Pregaming the Games
The sudden drop off in my posting is due at least in part to another blog I’m writing for class. It’s about video games (particularly advertising for video games), and so overlaps pretty heavily with the content for this blog. I will eagerly return around next semester — posts between now and then will likely be few and far between.
An Improved Garden Gnome
Another picture-post. Though I have a deep-seated loathing for lawn ornaments in general, I’d have to make an exception for this life-size piranha plant. Hell, it’s incentive to buy a house with a yard!
What are the chances that someone could be convinced to do a Deku Baba?
Dethmetal Heels
A quick, picture-heavy post today.
These are the shoes I plan to wear when I fulfill my life’s dream and am animated to be a featured guest on Metalocalypse — wherein I will be promptly executed by having two-thirds of my head removed by a battle-ax (guitar).
The Golden Rule, 10 Commandments, & You Don’t Talk About Fight Club
I’m in a course called “Ethics and Media” which I’m taking this semester, today we spent some time talking about the equivalent of ethical memes throughout human history. The idea is that, more or less, human reasoning (in regards to moral sentiment and our ethical choices) has evolved over time. Where before you might turn to a religious advisor or shamanistic figure for personal advice on what action to take (which you would, of course, follow diligently), now we go through the deduction process ourselves.
So, starting with “Thou shalt not steal,” maybe we end up with, “It’s wrong to download music for free,” despite the fact that the Ten Commandments have been a part of human history for over a thousand, and MP3s are, y’know, slightly younger. Anyway, it’s not too shocking of a statement. To be honest, I was bored very stiff at this point, which I expect will change as the course moves out of the basics and into specifics.
We were asked to come up with examples of authoritative texts which outline a basis for human interaction, and which imply certain ethical rules/assumptions (”Thou shalt not steal” means that stealing is wrong).
While people spent time exhausting the major religions, the first thing that popped into my head were the Fight Club Rules.
You don’t talk about fight club.- You don’t talk about fight club.
- When someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he’s just faking it, the fight is over.
- Only two guys to a fight.
- One fight at a time.
- They fight without shirts or shoes.
- The fights go on as long as they have to.
- If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
The sad part is, not only did this entertain me throughout the rest of the class, it applied remarkably well.
It was also a hell of a lot more relatable… as far as I was concerned.
Libraries: Original Free Culture & Ethical Ideal?
Originally posted on 9/14/09 at the class blog for NYU’s Copyright, Commerce, and Culture course.
Hello all. This is admittedly likely to be more related to free culture in general than a specific copyright issue, and if it’s too far removed from the scope of the course I have no problem with it being taken down (or taking it down myself). That disclaimer aside…
Today The Consumerist posted a news article announcing that the city of Philadelphia is closing the Philadelphia Free Library and all its branches on October 2nd, due to the economy and the city’s failure to work out its budget on time. I had a pretty visceral (and expletive-heavy) reaction when I saw this article in the RSS feed for our class.
Libraries, like pay-what-you-can museums and public parks, are cornerstones of functioning societies. They are cultural grounding points, and symbolize an effort on the part of the government to ensure that resources often reserved for middle and upper classes (modern technology, Internet access, archived knowledge, and so on) are made available to everyone. They aren’t just about loaning free entertainment to everyone, though that in itself isn’t an objective that should be sniffed at. Libraries often offer free activities for children whose parents can’t afford expensive after-school programs, to no-fee or very discounted classes for adults looking to build their work skills in order to find a job. They are institutions firmly centered around the idea that information is non-rivalrous and the more people that have it, the better.
The entire library system reminds me a lot of the society Barlow envisioned in his Economy of Ideas, even if it already existed when Barlow was hypothesizing about the future some decade and change ago. There’s this belief that all patrons to this source of free culture will treat the materials with care, respect the facility, and return everything in an orderly fashion so that the flow of information isn’t interrupted. And even if “all patrons” is a bit too ideal, the fact is that most patrons do just this, or at least enough of them that the endeavor is considered worthwhile. If you don’t follow the rules, the worst thing that happens seems to be a nominal fee that you can generally pay at your own leisure, and many branches are super forgiving about seeking reimbursement for late and even damaged materials.
All in all, with so much heated, often vicious back-and-forth going on over copyright and digital “piracy,” what are the ramifications when we can’t even protect the bit of state-sanctioned free culture that we already have?
Internships & Modern Indentured Servitude
For the past couple weeks I’ve been scouting for good part-time internship opportunities. There are a striking amount of places that seem to be looking for interns where the most “skilled” qualification is a knowledge of social media and online networking tools. I’m not going to knock the legitimacy of the need that companies have for someone to manage their online brand (heck, working as a Digital Reverse Mentor has been entirely based around explaining social media functions and their pervasivness in digital culture). All the same, I wonder if the occupation of “Social Media Manager” or whatnot is going to end up being a defining career for Generation Y.
While necessary, and admittedly more bearable than endless filing or data-entry, it still seems a little silly. And this is from someone who is routinely part of at most 2-3 other people in my classes who use Twitter, read blogs, and post to their own blog. It seems a bit deceptive: the kind of job that the “grown ups” haven’t figured out is actually quite simple when you get the hang of it, and is something that doesn’t even feel like work to us. But hey, who’s going to go out of their way to make that point, right?
That said, there is a common theme that I’m running into more and more as I sort through internships, prepare resumes, and draft up cover letters. I hate the idea of unpaid internships. And I don’t mean that I think I’m better than anyone doing an unpaid internship, and should be compensated monetarily where they aren’t, or anything like that. However, I do think that too often company’s hired “interns” for no other reason that to get the cheapest possible employees to do nothing but grunt work.
This doesn’t go for every company: I’m an Editorial Intern over at Fantasy Magazine, which is unpaid. However, it’s also extremely flexible, mostly done virtually, and offers real hands-on experience with online production. The hours per week are, at most, around 10 during busy times (once you learn how to do things efficiently).
On the other hand, companies that expect you in their office for 15-25 hours a week, filing papers, making phonecalls, photocopying, and so on… for NO compensation?! It makes me angry, especially if it’s a larger corporation which could at least make an effort to pay minimum wage to a part-time employee. I get that it’s more about work experience than making money, but it still seems so underhanded to me. Yes, it’s a competitive market, and an internship (paid or not) helps in the long run…
…but just because I’m a student doesn’t mean I should be offering my skills and abilities, whatever they may be, for a significant portion of the work week, for free. It’s not like the work is unskilled, either. If I could be making more flipping burgers at a fast food chain for the amount of time that I am assisting a growing company, something is wrong.
I’ll confess that a bit of my bitterness likely stems from the fact that I’m in off campus housing this year, and am going to be responsible for paying my rent once my student loan for the year runs out.
Sororities and Boba Fett don’t mix.
Firstly: I am back in school, once more surrounded by moments where geek and real life tend to clash. Expect more updates!
For example, last night was particularly painful. As usual, it was self-inflicted, and probably something I could have avoided, but what’s college without a little masochism?
I went to NYU’s “Meet the Greeks” event, which is basically a club fair (with booths, representatives, small stage show, etc) for the Fraternities and Sororities on campus. I was unsure about attending, but then there was the promise of free Qdoba, which is more or less Chipotle’s more tasty burrito-sister. So, after dragging a friend along, we set out to visit the booths.
Most girls seemed to take one look at my T-shirt (starring the lovely Boba Fett) and sort of looked down their nose at me. Some didn’t, which was appreciated, but it was pretty clear that I didn’t fit in.
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting. At best I guess I could hope to join a sorority that accepts and welcomes a “geeky” sister. Hoping to find other chicks that like to play video games (and not just freaking Guitar Hero!) and read comics, within the sorority system? I think my optimism there has been, unfortunately, unfounded. More than once I thought that I’d have better luck joining a fraternity.
Now I’m mostly certain that I shouldn’t bother with rushing at all. Just the idea of party-girl, ice-breaker games makes me a little nauseas.
Failed experiment! But I know there are other geeky girls on campus. They can’t all have come to NYU to live out a Sex-In-The-City fantasy, right?
…right?
This pool is like bathwater!
Today, after going to the gym, I decided to lay out at my backyard pool for several hours and read. Afterwards, when I came inside to shower — working out + sitting in the sun = shower, please, now — the water wouldn’t turn on. It turns out that my dad sent the water bills in on the cusp of their renewal.
There was no promise that we’d have water for the next 24 hours, and the idea of not bathing after being coated in sweat was pretty horrific. So I grabbed some facial cleanser, squirted a handful of shower gel into my palm, and carried both outside.
Then, in true redneck Maryland style, I took a makeshift bath in my backyard swimming pool. Fortunately I was wearing my bathing suit still, as my pool is in plain view of at least four or five other houses.
After washing I felt a little cleaner hygienically, and a lot dirtier ethically.
Of course, because this is the way of things: the water company called, said they got the check in the mail that day, and within a couple hours, everything was working as normal.
Bioshock: Andrew Ryan asks, are you a Man, or a Slave?
So, this recent post on xkcd inspired me to made a post about Bioshock, which I finished about a week ago. As someone who is absolutely terrified of the ocean — not the beach, mind you, but simply the idea of all that crushing, cold darkness — and who grew up with horror-game staples like Silent Hill, my reaction to Bioshock was something that I hadn’t expected, but probably should have.
Within the first few moments of gameplay I was anxious, nervy, and a bit frightened. The descending in the Bathysphere to some unknown location was terrible enough: the Spider Splicer taunting from the shadows was deliciously unsettling. It took till I was about a third of the way through the game, however, to realize that it wasn’t just a very good piece of work. It’s easy enough to spot games that run smoothly; those that are decent enough to sink money on, but aren’t really memorable.
But I wasn’t just intrigued, which in itself was a welcome surprise. I was impressed. It’s been some time since a game could really knock my socks off (Morrowind, for the original Xbox, was probably the last). Sure, there have been many games I have enjoyed sinking my teeth into, but so few actually bite back.
The voice acting is more than top-notch. The story always feels like a great mystery, and man, the writers really know how to get you to hate who you should be hating. And top of that, the mix of psychological horror, jarring images, and an unwillingness to let the player feel comfortable for too long easily put Bioshock head and shoulders above the rest of the horror-based genre at the moment, even if the game isn’t about horror at its heart.
For those of you who have not played the game yet, I highly, highly recommend doing so, particularly before the second one releases this October. For those of you who have experienced what I’m talking about, feel free to read on. Spoilers, my friends, are imminent. And trust me, if you plan on playing and haven’t yet, you do not want to be spoiled. Ahem.
Trapped in AOL Headquarters
Today I drove an hour to Dulles, VA to meet up with another mentee for Time Warner’s Digital Reverse Mentorship program. The meeting itself went very well, and I caught myself saying something truer than I realized it’d be during our talk about Facebook.
If you can figure out Facebook and navigate it easily, you’ve pretty much figured out how to use 90% of all Internet applications out there. The basics of commenting, posting, sending out messages, uploading media, participating in a continual online blabber of who’s doing what, when, where… Once you’ve got Facebook under your belt, the rest goes down smooth.
Of course things had been too hassle-free: there was no mix-up at the lobby to delay me, no embarassing posts that popped up on any site I showed off, no moment where I realized just how deeply I’d stuck my foot in my mouth-
Which meant everything was just peachy, until I accidently rode the elevator to the floor just below the lobby. And then the door outside of the elevator bank locked if you didn’t have a pass. So I took the stairs… and the door locked behind me, and I couldn’t get into any of the other doors in the stairwell. I was helplessly trapped for about 15 minutes until a man walked out of the door next to me, which happened to be the kitchen, and led me back to the lobby.
Then the drive home took twice as long because of the crawling early-evening rush hour.
Hopefully for the next meeting I’ll be more wary of getting caught in the no-man’s land of the stairwell, or the sludgy march of traffic.