jill/txt

Phew. Got the course previews (studieplaner) for next semester all sorted out, I think, and voted through in the department meeting yesterday. I’m becoming proficient, I think. I knew the answers to all sorts of things. “If you label that a compulsory assignment instead of assessment it will simplify our administrative burden hugely without changing what you want to do.” “No, the point is that we need to have a digital archive that allows us find a particular student’s digital portfolio exam in HUIN105 spring 2002 in case someone asks us for it in December 2009.” That sort of thing. Actually I’m still not quite sure why or who might ask us for Knut Knutsen’s exam in 2009, but we’re required to keep confidential records of exams for ten years. The students have three weeks after the grades are awarded to complain and request regrading by a new committee, so obviously we have to keep their exams that long. Why ten years, though? Maybe it’s for the national committees that are supposed to periodically survey grading around the country to ensure it’s more or less equivalent.

It felt rather strange leading the meeting perfectly knowledgeably. Almost everyone looked rather bored, to be honest, and yes, while these details are important in sum, I totally see the boredom. That’s probably why the university democracy doesn’t work, actually. Most decisions are so dull that people disengage or don’t show up - but of course real change happens as a result of these many, many small and dull decisions.

But I’m getting the hang of it, and while the juggling still exhausts me (and oh dear, things keep slipping through) there is a certain pleasure in feeling that I know how this works. Well, how quite a lot of it works. And I like knowing how things work.

Day 242, that’s ages. Having checked how many days I’ve been head of department, I had to also check how many days I have left. One year and 273 days. I’ll be an expert.

This has got to be a hoax, right? Armed dolphins, trained to shoot terrorist divers, have gone AWOL after Katrina. It’s in The Guardian, not The Onion. Possibly I slipped into a parallel universe or something, though.

So far, the quests I’ve done in World of Warcraft have all been of the following types:

1. Either explore, in one of these ways:
• Find a person (report to a person, deliver an object to a person, bring me an object from a person)
• Explore an area (scout an area, report back and tell us the condition)
• Learn to use a game function, such as buying an item from a vendor.
2. or slay monsters, with slight variations:
• Kill X number of a particular kind of monster.
• Bring the quest-giver an object that is found on the body of a slayed monster.
• Bring the quest-giver an object that is found in a monster-infested area.

I think the quests (sorry: missions) in Grand Theft Auto could be described in exactly the same way. Can you think of any exceptions? Do all quests and missions in all games follow these patterns?

I’d be interested to know if anyone’s written about this. I know Ragnhild Tronstad’s paper about how quests are performatives, and only become narratives after having been played, when they are retold, and I know Espen Aarseth’s followup paper on Quests as Post-Narrative Discourse (in Narrative Across Media) where he argues that adventure games, often thought of as being more narrative than, say, tetris or chess, could better be thought of as quest games than narrative games, and that that is significantly different. I also found the abstract of Løvlie’s paper arguing that Max Payne is a counter-example to this.

None of that is quite what I’m interested in, though: I want to think about what on earth makes me prefer certain quests - or series of quests - to others when their basic structure is so simple and repetetive, and when the literary quality of the writing and the quality of the plots tacked onto these basic structures is, to be frank, mostly abyssmal.

I’m thinking it’s to do with the way in which quests cumulate and work together, which unsurprisingly brings me back to blogging and the way we read little capsules rather than grand narratives these days. More or less.

It had to happen sooner or later: I got carried away on iTunes and bought a whole album that I thought I used to own on LP, but five minutes later I realised I own it on CD as well and had already ripped the CD and added it to my library. What a waste. Paid for the same music twice. Well, three times if you include the LP version I bought when I was eighteen.

Luckily, in Norway we have angrefristloven, “the regrets deadline law” (that sounds weird), a law that protects consumers from impulsive purchases outside of a shop, and allows us to return goods bought, no questions asked, within ten days of purchase. I wrote to iTunes, citing this, and explaining the circumstances, and received this answer:

We have issued a refund for 88.00 Kr for this accidental/duplicate purchase. The credit will be posted to your account shortly. Note: We are only able to provide a refund for an accidental purchase once. This is an exception to our terms of sale.

Which is lovely — except that they appear to think their sales aren’t covered by angrefristloven. There’s no doubt that post order sales and internet sales are covered by this, and such outlets are required to send information about the law with the goods they sell. Perhaps iTunes’ sale of intangibles would exempt them from this, though I doubt it.

Anyway, I wrote to forbrukerrådet (the consumers ombudsman) and asked. Hopefully they’ll add it to their F.A.Q. I can’t be the only person to have made a stupid purchase at iTunes.

That’s it. I realise you may have a legitimate reason for writing the word “holdem” in a comment to your blog, but if you do, sorry, that comment’s going to be instantly deleted. I’ve had it with the texas holdem blog comment spam. No more holdem.

The current exchange rate on Runetotem, the server I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft on, is 100 gold coins for US$11.10. Rates vary quite a lot from server to server, and gold on US servers seems to be systematically cheaper than on European servers. Cheaper labour, perhaps. The differences between Alliance and Horde gold aren’t too big, it seems.

As a still low level warrior, my mind boggles at what I could buy for 100 gold coins. The armour! The equiptment! Maybe even one of those bird things to fly on!!! Though I guess I’d need to level up to pilot one. (Castronova’s paper on how EverQuest has an economy as important as any UN sanctioned nation state is of course the required reading on this matter.)

Yay! My paper for DAC was accepted! One reviewer loved it, the other was much less enthusiastic but had some really useful comments about bits of the stuff I’m doing that I’m uh, still working on attaining expertise in. Lacan, actually, see, if I’m going to write about how we’re wild about photos of ourselves in mirrors well, you need to talk about the mirror phase*, which I know a bit about but need to work more on. I love reviews that are actually helpful and include references and specific things to work on. And I love having written a full paper and being able to revise it.

Here’s the abstract, which I’ll probably revise some before it’s all finalised, because I don’t think it quite expresses what I’m trying to do, really.

Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself
This paper takes the multitude of photographs of our own reflections and shadows that are published online as a starting point and demonstrates their place in a history filled with myths and stories of reflections, shadows and their simultaneous danger and fascination. I connect this to the self-representation of online diaries and weblogs, and relate it to psycho-analytical discussions of how we use our own mirror images to come to an understanding of our selves, concluding that our contemporary fascination with reflections and shadows is an expression of our newfound subjectivity as individuals able to represent ourselves rather than simply succumb to the generalisations of mass media.

One reviewer didn’t like the title, finding it clumsy. I see the point, but can’t quite think of a better one. For some reason I love “Mirrors and Shadows”, but the rest of it I could see changing.

This was another fun paper to write, though. Like the feral hypertext paper, where I woke up one morning just wanting to put the words “feral” and “hypertext” together. The idea for this paper came when I was in Oslo this spring, and I started writing it as a stream of consciousness kind of a draft of ideas sitting in an Oslo café. Then I picked it up again in August.

* The mirror phase is this basic idea used in lacanian and other psychoanalytic literary and film theory that we become subjects - that is aware of ourselves as individuals - in the “mirror phase”, by seeing our infant selves in the mirror and realising that that reflection is me. This recognition is always also a misrecognition, because, well, my mirror image isn’t “me”, and this leads to all sorts of theories of how the gaze works in cinema and how so on.

Wow. People have, of course, muttered about this for years (we certainly did and not much has changed in the ten years since I was a student), but it’s the first time I’ve seen it publicly debated. The students at comparative literature, where I did my MA, have issued an invitation to a debate next Wednesday titled “8 professors, 7 PhD students, only 1 woman: random?” (actually, depending on your brand of English, the Norwegian doesn’t necessarily translate as professors, and in other Englishes should be translated as “lecturers” or “faculty”, but you get the picture).

It’s quite obviously much easier to see the brilliance of a young person who reminds you of yourself as a young(er) person. On one level, this sucks; on another level it’s the reason we need diversity among teachers.

I’d noticed rather a lot of friendly, lovely, smart but very similar young men over at comp. lit. I hadn’t realised that none of the eight PhD students and post. doc.s at comparative literature were women. That is not only shameful, it’s stupid. You can’t use the “no qualified women applied” argument if you’re not actually trying to get some women in the recruitment positions.

ZoomInfo collects information on people online. It worked out, correctly, that I teach at the Dept of Humanistic Informatics. It also hilariously surmises that my past work experience includes being Prime Minister of Denmark. How it figured that out? Well, from an interview where I say “I’m fascinated by Poul Nyrup Rasmussen’s blog. Nyrup Rasmussen used to be the prime minister of Denmark, and he’s still an active labor politician.”

This is a really disheartening story by two people who were attending a conference in New Orleans when Katrina struck. It’s hard to believe it’s really this bad, you know, even with all the first-hand stories it just seems unfathomable. I wonder whether Norway would collapse as easily. I find it hard to imagine our efficient and more or less fair society failing quite so appallingly, but then so, I imagine, must most Americans have assumed their society would hold up fine.

I’m trying to decide whether I’d want this or not: A Calendar with Common Sense. A calendar that knows, for instance, that if I’m in Chicago I won’t be able to go to a lecture in Bergen, or that if I schedule dinner for 3 am I probably made a mistake. See, I often add lectures in Bergen to my calendar even though I’m going to be elsewhere - putting an event into my calendar doesn’t mean I’m actually going to attend that event, it just means I really want to be aware of it. SensiCal seems to be meant mostly to correct the sort of mistakes you’d never make on paper - schedule dinner at 3 am without intending to? Only with a computer, darling. That would probably be rather convenient. I’m wary of “intelligent” suggestions (”It looks like you’re writing a letter”) that mess up my personal and idiosyncratic way of calendaring, though. (via my CiteULike feed, and no, it’s not a new paper, it’s from 2000, and no, I googled and I don’t think they developed it further.)

Tonight is the launch of Digitale fortellinger, where a dozen or so digital narratives have been selected and developed and are to be presented on nrk.no, the public Norwegian broadcasting network’s website. I was on the jury this spring, and it’s really cool getting to see the first finished story, “Myggbase for Kalkutta og Finnmark” by Espen Sommer Eide og Nicholas Møllerhaug (aka Rural Readers).

Tomorrow morning another person with a foreign name and a perfect Norwegian accent (I wonder if he’s a dual citizen and whether he got to vote? Oh btw, the Labour/socialist coalition have a majority, though the scary “Progress party” got nearly one in four votes.) is interviewing me about the project and networked stories in general for Kulturbeitet. I’m supposed to be at NRK’s Bergen office at 8:50 am, and the interview’s at 9. They promised they’ll have me in a prepaid taxi and back at the university in heaps of time for my ten am meeting. I love the efficiency of live radio.

People read my paper on feral hypertext! And (I think) misquoted me in just the way that I’ve been thinking, lately, was perhaps what I really meant. I wrote the paper about hypertext, sticking rather closely to the history of hypertext rather than trying to talk about, you know, everything. But Robert Leston at Neo Baroque mentions that “the distinction Jill Walker makes between feral and domestic writing”, see, that’s a broader distinction than I think I actually made in my paper but one I was musing over, vaguely, over the weekend, thinking that perhaps that’s too big a distinction. And I was thinking that I far prefer the word “feral” to “distributed” and that perhaps it would be more interesting to talk about feral narrative than distributed narrative, but then, where, exactly would that get me? Maybe not where I want to go, though where, exactly, do I want to go anyway?

Jill’s paper helps illustrate D&G’s thinking of the rhizome and how community and multiplicity can be made, but not from the perspective of the individual or the centralized location or the blog or from internet writing but by taking any of those notions and subtracting, dispersing.

I get that! It’s not exactly what I meant, quite, but it’s what I mean, kind of. I love how ideas change, just a little, but wonderfully, as they slip from mind to mind. And it’s exactly the sort of thing Justin Hall tried to write about, and I quoted him and Robert requotes him: “to write on the web itself, not on a web page. Disappear from any central location; intead, inhabit the web as a sort of spirt. My personality, commentary, reflections, stories, notions popping up on other web sites.” Is this how it works?

And what does it mean that I still bring it back again by writing about it here on my very author-centered, orderly blog?

I’ve been deliberately pretending not to notice the national elections (the somewhat conservative Norwegian paper Aftenposten has an English edition if you’re curious), because, well, I can’t vote though I’ve lived here for 25 years, no, I can’t vote unless I give up that possibility of maybe moving back to Australia one day. And if you’ve ever been in a situation where you have to choose between citizenships you know how hard that choice is. Especially knowing that more than half the countries in the world — including Australia, heck, including Sweden, Norway’s neighbour — are fine with dual citizenship, and, oh, also that there are tens of thousands of dual citizens in Norway anyway because a Norwegian citizen can be granted, say, Australian citizenship without any quibbles and keep both.

Not being a citizen of the country where I live is fine except on election day. And this year, amazingly the labour party and the socialist left are cooperating! Can you imagine!? So the traditional left majority in parliament might actually translate to a left wing government, instead of failed cooperation and a right/centre minority coalition!

Not that it’ll necessarily make much difference — which seems to be what people on buses explaining to their neighbours say is why they won’t vote.

But still: as Martin says: if you can, VOTE! Please. If nothing else just because I can’t. You have a few more hours left.

Rob Wittig’s blog course this semester looks great! A lot of work for the teacher, I fear, but I think perhaps that’s just that the US system works differently. And that I’ve just been talking with the administration about our “resource analysis” of funds spent per student in our various classes. Teaching sure looks different from this side of the table…

Hm, how exactly shall I set up my web design and web aesthetics (hitherto taught as webdesign and critical analysis of new media by blogging) course next spring. It’s amazing; it’s only September, and I’m already late in planning next semester. They want us to have finalised schedules by October 12, so international students, who have to apply early, can see which classes won’t crash.