in sight.

Well wise up: if you want as wide an audience as possible for your website, you’d better bloody well not treat it as the boys’ showers.

I think PlayStation’s pathetic for using pretty women to promote their gadgets. What a stupid way of telling 50% of the population that they’re not interested in selling to them.

I think Engadget’s perpetrating sexism by focussing on the tits rather than the gadget.

And I’m appalled by the readers’ comments here. I’m guessing the women who STARTED reading this thread stopped pretty quick.

Engadget: are you REALLY trying to scare away your women readers?

Engadget had better bloody answer [Update: They did, and nicely, too.]. And I will be reading the womens’ gadget blogs from here on: Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women and Shiny Shiny: A Girl’s Guide to Gadgets.

While I’ve heard of No Pain No Game, or The Artwork Formerly Known as PainStation (did PlayStation sue them?), I hadn’t realise how much it hurts. That looks really painful. The game’s kind of like Pong, except played on a tabletop that gives your hand electrical shocks. And gets really hot when the game heats up. If you lift your hand to escape the burns and electrical shocks, you automatically lose.

No, I don’t think I’d do well at all.

In Norway there’s a tradition that the weather on your birthday is like a report card on how good you’ve been over the past year. Today the weather is a mixture of everything: strong winds, sun for a few minutes, a little drizzle, some grey clouds, sudden blue sky and sun again. I’m taking that as a sign that I’ve been really interesting over the past year.

Tonight some friends are coming round to help me drink up champagne left over from my defence party last year. Maybe I’ll mix some drinks too - look, The Webtender lets you tell it what’s in your bar, and it tells you what you can make! If I can get strawberries I might make some virgin strawberry daiquiris, too. The drivers and kids would appreciate that, I know. Oh, and little umbrellas for the drinks: my eight-year-old will adore that.

After a few cool years of pretending birthdays are for kids, I’ve definitely decided that I like getting attention on my birthday. I love cards in the mail, emails from friends I hardly ever see and the phone call from my sister with promises that the pressie’ll turn up, uh, soon. I’m thrilled that on barely any notice, many of my friends are happy to pop round and help me drink champagne!

Ooh! Look at the lovely composite photo of Nina Wakeford’s keynote at AoIR Anders took with his phone!

There are spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in the latest Norwegian and Swedish versions of Windows XP, as, it must be said, there are in most translated software. Interestingly, the Swedish translator has actually blogged a post wondering how this might have happened.

See, to give your presentation you’d just unhook your locket and slip it into a USB port - your slides would be right there. To show a friend photos of your daughter or your lover or your holidays, the same. I think I’d like a tiny speaker in the locket, too, for tiny messages just for the bearer, the kind of messages you might like to hear many times as you open a locket to look at the photos again and again.

The lockets are made by Emily Conrad, whose website is portableink.com.