Nowhere

Web Communities Article Five: Character or Avatar?

2012-01-19T03:00:00.004Z

Some of my favourite games of all time are Portal and Assassins Creed. But the characters in them are approached very differently.

In the Portal series you play a woman named Chell. She's adopted. And that's about all you know of her. In a way she is very much a place filler. The entire game is played from a first person's perspective, and no other characters in the games refer to you by name. In the first portal game there's very little at all, a little more information is given in the second, but she is a silent protagonist in the story.

In the Assassins Creed series you play as 3 characters in total, Desmond Miles, Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Each have extensively detailed backgrounds, history's, and connections to the world around them.

In thinking about this I thought Assassins Creed was very simple to approach. They are characters.

But then I stopped. So what about when I was controlling them? What about when I was making them climb up buildings, and making them leap of strangely placed wooden beams in to conveniently located hay stacks?

The other option is that they are an Avatar. The idea of an Avatar is it is someone you embody to walk around. You become the character in the strange land.

Chell would fall solidly in to this category, as there are very few points in both games where she does anything without being made too, and she never talks at all.

But all three characters in the Assassins Creed games have cut scenes, where they become the character again. Indeed all 4 assassins Creed games have been transferred in to book form, so there is a very set structure to what they do. There are several forms of media the game has taken, including short movies, and comics on top of the books and games.

If there is a state between character and avatar, I believe that's where the assassins lie. Neither one or the other, but a state where they are both.

Web Communities Article Four: Casual and Core Gamers

2012-01-19T01:39:00.003Z

Looking through my lecture notes, and I notice a couple of pages dedicated to the differences between hardcore and casual gamers. And I have a big disagreement with that.

First, it says hardcore gamers prefer darker story lines, spending lots of time in the game play, having played lots of games before, with controls that are harder to master. While casual gamers prefer lighter storylines, having played few games, prefer easier controls, and aren't willing to invest much time in to the game.

If one can sit at the computer, playing one game for hour's at a time, it would fall in to the hardcore factor of gaming. Correct?

What if that game was solitaire?

On the other hand, spending maybe 30 minutes while waiting for something dipping in to a game would be considered casual. What if the game was World of Warcraft?

Casual and Hardcore gaming is a concept I struggle to wrap my head around.

My housemate can spend her entire day playing the Sims, which is the same amount of time my brother can spend on Skyrim. While I can spend maybe 30 minutes to an hour jumping around on Assassins Creed while I've got nothing better to do, which many people can kill playing Angry Birds.

Which is why I put it to you, there is no such thing as a casual game, only casual game play. Playing with intensity makes it a hard core game experience, while impulsively playing another makes it casual.

So I put it forward, there is no such thing as casual games, or gamers, only casual gameing. While much of what we consider to be "casual games" can be easy to master, easy to pick up and put down, casual is a style of game play that is not reflective of the way they can, and often are, played.

The Escapist : Jimquisition : Hardcore Hypocrisy

The Jimquisition is something that usually gets on my nerves, a lot, but despite the irritating start, he makes some very good points in this.

Also on the same website there's this article.

In another article, an interview Laurent Fischer, Nintendo's European senior marketing director says "For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer, I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he's a core gamer." He concludes with "There is no casual gaming. There is just a different way to play."

Web Communities Article Three: Gamification

2012-01-18T22:16:00.002Z

So while looking through my notes looking for another 3 things to blog about, I locate the lecture on Ludology, and Game play. I look down through the information, from the concept of the magic circle, to Simulation vs representation, paidia to ludus, Agon, Alea, Mimicry and Ilinex, all of which are words that set my spell check completely crazy, and my mind wanders from there.

But for those of you who read all that, and eyes glazed over, lets start from the beguining.

There are two ways to approach games. One is naratology, which is study of the narrative. Things like the story line, characters, and surroundings. The second is ludology, which is the study of play.

The magic circle is the idea that there is a special place where you go to play the games. Things like you play football on the football pitch, golf on a golf course exetera.

Paidia is a form of play, specifically free form. The kind of play where there are no rules.

Ludus is ruled play. There are rules.

Agon is competitive play, such as competitions, Alea is chance play, like with dice, mimicry is imagination, pretend, ilinex is the seek of sensation in play, like spinning till you get dizzy, or swooshing down a mountain with planks of wood strapped to your feet (but ski's are made of fiber glass these days aren't they?)

My mind wandered in two directions after this. The first was The difference between a hard core and a casual gamer. However, the second point my brain walked down was gamification.

Gamification is the application of the principles of play to the real world.

Now, games are nothing new. The ancient Greek gods played dice, it's how they decided who ran the heavens, earth and hell, but we live in a world that's so full of sensation, we're constantly engaged by something, everywhere, all the time, and when we’re not, we're bored very very quickly. And the places we're not engaged? In school, in work. In real life. How many kids would rather be playing angry birds under the table than reading Wuthering Heights?

Actualy, 5 years on from when I last got told to read wuthering heights, and I'd rather be watching paint dry than reading that book.

Beside the point. While the advancement of the world around us constantly bombarding us with noise and distraction, our education system is stuck somewhere in the 1800's.

That's a video that goes on about the difficulties with education at the moment.

So what would happen if we incorporated games in to education? They have done tests on this.

It's about motivating the kids. Counting up instead of down. I remember this happening to me. I entered highschool convinced that I could get A's in everything I did if I worked hard enough. 3 years later of being told my expected grade was a D, and if I was very lucky and worked very hard I'd get a C, I believed them. I stopped trying as hard, I stopped expecting to do well.

We were all seporated by the ability expected of us. And it was across the board, the expected grade was the same for everything, and then you were seporated by that expectation. People at the bottom don't expect to do better, and actually, the teachers don't expect them to do better either.

But in games, you are involved in an environment, a magic circle if you will, where you not only expect to get better, get more XP points, you want too. It's the compulsion that keeps you playing bejewled longer than you should, or keeps you up later than you should be when romeing through Skyrim. The "just one more level" factor. The compulsion that keeps you playing angry birds. Flick the bird, kill the pigs.

It a state of immersion, and flow. "In this state of consciousness, people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance." (Trevor van Gorp, 2008)

It's a concept explained first by a man named Csikszentmihalyi. He made this chart.

(Found here.)

In the article by Trevor van Gorp that I read, he goes on to explain this.

Attention and Flow

The elements associated with the flow state can be classified into the three areas; 1. Causes of Flow 2. Characteristics of Flow 3. Consequences of Flow (Novak, Hoffman and Yung, 1999).

1. Causes of Flow
• A clear goal
• Immediate feedback on the success of attempts to reach that goal
• A challenge you’re confident you have the skills to handle

2. Characteristics of Flow
• Total concentration and focused attention
• A sense of control over interactions
• Openness to new things
• Increased exploratory behavior
• Increased learning
• Positive feelings

3. Consequences of Flow
• Loss of consciousness of self
• Distortions in the perception of time
• Activity is perceived as intrinsically rewarding

What if you could apply that state of immersion and flow to education? Maybe not just education, but the work place? Or in a hospital? Things in real life. It could improve things so much

I can't embed this video, as I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have an option. But check out Gameifying Education, by Extra Credits, and it explains all this wonderfully, or even just their Gamification video.

It's the same kind of thing that keeps you following links on Wikipedia for hours after all. And that's learning, isn't it?

(Found here.)

Web Communities Article Two: A Medium of Conveniance

2012-01-18T17:41:00.001Z

What do the revolutions in the middle east, and the riots in London have in common? They’re both products of a convenient medium, and a new way of thinking.

The instant communication of information, from point A to point B is something that’s been with us for years now, but it’s exactly that reason that is’ so important. As technology advances forward, we start taking a certain level of it for granted. Things like the internet, things like facebook, and things like mobile phones.

I can be sitting in my room communicating with people on the other side of the planet, back and forth, instantly, and I think nothing of it.

I have a cousin who lives in Australia, and a few months ago her sister was visiting. Her sister posted on facebook that my Australian bound cousin had gotten engaged that day.

I live in the south of England, my mother, the sister of my cousin’s mother, lives in the north of the country. So I texted her, informing her. And she already knew, as she’d been informed not a minute earlier by her sister.

And not a single person thought anything of the medium it was portrayed through. The information was the important thing. The medium was convenient, but irrelevant.

Take a different piece of information, and a different group of people, in a different setting. Person at point A posts something to facebook. Person at point B responds, maybe with communication, maybe with action. But the information is the cause; the medium is just a convenience.

What if that information was about rioting? In London, or Tripoli? That instantly shared information can then be acted on by everyone else who has access to that page, to that information, to that single post from one mobile phone in a crowd. Reinforcements can be sent, or people can decide they want to be involved, and move. Meet me here. Go do this. This place is open. Little points of communication that can be acted on instantly, portrayed through a medium that we no longer see so much as expect.

I once had a discussion with a friend about the power of thought.

Thinking is dangerous. Thinking gives you ideas. Ideas bring action. Action brings consequences. Are you will to be responsible for the consequences of those thoughts?

“What matters is not technical capital. It’s social capital. Things don’t get socially interesting, until they get technologically boring.” Clay Shirky, 2009.

This guy goes in to deeper detail about it all.

Facebook, social media, is an outlet for those thoughts. People often say they don’t see the point in updating the status, or why other people do it. Why do they want to know? And indeed, why do we? But we do. We glean information, process it, and pass it on to be reprocessed. And now it’s not so much that we suddenly have access to ways and means of sharing those little thoughts, or instant ways of collecting little sparks of conscious. It’s that we stopped seeing it’s happening. We expect it to happen. We expect to have access to this mine of humanity, of tweets and updates. The medium no longer matters, so we no longer see it. We see what it contains.

Web Communities Article One: SOPA

2012-01-18T14:09:00.003Z

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced to the US on the 26th of October, 2011, is one of two acts introduced to the US in an attempt to combat online Copyright infringement. The other is PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, introduced back on the 26th of May, 2011.

The act allows anyone who feels their copyright has been infringed to “to seek a court order against” those who infringed it. It “sets forth an additional two-step process that allows an intellectual property right holder harmed by a U.S.-directed site dedicated to infringement, or a site promoted or used for infringement under certain circumstances, to first provide a written notification identifying the site to related payment network providers and Internet advertising services requiring such entities to forward the notification and suspend their services to such an identified site unless the site's owner, operator, or domain name registrant, upon receiving the forwarded notification, provides a counter notification explaining that it is not dedicated to engaging in specified violations.”

The original act’s aim was to give the right to anyone who thought their copyright had been infringed the ability to take out a court order against the website, but it has since been changed in an attempt to quell the protests that have been brought up over the act.

“In addition to going after websites allegedly directly involved in copyright infringement, a proposal in SOPA will allow the government to target sites that simply provide information that could help users get around the bills’ censorship mechanisms.”(Trevor Timm, 2012)

IT would be very easy to go in to the conspirasy’s behind everything, the theory’s, and resons for why SOPA and PIPA are coming to pass, but generally, it’s how the US has run it’s country for hundreds of years. Those with money pay those with the power to make the rules, to make the rules that sute those with the money. A cycle that is America.

Copyright law was created to protect the rights of authers when the printing press was first created, and it became possible to produce books en mass, quickly, and cheaply. “It is estimated that before Gutenberg’s printing press the number of books in all of Europe numbered in the thousands, but that within 50 years, that number approached ten million.”(2005) The Statute of Anne was passed in England in 1710, which was an “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” (Anno Octavo, 1710)

The bill started out with

“May it please Your Majesty, that it may be En-
acted, and be it Enacted by the Queens most Excellent Majesty,
by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and
Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament Assembled,
and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the
Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten, the
Author of any Book or Books already Printed, who hath not
Transferred to any other the Copy or Copies of such Book or
Books, Share or Shares thereof, or the Bookseller or Book-

sellers, Printer or Printers, or other Person or Persons, who

hath or have Purchased or Acquired the Copy or Copies of any
Book or Books, in order to Print or Reprint the same, shall
have the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and
Books for the Term of One and twenty Years”

When the work reached the end of its term, it fell in to the public domain, giving right for anyone to use and reuse and abuse the content to their hearts content, and giving way to the people who came after to build upon it.

With the development of time copyright is now considerably longer, lasting up to death, and after. Each country has there own version of copyright law, but it is American Copyright law that has brought us SOPA and PIPA. And with most things American they’re not always willing to keep it to their own shores.

Richard O’Dwyer’s is a British 23 year old student, who ran a website called TV Shack which listed links to websites where you could watch pirated content, and he faces extradition to the US for breaking US copyright law. A man from the UK, who broke US law while in the UK faces being sent to the US to face trial.

Now I personally hold very strong views on copyright and piracy. I don’t think piracy makes you clever, I personally believe it makes you an ass hole. When you download the latest film, or TV shows, I think its daylight robbery, as if you’ve ever watched the credits at the end of the film, and seen the names rolling past, every single one of those people there needs to be paid for their work. They need to be paid for every day of their 6 month’s spent on that film. Yes, 6 months, as you only get on the credits if you spend 6 months or more working on the project. There are more people who aren’t on the credits who need paying for their less than 6 months work on the film. The media does not deal in tens, or twenties. They deal in millions. They deal in billions. It costs huge quantities of money to make a blockbuster, and they need to make the money back, they need to pay the people who make it, so when people steal that work, and think they’re being clever, it really, really, annoys me. They have no perspective of where this money is going. They just want to be entertained for free, because it’s just entertainment isn’t it? It’s just one person downloading one song, because they want it, but don’t want to pay for it.

However, what right does the US have to extend its all encompassing hands in to my country, and steal it’s citizens for breaking the law in a country that that law doesn’t cover? And what’s to stop it from doing it when it comes to SOPA and PIPA?

The declaration of independence of the internet was published back in 1997. The Internet is not a country, nor is it a place to be conquered. It’s a place where the mind rules, and exists, and no matter how much legislation is put in the way, people who want to publish content for free will find a way to do it. The media industries can’t continue to fight the change that the internet brings. SOPA and PIPA won’t work. The only way forward is to find a way to work with that change. If you start demonising your customers they will only demonise the companies in their way. And there are always more people in the way.

America, get your hands off my internet.

Gladly, the White House has issued this statement on the SOPA front.

“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Things are due to be decided upon in early February, so we shall see what happens then.

Sources I used, and other places you can read about this stuff.

http://www.historyofcopyright.org/

http://youtu.be/WJIuYgIvKsc

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261&tab=summary

http://ammori.org/2011/12/31/sopapipa-copyright-bills-also-target-domestic-sites/

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/hollywood-new-war-on-software-freedom-and-internet-innovation

http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Copyright-Regulations-Early-Stage-Investment.pdf

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html

http://youtu.be/1p-TV4jaCMk

Work Load

2011-10-16T17:03:00.002+01:00

So I’ve decided to keep a blog of the process of my work for this term. No particular reason. I just felt like it. The blog I did last year really helped, so maybe this’ll help me remember my lessons, and the things I learn for my course work.

This year I’m taking 4 classes.

1. Windows, Mirrors and Pathways.

This is a study of the representation, narrative, and playfulness from classic times to the modern day.

2. Sustainability in Practice.

This is about sustainable practices in industry and business.

3. Web Communities and Interactive Media

Does what it says on the tin. We’ll be looking at hypertext, comics, history of the internet, net art, virtual reality, etc.

4. Teamwork Practices

Working in teams, and learning to work with other people. We’ll learn about personality types, and how they clash, and how they meld together.

So far I’ve got a handful of things to do for each module.

Teamwork Practices is due in on the 27th of October. I’ll be doing a profile about my personality. Easy enough.

Next comes Windows, Mirrors and Pathways. This is due in on the 14th of November. A literature review on “Other ways of seeing; beyond the western eye”. Considering when I asked my teacher for some help he had no idea where to point me, looks like I’ll be doing this one on my own. And considering how big the none western world is, that should be interestingly large. Also: I fail at lit reviews. I’ll probably be focusing on this one a lot.

Then comes the Timeline for Web Communities. An interactive timeline about technology, or culture, or both, starting in 1945, up to 2000. Due in on the 24th of November.

Finally is an essay for Sustainability in Practice, due in on the 6th of December, entitled: “Critically explore the notions of “Greenwash” and how the media and large corporations make misleading claims on the environment, whilst making references to at least two case studies.”

Fun fun fun.

Stick around. You might learn something.

In the case you are curoius

2011-02-11T12:23:00.001Z

I’ve been putting off writing here until I get my mark back from Media histories and culture. But I got it back last week, so I thought I’d put it up here for people who were watching (despite the fact it’s been like 3 months)

My marks prove once again the big divide I get in my work, when comparing something I find interesting to something I need to do, or else I’ll fail and die and all that jazz.

My i-map was months ago, and I can’t remember what I got for that.

My essay was due in on the 23rd of November. (Yes I did only just get the marks back last week. But MH&C is a big class, so they are excused).

Blog was the 14th of December, if my brain is in functioning order. (And it should be. I got 11 hours of sleep last night)

I-Map:- Passed, but mark unknown/forgotten.
Essay:- Be amassed at my scraping in to the passed category with 48.
Blog:- this one shocked me the most, with my top band, 82.

Let me explain the marking system.

The passing mark is 40%. Anything below 40% is a fail.
40% to 50% is satisfactory.
50% to 60% is good.
60% to 70% is very good.
70% to 80% is excellent.
80% to 100% is outstanding.

Most people will get marks in the ‘good’ and ‘very good’ category. Outstanding was described to me as ‘good enough to take you’re work out, and sell it to someone’. So apparently I blog good. Lol.

But I essay crapply.

Nice to know I’m capable of getting work in to the ‘outstanding’ level. I got a 75% before, but never above 80. It makes me happy, cause I’m a know it all little cow who takes satisfaction in such things.

Anyway. Now the blog is FREE from the restraints of academia, I will probably get back to, you know, blogging about stuff. Like the film I’m making, or the scripts I’m writing, or the very interesting advice I’m receiving from my lecturers about Journalism, quote “Being a Bastard Works” unquote.

But right now, I have scripts to write, audio books to listen too, and pie to make.

Realism, immediacy, and transparency

2010-12-16T18:23:00.003Z

To be honest I’m just putting off doing Marshal McLuhan, and if I end up not doing him, OH WELL! Great man, but he’s like the Freud of the media studies world.

The subject of the moment is realism, immediacy, and transparency.

Ever watched an old movie, looked at the graphics and burst out laughing because of their crapness? As effects grow in to greater and greater parts of our entertainment industries, what comparison does a balaclava and some tin foil have against a cyberman?

“The urge to represent the world” the slide notes go “manifests and represents its self in 3 ways”

This is, the urge to document (the world as it is), the urge to confess (the world as you see it), and the urge to imagine.

But apparently there’s a constant overlap.

I can see how that might occurs, being that the last few blogging posts have been about “There is no one way to view the world”. Anyone else getting a similar theme from all this?

The lecture goes on to “Plato’s Cave” theory. Which if you care to find out about, go read the Wikipedia page. Cause I’m tired and cranky, and Psifa starts in an hour.

This is the lecture where I learned about ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’

Immediacy in media is where the medium vanishes. When you get ‘lost’ in a book, or when you’re watching a film, and you’re there with it!

Hypermediacy is when the effects draw attention to it’s self. When you’re watching avatar and going ‘OMG those special effects are amassing!’ then get depressed because Pandora isn’t real. I kid you not. People have got clinically depressed because Pandora isn’t a real place. What is the world coming too?

Beside the point.

The problem with Immediacy and Hypermediacy is that when you reach a point of Immediacy in something, the medium draws attention to it’s self. “Those graphics are so realistic.” But they’re not real. They’ve broken the enchantment by being so real.

Then there’s the uncanny Vally. I remember this, cause I met up with my friend right after class, and we sat drinking coffee and hot chocolate, and laughing at the fact some serious academic somewhere had seriously thought about where zombies come on a scale of unnerving and acceptance.

The picture used in the lecture was only half of that one, but that’s it. I could sit here trying to explain it, but brain not function right now. (I have the dumb). So here’s the article that goes with it. I’ve read through some of it, and I think it’s pretty good. Go educate yourselves. (Unless you already know this in which case, have a mince pie, and feel smug).

Also I’m slightly more concerned with the snow outside, as I would actually like to get home tomorrow… as in actual HOME, away from the university.

I may not blog again after this, at least not for ‘academic’ reasons. So for any people checking in who are not from the university, you may find things quiet over the Christmas period, you may find this rather quiet. However, I’ve really enjoyed this experience, and I think I’d like to continue blogging. Though more about things that interest me instead of different theory’s on how we perceive the world. Not that it doesn’t interest me or anything, I’ve really enjoyed some of the lectures. But it’s been a very long term, and I need to go home, sleep, get tackled by my dog, and decide what I’m doing with my life.

Food sounds like a good idea. Yes. Goodnight everybody.

Structuralism, and Binary Opposition.

2010-12-16T13:29:00.001Z

The temptation to post this entire blog in Binary coad was very high. But as a joke goes, I'm sure if you could read it it would be hilarius. Other than that, it's just annoying.

I’m beginning to see a pattern in the things I’ve got to blog about.

“There is no one way of seeing the world” seems to be cropping up a lot.

Today is the last day for my blogging deadline, and I’ve started writing this at 1pm. There will probably be a few updates in the next few hours. Maybe. But there are always more interesting things in the world.

Structuralism is based on the idea there is, have you guessed, “no one way of seeing” things.

Yes. And grass is green. And water is wet. Do we have anything else obvious to say?

It is based on our cultural upbringing. Our culture is how we determine the world.

Alright, less obvious, to some. But I kind of already know this. Country to country, there are big differences. Region to region within a country too. Language, actions, expectations all change depending on where you’re from and how you live your life.

If I’m honist this lecture didn’t impress much on to my brain. Maybe I was tired? Maybe I didn’t care? Maybe I was bored? I don’t know. I remember having this lecture, but it hasn’t done much for me. But looking through the lecture notes, I remember being told “to know what something is, we must first know what it is not.” A fair assumption. But if we were to measure everything in life by what it is not, we wouldn’t get very far. A chair is not a table. A chair is not, as much as I would like it to be, my bed. But it IS a chair. I’m pretty conscious of my thought process, but I’m pretty sure I don’t define a chair by what it is not.

We know what hot is, because it is not cold. We know what good is because it’s not bad.

Now the philosopher and the scientist inside me are laughing.

Hot and cold is a matter of interpretation. If you put a metal table, and a wooden table in a field, and leave them over night in freezing temperatures, only to go to them first thing in the morning, which one is colder? Logic says the metal one. Metal benches are always less pleasant to sit on that wooden ones. They’re always freezing. Lies. They’re both the same temperature. Metal conducts heat faster than wood, so it feels colder, because we perceive it as such, as it steals heat from our skin faster.

And good and bad? Bollocks! There is no difference. Everyone believes themselves to be right. No one does things because they believe in evil. They may say so in joking, but really? HA!

“there is no one way of seeing the world”

No Shit Sherlock.

Life is infinitely more complicated than binary opposition. Everything sits in the shades of grey. The only area I would question this is in the “Life and Death” category.

We know what Life is, because it is not Death. We know what Death is, because it is not Life.

I’d like to think I’m alive. I don’t feel like a zombie, or Schrodinger’s cat. That doesn’t mean I know what death is.

But that’s stretching a little to far from screen cultures, and a little to far in to the humanities section over on DeHav.

In the lecture notes there’s a section based on ‘in media terms’ and to me it looks like a simple “How to tell a story” analogy.

The time is 1.30. I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap, then wake up and get on with life. Probably in the form of more blogging, then packing for the Christmas holidays.

Modernism and Postmodernism

2010-12-15T00:55:00.002Z

Technically this is two lectures, and they are the last of the season. I have a lot missing between the start and this, but I’m getting this over and done with, because as you will come to see, I do not like Postmodernism, or Modernism.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
I hate thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when taking flight
To escape your expanding mental case.
I hate thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet thought, and decaying blight.
I hate thee freely, as men seethe and spite.
I hate thee purely, and with out phase.
I hate thee with a passion put to use
In burning suns, and mechanised lathe.
I hate thee with a hate I do not loose
With the loss of my mind---I hate thee with the breath,
Glares, tears, of all my life! ---and if God choose,
I shall but hate thee better after death.

A little poetry.

Art is something I’d like to forget in my life. Postmodernism, modernism, situationalism, and many other isms, took up a year of my life. With a parting of ‘wisdom’ from my teacher, "Well, torture is an experience", and a mental confrontation of "I can't believe you just said that" it’s a year of my life I’d like to forget. There’s something most people can’t quite comprehend about an artist.

They take it seriously.

I’m no expert on postmodernism, or modernism. But I’ve had more experience than I’d like in the field of fine art. Art is a ruling body in my life. It has been since I was old enough to hold a pencil. It’s something I do, but when it comes to studying it, it always strikes me along the same lines as philosophy, and literature. No one has a fucking clue what they’re talking about, but if they use enough big words, and fancy sentences they’ll impress everyone who cares enough to listen, and be accepted in to the club of ‘more intelligent than thou’. And to me, [post]modernism sits along these lines.

According to the lecture I had today, and two weeks ago, Modernism, and Postmodernism are movements of art, philosophy, architecture, and all that jazz. Creative movements, with no specific beginning or end, but mostly centred on certain periods in history. Modernism from mid 19th Centaury to early/mid 20th, and postmodernism from early/mid 20th to now. Theoretically.

Modernism is about being ‘modern’ about living in the now. Nothing old can exist, keep moving forward, and all that. As for postmodernism every definition you find is different. The approach the lecture took seems to be labelling it as being some sort of movement about being independent, and taking the piss out of society. Dictionary.com seems to think it’s “any of a number of trends or movements in the arts and literature developing in the 1970s in reaction to or rejection of the dogma, principles, or practices of established modernism, esp. a movement in architecture and the decorative arts running counter to the practice and influence of the International Style and encouraging the use of elements from historical vernacular styles and often playful illusion, decoration, and complexity.”

If that made sense to you, goodie. When doing my research, I found “Postmodernism is difficult to define because to define it would violate the postmodernist premise that no definite terms boundaries or absolute truth’s exist.” Then I found “In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understand of it, but rather is constructed as the mind tries to understand it’s own particular and personal reality.” “Reality only comes in to being through our interpretation of what the world means to us individually.” Which is great for a philosophical discussion.

Anyone else notice those definitions didn’t match?

Eventually I found this comic:

Which incidentally was also used in the lecture, so let’s go with that.

Anything art related at this level fills me with a deep psychological dread, and a need to run, VERY FAST, as far away as possible from the conversation at hand. So with my brief encounter of reading up on postmodernism, there were some conclusions I came too.

1: I don’t actually care.
2: People don’t realise how serious ‘artists’ take this kind of stuff.
3: No one has an effing clue what they’re talking about.

Elaboration on points:

1: if I cared about this kind of stuff, I’d be breaking down the last wall of my well deprived sanity, and spiralling down in to schizophrenia. (Interesting fact: To create schizophrenia you place someone in a space completely devoid of outside influence i.e. a white room with no windows, tell them to ‘create’ or ‘play’, then brake down their psyche by getting them to second guess everything they do. Ever been in an art school?)

2: Artists take this kind of stuff seriously. The kind of people who put urinals in art galleries, and take plaster casts of piss in the snow, truly believe what they are doing is serious stuff. To take a point of experience, during my art foundation, we had a lecture about a movement called ‘situationalism’, which means ‘living the art’. Going out doing something new, for the sake of living in the moment. It’s a maximalist movement from the 1950’s, and could be argued to be modernist in a way. I did nothing for two weeks, came back, and told my teachers I’d done nothing for two weeks, but the experience was art, and you had my word for it that it was art, and you can’t deny this. It was one of the highest marks I’d got all term. I’ve watched people clean brushes with ‘rain water’ to get the ‘feel’ for art pieces, and seen people get tattoos for projects, to make some sort of twisted logic point, spray paint water, then stand there and go “It represents…” And they’re completely serious about it.

3: There is no single way to define postmodernism, which in a way makes the word empty. If by its definition it’s indefinable, what is the point if it’s existence? The movement’s a joke, and covers too much. It’s like saying “yeah, I come from Earth.” Earth’s a big place.

To me this is pointless. And it probably is. It’s probably made no conclusion to the point of postmodernism, or modernism, or whatever. I don’t see how the study of psychopaths who stick shit on a pedestal and call it art can in anyway enhance my ability with screen cultures, and media practice.

But of course, that’s just my opinion, isn’t it?

Semiotics

2010-12-13T22:54:00.005Z

I’ll be honest and say I didn’t remember this lecture until I opened the slides. But now I know which one it was I can go “Oh it’s the one with the conversation about bowler hats” where I once again proved myself to be a complete nerd. Alex out of a Clockwork orange has a bowler hat in the movie version.

Why? Silence from the class. What does a bowler hat represent? What does it make you think of? “Gangsters” goes the class.

Silence.

Yes. But why?

“Respectability.” Says I.

If you wore a bowler hat, you were a respectable member of society. Basically, Alex is taking the piss. Then there’s also the fake eye lashes on one side, which is traditionally a women’s beauty product.

“Why is he wearing it?” asks Iven

Silence from the class.

“It makes him look unbalanced.” Says I.

The resulting part of the lecture went on to explain how symmetry is perceived as beauty in the minds eye. Which, to be honest, I already knew. Symmetry and the golden ratio and all that. (Which Google informs me is 1.61803399, or in terms of Wikipedia: A+B is to A as A is to B. Why yes I do understand that. Do you?)

I will remove my geekyness/ know-it-all-ness now, and get on to the topic of hand.

Semiotics, literally ‘reading the signs’. Which is something I do more than I’d like to admit. Reading the sign, or linking it to the context in your minds. Behold:

A fox. Or at least a picture of a fox.

Now how do I know it’s a fox? Well it looks like one. Wouldn’t you say? The tail, the head, the colour of its fur.

If I saw a fox that actually looked like that, would I be freaked out, YES I WOULD!

It’s a slightly stylised version of a fox. If I actually saw a fox sitting in front of me like that, having painted a smiley face (hohoho, a complete other kettle of fish there) on it’s tail, I would be mildly freaked out, and wonder if it was some what deformed.

It’s the scale of ‘iconic’ (close to the thing it represents) vs ‘arbitrary’ (far from the thing it represents), and while it isn’t a fox, it’s certainly more iconic than the word ‘fox’. I mean the word ‘fox’ doesn’t even look like fox. But you know what I mean when I write it.

This is of course assuming you speak English.

And I just got very distracted looking up translations of ‘google informs me the (incert language here) for fox is (incert translation here).’ And then translateing back in to English. Bad Dibbzy. Back on topic.

Examples the slides use are ‘rat’, ‘human man’ and ‘human female’ in the form of Lara croft, who had amasingly pointy boobs in 1996, and if I saw a woman with boobs that pointy, I think I’d be scared, but I bet boys still dribbled over them. That’s why toom rader games exist isn’t it? So little boys can push Lara up against a wall to find the best camera angles to admire the cones strapped to her chest.

Sorry. Moveing on.

Denotation, Connotation, and Myth. This is the part of the lecture where I once again found myself being geeky and going ‘I KNOW THAT PICTURE’ when Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, flashed across the screen. Mainly because I read about it. Ever read a book called Framed? (By chance adapted to TV by the BBC. And very good it was too. Highly recommend it. Sorry. Off topic.)

This is the part where we discus : what the sign IS, what it SUGESTS, and what it IMPLYS.

It would be so easy to just take the pictures from the power point to use, but lets be a little more orignal, shall we ?

Banksy, cause I fail at art, and I think he’s epic. One of his epic rats. Or at least I think it’s Banksy… You can never tell.

Denotation: What is it? Well, it’s a stencilled picture of a rat, holding a sign saying ‘You Lie’

Connotation: What does it suggest? That either the rat is lying, or he knows something you’re not saying. May also suggest the rat knows how to speak/read/write/saw what you did last night.

Myth: What does it imply? Well rats are filthy, they’re dirty little creatures, that carry disease and get everywhere. It may have well seen you before, but you may not have seen it. We like to think our houses are clean, but the truth is every house has rat runs under its floor boards. The fact you never see them does not mean it did not see you. It implies the rat is intelligent, intelligent enough to know what you know. It implies that you’re not being honest, and it knows it. Something we don’t want to acknowledge knows something else we don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe a representation for members of society we don’t want to know about. Also, I do love what Banksy has to say about rats.

"If you feel dirty, insignificant, and unloved rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society and they have sex fifty times a day."

Moving on, this is the part of the lecture where A Clockwork Orange came in to play. Paradigm and syntagm.

Paradigm: The sign’s available to use.
Syntagm: The signs selected to be used.

An exhalent example of why I hate academia. Why do we need words for that?!

I would rather not talk about A Clockwork Orange, having more than enough experience with it for one life time (A level drama. *shiver*).

Here’s a picture of a flag from Firefly.

Here’s a little context. Firefly is based some large number of years in to the future, when ‘earth what was’ is gone, and they now live in a new system with ‘dozens of planets, and hundreds of moons’, and you will find a very large and rather enthusiastic following for the sci-fi, and why yes, there are maps available of this system, despite only about 17 hours of said universe exists. Beside the point. The culture is based around colonisers, in a way. ‘fringe dwellers’ people on the edge of civilisation. The flag above is the alliance flag. What does it make you think of? Here’s a clue.

The governing body for this system is made from the US of A, and China. They combined to make the government of that future.

Paradigm: Anything representing China, and the USA.

Syntagm: Their flags, in a combination.

Flags should be simple. Easy to remember.

Consequently, the fifty stars on the US flag represent the 50 states and the 13 stripes represent the original thirteen colonies that rebelled against the British monarchy and became the first states in the Union. While the Chinese flag the red background of the flag symbolizes the blood of the heroes who died during the revolution and the yellow colour symbolizes the glorious history and culture. The larger star symbolizes the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party which is claimed as the leader of all and the four smaller yellow five-pointed stars are believed to represent the four classes of Chinese: the Workers, Peasants, Petty Bhourgeoisie and National Bourgeoisie. An interpretation under a more historical context is the four stars represent the traditional four categories of the people in the state, which are Workers (gōng, 工), Farmers (nóng, 农), Intellectual (shì, 士), and Businessmen (shāng, 商).

Ooo. I’m learning things.

So, looking back to the Alliance flag from firefly, we have, no 50 state stars, which fits, as there are no longer 50 states, actually, no states at all, and 2 large stars, symbolising the leadership of the two nations, as one, over the Workers, farmers, intellectuals, and businessmen of the nation. AKA, 1 combined alliance over all. Now don’t you appreciate that flag just a little bit more? Good.

I have bored you long enough. I have a new book to read, and you have lives to be getting on with. I also have Post-Modernism to research…

Some how L4YER CAK3 by J.J. Connolly seems more interesting right now…

Communication and cybernetics

2010-12-12T13:34:00.001Z

Now, if you ask me straight out and say “What do you remember about this lecture?” I would have to say “I remember that toilets are cybernetic. And that the float in the top of a toilet is called a ball-cock.” Which is not something I ever thought I’d be learning in a media lesson.

I’m a little bit of a sci-fi geek. Self admitted, and while the term ‘cybernetic’ is quick to spring images of cybermen, cyborgs, and the just plain borg, to the mind, the true meaning of ‘cybernetic’ is something different. For that we need to visit the ‘process model’ of communication.

For communication to work, there are three things that are needed,

1: A transmitter
2: A medium
3: A receiver.

The transmitter transmits the communication. The medium caries the communication. The receiver, shock horror, receives the information.

Anything interfering with the communication between transmission and the receiving is ‘noise’. Cue reference to Black Adder if my memory serves me well. There’s a point in ‘Black Adder goes Forth’ when orders are coming through on a radio, and Black Adder clamed he can’t hear them. (Which resulted in my watching of some ‘Black Adder goes Forth’ after the lecture, cause it was funny. While I never found the clip in question, I did enjoy the slug balancing act.)

But communication doesn’t work one way. If a phone conversation consisted of one person talking down the phone to one person on the other end, without the person on the other end being able to talk back. The transmitter would have no way of knowing if the receiver had received. Which is where the idea of cybernetics comes in.

At any point between the communication the transmitter needs to become the receiver, and the receiver needs to have the ability to become a transmitter. Cybernetics is the feed back loop.

This is where I learned about toilets and ball-cocks (“oh no” says Ivan “Two innuendos for the price of one!” and the class giggles).

Pulling down the handle on a toilet flushes it. Flushing consists of emptying the basin of the toilet in to the bowl . Inside the top there’s the float, and as the water goes down, it goes down with the water. When it gets to a certain level, the float triggers a switch that pushes the handle back up, and stops the water flowing.

The water received the single to flow. It then transmits the single to stop flowing.

Toilets are cybernetic.

Why do I remember this?! Seriously. One would think I’d have better things to do with my time than remember random facts about toilets. But evidently not. As for the process model of communication, what use it is to me? I have no idea. But then again I never do. It’s better to have the knowledge, and not use it, than to lack the knowledge to act upon. One of the ideas of the blog is to ‘evaluate’ the usefulness of the things we’re learning. I don’t assess things I learn for ‘usefulness’. If it interests me, I’ll remember it. Obviously this interested me. As this lecture was over a month ago.

Now go return to your lives.

Whoopsie

2010-12-03T14:24:00.002Z

So 11 days till my Blogging deadline, I actually looked back over what I’ve got, and realised the only thing I talk about is intertextuality. Granted it’s probably the only thing that’s interested me, and things I think are interesting, and might be interesting to my class. (Not that any of them actually read this, but that is beside the point).

So I figured I’d have a look back through my lectures, and notes, and try to, you know, not completely fail my Media Histories class.

So instead of doing my DVD cover project, I bring you what I am effectively naming ‘the back log’.

Stick around. If you’re not actually part of my class, you might learn something interesting.

Today the subject is Games.

2010-11-20T04:35:00.004Z

So, I think it was last Monday, I had a timelines lecture on Games. Timelines, not technically Media History’s and Culture, but there are a lot of parallels. So, while working on my ability to actually sleep sometime before sun rise, I was looking at some game reviews, wishing I owned a TV, or a computer capable of running a game a little more sophisticated than solitaire.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is a brilliant reviewer, and always hilarious. He's someone I respect in the opinions department. You don't watch him for 'good' reviews. You watch him cause he slaughters things.

I don't check in often enough, so catching up on some reviews, I found this.

Which I thought might interest people. Not that anyone ACTUALY reads this blog or anything, other than my best friend, and the very unlucky person who has to mark it. (Virtual cookies to the both of you for bothering.)

The video’s a few weeks old now, but the points there.

Games are vastly underrated as a media, and it is hard for people outside looking in to appreciate the shear sophistication medium through the seemingly constant onslaught of "GAMEING BRAINWASHES THE YOUNG IN TO VIOLENCE!"

I'm a fan of films, TV, radio, and books as much as the next person, but games are something completely different. They're a form of emersion and escape that seem to be the new unspoken element of the entertainment society. To like games is... wrong, in some sense, like the very fact you play World of Warcraft on the weekend means you're as bad as a druggy. And while it's true games can be as addictive as drugs, you immerse yourself in to anything, and it's difficult to come out.

I've been playing computer games for as long as I can remember. The first games I played were Putt-Putt Joins the Parade (1992) and Putt-Putt goes to the Moon (1993). (I was born in 1990.) I can remember my dad had a game boy. Big grey thing built like a brick, and he had 2 games on it. I think one might have been a Mario game? The other was Tetris. (God I hated that game... It beat me every time...) Why, even this summer was spent dusting off the old Play Station 1, and playing some old games. There is nothing quite like Pixilation in High Definition. lol.

I'd hesitate to call myself a gamer. Maybe because I don't think I play enough games for it,(yet I apparently play more than over half my screen cultures class) but to say I've not been influenced by games would be a lie. As far as I can recall in my obviously questionable sanity, I have yet to crack, go crazy, and walk around clubbing people in the head with a crow bar.

But I think Yahtzee has a point in that it generally is the older generation who rallies the whole "Video games are evil", which reminded me of something I heard in my first few weeks. The exact lecture escapes me, and while it could have been Timelines, or Media History’s and Culture (like I said, they tend to blur), I think it stands to point. It was something about anything being created before the age of 20 is the norm, anything after that is new and exciting, but theirs a point we reach where new and exciting becomes an abomination against nature, and shouldn't exist. I will have to look up the exact quote at some point, but it's on my lectures laptop, which is on the other side of the room, turned off, and somewhat disorganised. Like I said, I can't even remember if the quote in question came from Timelines, or MH&C.

I apologise for the random entry. The topic for the moment should be 'realism' as reflecting the lecture I had on Tuesday, or at least 'intertextuality', as the essay is due in on the coming Tuesday.

Alright, being I can hear birds now, I'm going to go try and sleep. Long live the weekend, and sleeping in till past noon.

I'm on a horse

2010-11-19T14:19:00.000Z

Chances are over the last few months you will have come across this advert at some point on your quests around youtube.

Hilarious in it’s self, but how about this advert?

Sesame Street spoofing adult adverts.

I love children’s TV.

How It Should Have Ended

2010-11-14T00:56:00.004Z

A website who's movie reviews I always trust, How It Should Have Ended do some amazing parody's of films. This ones getting a little old now, but I do love it. They have other ones such as Avatar, Predator, and recently The Social Network (though I haven't seen it so I don't know).

I guess I should probably link this back to some sort of theory, or thing we've learned over the last few weeks in class. Intertextuality would probably be pretty obvious, I guess. Though most my blogs seem to be linked to that. But out of everything I've heard about in class over the last few weeks, Intertextuality interests me greatly, and it's what I'm doing for my essay/what I did for my i-map. So it's kind of on my mind. I'll move on to other things when I'm not up to my eyeballs in ~~boredom~~ I mean... work... Yes. Coursework. Homework. Yes... Lets go with that. Sounds convincing enough...

Did you know in the original Star Wars the space explosions were done with ping pong balls? According to my friend. And she has the original version of 'DVD' extras, in the form of special edition Star Wars Trilogy. Which, if you own a VHS can be found, funnily enough, in every charity shop in Hatfield. I should know. I found it. Found 2 in one shop. If I owned a VHS I'd buy it. But I don't even own a TV. So there goes that plan.

Speaking of parody's.

Sound familiar to you?

In other news, I curse the bus plan. I didn't get to go to that comic thing I wanted to go too... Sad Dibbzy is sad.

Oh well. I'm going to go make cake instead of doing my literature review.

I think we can put our differences behind us.

For science.

You monster.

Procrastination

2010-11-06T14:03:00.001Z

I’m not sure it counts as procrastination, exchanging one homework assignment for another. But I appear to be blogging instead of getting on with the impending doom of my iMap. But there we go.

Just a short entry.

From the page to the screen.

Readprint

and

Full Books

Excellent resources for free books, online. Fictional classics, to none fiction.

I love living in the 21st centaury. Lol.

Right… I’ll go back to the iMap now…

Comics

2010-11-06T01:50:00.004Z

Comics are awesome, and there is not a single thing in the world that you can say to me to change my mind on this subject. And granted, while enthusiasm for comics in the west doesn’t exactly match up to that of eastern cultures, we do alright for ourselves. Sales of Graphic Novels seem to be going up these days, and the medium is taking off, more and more comics these days are available online. Not just retailers like Marvel, who do a roaring trade in screen based comics, but web comics as well. Hanna Is Not A Boys Name is one of my favourites, but there are others, like Evil Diva, Boxer Hockey, The Abominable Charles Christopher and XKCD, which all do well for themselves. There are fan comics, such as MNT Gaiden, and Search For The Truth. Then there are even web comic projects/contests, such as Deviant Dead, which I’ve been following for over a year now.

And for a medium that lends it’s self so well to the screen we have Youtube.

Where a Comic stops and a cartoon begins, I don’t know, but a medium I came across a while ago is something called ‘Motion Comics’. Marvel have done a couple.

Astonishing X Men, and lately an Iron Man one.

Sadly motion Comics are a ‘buy to watch’ thing. And me being a poor student, who’s lone has STILL NOT ARIVED, there is little I can do to follow such things up.

On a comics based side note, those of you on my course glancing at this might remember Danny from last Monday?

He’s doing this on the 9th of November.

I’m going, maybe. If I can find my way there, and if I don't have homework coming out of my ears.

Where does it stop?

2010-11-02T01:54:00.004Z

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine today. Sitting in Mc Donald’s does not have the same philosophical effects as a Weatherspoons, but Hatfield doesn’t have a Weatherspoons, so we have to make do with what we’ve got.

Said friend is doing Humanities over on the other campus, but we’ve known each other for roughly 6 years now. Status of ‘Best Friend’ inserted here. And discussing weird stuff over cheep coffee happens a lot.

The conversation started as I was explaining my lecture today and my opinion on ‘story telling’ in film.

There are an awful lot of films out there that don’t story tell. They exist to exhibit a certain feeling. And that is the only reason you go to see that film. Escapism of a sort, in to an emotion you have chosen to feel. Be it thrill, romance, sadness, or fear. Anything. The same story thrown out over and over, with different actors, different special effects, different locations, all following the same off the shelf plot, with off the shelf characters, pushing for more and more spectacle in their work. Then there’s the emersion of ones self in a state in which one does not need to think. Doesn’t need to feel. Clubbing, drinking, loud music pulsating. Be it a Friday night out, or just the need to unwind. It’s a product of our culture that we expect to be able to just shut ourselves off. A product of our generation.

My friend mentioned when her mother was young, you got on a bus, and you talked to the person next to you. It was how things were done. It was polite. People don’t do that these days. We don’t know how to interact like that any more. We sit there, and in order to avoid the situation, we lock ourselves out of it. We put our head phones in. We plug ourselves back in to that little world we’ve created. Our little bubble of reality.

It doesn’t stop when we get home. We talk about the ‘global village’ of the internet. But how much of a village is it? We don’t talk to people we don’t want to. We don’t like them, we block them. Selectively choosing the people we wish to commune with. Creating our little bubble once again. Facebook friends, MSN, Skipe, Twitter, even mobile phones, texting. We ignore things we don’t like, pushing them out of mind.

And so we sit in our little bubbles. Constantly plugged in to something, never unhooked. The mobile phones always on. The internet is always there. The music is always playing, locked away inside our little worlds.

Meanwhile technology is moving forward. Science is innovating, becoming more and more interactive. From buttons, and leavers, we’ve moved to machines of recognisability. TV’s are getting flatter. Computers are getting smaller, keyboards replaced with touch screens. Already holographic key boards exist you know.

Where does it stop?

3D steps forward. Glasses on, what you’re watching is right there in the room with you. Take that forward a step. 3Dimentional holographic projections, right there in the room with you. Walk in computers. Who needs a physical contraption, just move the stuff by ‘touching’ the light. It moves with you.

What about this responding to touch thing? Less invasive. Move away from the greater action required to the simple sitting there. Place your hand on it, and it reacts to your thoughts.

Already they’re creating prosthetic limbs for amputees that respond to thought process, and can feel.

A hand to a helmet.

Who needs a screen? Project it right on to your eye.

(Video by Tom Scott)

Fine by you?

So a small suggestion. Why project it? A contact lenses that has a screen on it. Perfectly removable circuitry placed on to your eye. You look around, it tells you everything about where you are, where to get to. Sound to off? There’s already an app for the iphone that does this, when you hold it up. I’d give you a link, but I really can’t remember the name of it I’m afraid. (From an old edition of Focus magazine, which is currently sitting back home at the other end of the country. If I find it, I’ll drop it in later.)

Contact lenses fall out. Get broken, damaged. That’s a lot of money to lose with accidents. Why not make it a little more permanent? Stop it falling out.

There’s already contraception that can’t be removed without surgery.

Why just enhance your eye? You’ve already had one thing put in. A microchip credit card, under your skin. A little enhancement here. A little improvement there. Like plastic surgery.

We’re immersing ourselves in this world of feel on demand. Why not just fall further in? Why have use for a physical body at all? Immerse ourselves entirely in to the digital village. In to a matrix like state? Is that wrong?

I find it scary. But that’s just me. That’s just today. Go back 100 years and tell them one day kids would spend hours hooked up to video games. Conversation, and knowledge can be passed from one end of the globe to the other in less than a second. They’d find that scary too.

(More from Tom Scott. You should really check him out.)

100 years from now, we’ll just be primitive hilarities, marvelling at the first 3D films, the first holographic projectors, the first touch screens.

What will a little invasion be then?

Lady’s and Gentlemen, Freaks of all ages.

2010-10-30T17:03:00.005+01:00

May I direct your attention to the centre ring...

And if you got that reference, you're amassing.

I've had intertextuality in my head all week. Not to a point where it's annoying, but to a point where I find myself analysing things as I look at them. Wouldn't be the first time the question of "reference" has come to mind. Watching a film, and you pick up on a line, and giggle, because you recognise it from somewhere else. Even in life, I had a teacher last year called Ozzy. During the first week he said two things that made me burst in to internal giggles, glancing sideways at my friend who was doing the same thing.

If you're interested he said we're on a "search for the truth", which is the name of a Doctor Who fan comic I read, and at another point he said you can't "dance through life", and about 3 weeks before he said this, I'd been to see Wicked, one of my favourite songs being "Dancing Through Life". Click those links if you care.

Now he didn't mean it like I took it. But I can barely recall another thing he said in that introductory speech of his. This may have been due to the fact we REALLY didn't get on, and he was one of the most annoying people to ever stand in front of me and talk. But after that I couldn't stop thinking of Oz and Doctor Who. And the guy really had no idea what he was saying.

But spinning that around, the wonderful Girl-on-the-moon had no intention to reference what one man on a different cotenant would say, neither did the amassing Stephen Schwartz intend to reference it with his songs. But they did intend to put intertextuality in to something else.

Search for the truth is about Doctor Who. Doctor Who, as we know it today is a continuation of the original series. The TARDIS, an amassing machine made to travel through time and space, is shaped like a 1960's police box, which was done because it was easily recognisable, and they couldn't afford a shape shifting ship. Daleks are famously referred to as pepper pots, this was no intention of their creator. It just happened.

Wicked, the musical, is based on the book, Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, which in turn is based off The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. The Wizard of Oz got its name from a long series of storeys L. Frank Baum told to his friends, and family, and one day when he was asked what this land was called, he looked across the room and saw a two part encyclopaedia, A-N, and O-Z.

It just keeps going. The world we live in just keeps using, and reusing everything.

"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." Roland Barthes, if my notes from last lecture serve me well.

The prompt for this blog is the fact I've got an account on Fanfiction.net. I've even got a few story's up. And last night someone read one, and faved it. I got the notification in my e-mail, which I was looking at this morning (read: 2pm), and it just got my brain going. (An amazingly herculean task when I've just woken up. Trust me.) The story in question was based on a cartoon series called Danny Phantom. A cartoon series that was cancelled in 2007.

Now the portrayal of Danny Phantom I put forward in this little story is a far flung thing from the Danny Phantom in the cartoon series. It's more serious, more in-depth. But it's not an out of place thing. It takes just a glance down the fiction on that site to tell that actually, the storeys are far from the cartoon. In some cases they are so far from the cartoon, the characters (in my opinion) share nothing but names.

There is an entire language to fanfiction.

Cross over’s= more than one story line put in to one. I once read a really good Firefly/Doctor Who cross over.
Slash= Heterosexual characters from a series put in to a homosexual story.
OOC= out of character.
OC= original characters.
AU= Alternate universe.
Cannon= as close to the series in question as you can make it.

All common occurrences within fanfiction. There's more too, but I don't want to get too deep in to the language. How these people twist a story can be quite terrifying.

It's one of those things I talk about with my friends. We've all got storeys we want to get out there. But a reoccurring thought is what exactly will happen if it gets a fan base.

Joss Whedon, when making his Firefly series said that the best way to combat possibility's is to blatantly come out and say the obvious. To show that it's really not happening. He was worried about two of his characters Mal and Zoe, being pushed together in the minds of the masses. Reading in to sexual tension that was never meant to be there. So he put it in an episode where he put it in such plain language that Mal and Zoe were not interested in each other that it was imposable to ignore. That's rarely seen in the fanfiction world. I've yet to come across it. On the other hand, Jayne/River was never tackled in the short lived series. That's something I come across on occasion. Though to anyone who's seen Firefly I challenge you to find anything that may point towards such an out of character unity. (Granted. Personal opinion.)

But that's the thing. An author can try to direct the fans, but the reader can not be controlled. People read in to things. See things that aren't there, or things that are there that the author never intended. You can try, and you can hope.

I swear I could keep going on this topic, but I'd better shut up before I hit 3 pages.

And by the way, the title I started with was a Danny Phantom quote. Right off to do i-maps...

Random fact about the Radio

2010-10-24T00:22:00.003+01:00

Semi-researching for my Timelines class, and semi-omg-this-is-such-a-cool-book, I was glancing through a book on my shelf called "So That's Why They Call it Great Britain" by Steve Pope (first published in 2009 by Monday Books). Cool book to dive in and out of in times of procrastination, and being somewhat a patriot (Rule Britannia, and all that), puts a smile on my face.

An Italian man named Guglielmo Marconi was credited with inventing the radio telegraph, some time between 1895 and 1897. He began experiments on his fathers estate in 1895 (in Italy), took his equipment to England in 1896, and demonstrated it for the nice post office people at the time. He's the subject of my research.

HOWEVER

Back in 1879, when Marconi was only 5 years old "a Welshman named David Hughes was the first person to transmit and receive electromagnetic radio waves." The book says this was demonstrated to members of the Royal Society. "They were unimpressed, and the results were never published."

David Hughes also invented a new form of type-printing telegraph, "which revolutionised the burgeoning communications industry", and the modern microphone (which he gave to the world, helping to create such things as telephones, rock and role, and so on.)

He died of flu in 1900. How sad.

But I'll tell you what Marconi did do. He set up the worlds first radio station, in 1897, in Alum Bay on the Isle of White. It was a success. The landlord responded to this by putting up the rent, and the station closed down three years later. Also in 1900.

So how about that!

XKCD

2010-10-22T21:48:00.002+01:00

Flicking around the internet, decided to check XKCD, and discovered this. (2010)

Compare it with this. (2007)

3 years difference between them. Times change.

Where will we be in 3 more years?

Shrek

2010-10-17T14:04:00.004+01:00

Anyone a fan of Shrek?

How about... Shrek the Musical?

Which has already been through America, and is coming to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, in London next year.

Not the first movie to musical conversion, and if it works, it won't be the first conversion to work. Oh the other hand it won't be the first to flail.

But Shrek really does work well as an animation. Can stage effects, fluffy costumes, and different actors ever truly live up to that?

I'll admit it's something I'd like to see. I'm a big fan of musical theatre. But I'm also very cautious. This could be, in my opinion, either very good, or very bad. Glancing down Google at reviews they seem to be pretty good, if you're looking for a family show. One person compared it to a pantomime. I like pantomimes. Though admittedly not everyone does.

Will Nigel Lindsay make a good Shrek?

Alan Moore... Hiss...

2010-10-16T22:25:00.004+01:00

Spending my Saturday once again contemplating when ‘independent study’ stops, and ‘me time’ begins, I find myself scanning through the internet, to discover the picture of Dorian Grey all over Google’s home page.

Wondering if it had some special occasion to it, or if it was just the randomness of someone’s whim, I type the name in, and search. Come up on Wikipeida, and slowly find my way flicking through. From Dorian Grey I go to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2003 film, then across to the comic. Glancing down the plot, I am once again reminded why I hate Alan Moore’s guts.

It’s not the first time I’ve hit this conclusion. Slowly reading through his most famous works, I get pulled in by intricate plots, and interesting idea’s, to reach half way through and find out the man has slop for brains, and I really wish I’d never picked up the book. I find myself wondering that, if Alan Moore is the best the comic world has to offer, what the hell are people doing in the industry?! The plots in all of his works start off in a well established world, with solid characters, good writing, then somewhere near the middle, or end, they suddenly give up the will to live, and flop out in any matter of random! I wouldn’t mind the dark, gloomy, worst of humanity approach to the works, if they actually went somewhere!

If you’ll excuse the spoilers, my biggest peeve is Watchmen. If you can ignore the random turn around of attitude in V for Vendetta it is half way decent from ‘I want my revenge on the worst of humanity’ to ‘you should all live in anarchy, because that will work out great!’ (I’ve read worse endings). But in Watchmen, the whole super heroes in hiding, in the middle of cold war escalations, all going to end in nuclear holocaust if they don’t save the day! Oh don’t worry, I, the vegetarian/vegan/smartest man alive, who would never kill anything, have the answer! I’ve been planning for this for years. I’ve made a giant fake alien I plan to teleport in to the middle of New York, where it will explode; kill half the city, and suddenly everyone will be best friends!

And yes, that’s how it ends. Isn’t that wonderful?

And these works of fiction are famous as huge turning points in the history of comics! Adult comics, wow! Aren’t they brilliant! And I’ve read better children’s books, watched better children’s cartoons, and films.

I’m not even sure if I should be posting this here. I guess there’s a relevance in Media History and Culture.

Alan Moore famously won’t accept any royalties from his film adaptions, because he never agreed to them. He says the ideas are suited to comic format, and that’s why they’re in them. And I’m glad, cause at least it gives someone a chance to do something better with such a good idea.

And as far as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is concerned, if Mr Moore wants people to leave his idea’s alone he should stop fucking with everyone else’s.

His plots are worse than Avatar’s.

This is where it begins

2010-10-13T01:20:00.002+01:00

When I first found out about Blogging, it wasn't the kind of thing I ever pictured myself doing for homework. Yet here I am, third week in to my Screen Cultures and Media Practice course, Blogging for homework. Bizzar really, if you think about it. Then again the course isn't exactly what I pictured myself doing.

One thinks, "I'm going to uni" you picture over loading work flow, exams, books piled so high you can make a fort out of them in you're bedroom, which doesn't have enough space to swing a cat in. Yet when on the first day I was informed playing games, scanning the internet, watching TV, and films, and yes, even Facebook, were classed as "homework" I really hope I didn't laugh out loud. Did I just walk in to the twilight zone? Evidently.

And here I am. 3 weeks in. Blogging for homework. And I will be doing at least once a week till just before Christmas, and maybe beyond, cause, you never know, I may actually grow to like it.

So... Blogging... For homework?

...

I am so doomed.