Humanities: November 2006 Archive Page

I would like to send my condolences out to Catherine Altman, Robert Altman's wife, as well as all of his immediate family, close friends, co-workers, and all of his inner circle.

I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches. If not only my heart but the heart of Mr. Altman's wife and family and many fellow actors/artists that admire him for his work and love him for making people laugh whenever and however he could.

Robert Altman made dreams possible for many independent aspiring filmmakers, as well as creating roles for countless actors.

I am lucky enough to of been able to work with Robert Altman amongst the other greats on a film that I can genuinely say created a turning point in my career.

I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years.

The point is, he made a difference.
He left us with a legend that all of us have the ability to do.

So every day when you wake up.
Look in the mirror and thank god for every second you have and cherish all moments.
The fighting, the anger, the drama is tedious.

Please just take each moment day by day and consider yourself lucky to breathe and feel at all and smile. Be thankful.

Life comes once, doesn't 'keep coming back' and we all take such advantage of what we have.
When we shouldn't.....

Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book)

-- Everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on. -- Altman

Its true. But treasure each triumph as they come.

If I can do anything for those who are in a very hard time right now, as I'm one of them with hearing this news, please take advantage of the fact that I'm just a phone call away.
God Bless, peace and love always.

Thank You,
"BE ADEQUITE"
Lindsay Lohan --Lindsay Lohan Says Robert Altman Was Like a Father (People)

If I had more energy, I'd try to write a cute blog entry that pretended I was giving feedback to a freshman comp student, but I'm too burnt out on grading to bother.

Poor thing.

It's a shame that someone didn't tell her "No, don't release that until you've had an editor look at it."

With the aid of a photo, master illustrator Rob Sacchetto will hand-illustrate a custom portrait depicting you as a brain-chasing ghoul. --Zombie Portraits

--Asteroid's Revenge

This resembles a videogame version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the modern play that retells Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters.

The website calls it "Asteroids Revenge," but I'll excuse the mistake.

Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) during the next three years.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book'sread-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.


These exemptions will go into effect upon publication in the Federal Register on November 27, 2006 and will remain in effect through October 27, 2009. --Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works (U.S. Copyright Office)

I'm glad to see that some reasonable exemptions are being made so that media workers, educators, and archivists have a chance to do their work in a legal environment that otherwise overwhelmingly favors coporate interests.

This face says, "GOD! I am WAY TOO BUSY having a mouthful of braces and a hot-rolled ponytail to smile for you, Mom! GOD!" --bershon (flickr pool)

The world needed a word to describe this attitude. I haven't been able to trace its origin, though.

Update: My German classes were a long time ago, but as I was driving to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, I kept hearing the word "verschon" in my mind.

I looked it up on the internet, and, since everything one finds on the internet is automatically correct, I now know that "verschon mich" means means "gimme a break" or "spare me!"

Could that be the origin of "bershon"?

Mr. Banks learns that the British Empire, its banks and many other manifestations of authority should be undermined, or at least taken less seriously. Life would be better if parents allowed themselves to dance like chimney sweeps and fly kites in the park. They shouldn't just pay more attention to their children; they should become more like them. The movie's liberatory spirit is, of course, out of the heart of the 1960s.

The new Broadway show is ostensibly darker, showing that children too have their flaws. But again it is the parents who need the healing. --Edward Rothstein reviews a new Broadway version of Mary Poppins --Stop That Foolish Singing This Minute! Mary Poppins Would Be Appalled (New York Times)

In this passage, Rothstein praises the subtlety of the books and laments the Broadway and Hollywood simplification:

Children are asked to submit to formal restrictions they don't fully grasp; they see exaggerated manifestations of responsibility and authority. Yet underneath the adult exterior they also sense strange, half-threatening and half-alluring forces that promise a realm of magical freedom. Travers captured that double vision -- that confusion and melding of realms -- that makes childhood so powerful.

That is where the film and Broadway show come to rest, fully endorsing a childish vision of freedom, rejecting much of everything else. But in the books that isn't possible.

I've blogged about Mary Poppins before.

About 300 eighth-graders at South Valley Junior High in Liberty, Mo., are blogging this fall about Guerrilla Season, a book about a 15-year-old living in Civil War-era Missouri.

The book's author, Pat Hughes, is joining in the online discussion from her home in Philadelphia.

"I love being able to communicate with the author because it makes me feel like I can ask anything," says Amy Lostroh, 13. "Most books you read you have to guess how the author named the characters, why they chose to write about the topic or what inspired them." --Ashley Bleimes --Blogging Now Begins Young (USA Today (will expire))

Thanks for the link, Neha.

I'd love to see more secondary teachers who do this. If students have to wait until they get to college before they start working on developing an intellectual awareness of their online voice, it's too late.

Here's an unapproved comment an an angry MySpace user left on a blog entry in which one of my students wrote of the risks of posting on MySpace:

You are a f*cking faggot. MySpace is totally cool and it doesnt deserve to be trashed by adults 24/7. Just because they are getting older doesnt mean us kids cant live our lives freely and learn our mistakes for ourselves. This is the USA! So quit bagging on it and mind your own business. -- Becky

(Asterisk added by me.) While Facebook had a good idea of limiting contact between older and younger users, young people who blog are not writing only for themselves. Attitudes like Becky's are clear signs that young people need guidance. Becky's teachers need to tell her that the First Amendment does guarantee the freedom of speech, but does not promise that the people who choose to exercise their right will be insulated from the consequences of breaking the law, breaking school rules, giving future potential employers reasons to throw their resume into the trash pile, etc.

We got to go there - but not back again ... Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (who directed/wrote the Lord of the Rings films) --Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk THE HOBBIT (The One Ring.net)

Jackson and Walsh won't be involved in The Hobbit movie or a planned prequel to The Lord of the Rings.

[Image showing a few paragraphs from a story spoofing the "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" book series.]

>>>

--Adam Cadre --The Case of the Captured Koala (adamcadre)

Make sure you stick with it until you get to the solution, which is where you'll find the gimmick that makes this story worth blogging -- especially if you know the Encyclopedia Brown series.

A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.

The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.

"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

[...]

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

[...]

"More than half of our signs have already been scrapped," says traffic planner Koop Kerkstra. "Only two out of our original 18 traffic light crossings are left, and we've converted them to roundabouts." Now traffic is regulated by only two rules in Drachten: "Yield to the right" and "Get in someone's way and you'll be towed." --Matthias Schulz --European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs (Spiegel Online)

This is fascinating... creepy and fascinating.

--Dumb Azz Burglars, A MUST SEE WMV (YouTube)

Do not -- I repeat, NOT -- drink milk while watching this, for it will shoot out your nose.

This one is also kind of cute, though it's too long.

Writers are always beaten over the head with the admontion "Show, don't tell." It's not bad advice by any means. Often it's pretty good advice. But, I know there are times when you should tell instead. For instance, in my Nanowrimo, I appreciate the word inflation, but I'm well aware that no one actually wants to read 2 pages of Yui buying a dress. No matter how much of a plot point said dress becomes before the end of the chapter.

And some of the advice out there is, um... Not so good. This page says you must always follow this rule because it makes your readers work more to interpret the story, and they like that. Um, that's not my experience. At all. --When Should You Tell, Not Show? (Jinnayah's Realm)

That's my page being cited as an example of "not so good" advice.

I don't mind at all coming across a blogger who disagrees with something I've written. But my that particular document does not call "show, don't tell" a rule, and in fact the words "show, don't tell" don't appear anywhere on the page.

Like a good blogger, Jinnayah has linked to the page so that readers can click the link and judge the contents for themselves. If readers do that, they will find that the title of my page is "Show, Don't (Just) Tell," and that the last section is titled "Sometimes, 'telling' can be a good thing." Which means that my page is hardly a good example of what Jinnayah is complaining about.

Jinnayah's site seems to be about writing fanfiction. Any writer should pay attention to the needs of his or her audience, so it may be true that Jinnayah's readers prefer telling to showing. Fanfic is all about playing in and with a world that someone else has already created and that the reader already knows well. If I write Star Trek fanfiction (as I did when I was in high school), I can refer to a tribble or Spock's arched eyebrow or Scotty's temper, and I'll know a Star Trek fan will automatically know what those details mean. Since the characters are already well-established, it's a waste of time in fanfic to generate from scratch a new way for the reader to identify with each character that you re-use in your fanfic. That kind of emotional bridge-building gets in the way of the fanfic story you want to tell.

But I think it's probably more likely that what Jinnayah and others object to -- "2 pages of Yui buying a dress" -- is not actually showing, but instead long, drawn-out telling with a lot of wordy details.

In Jinnayah's defense, it's true that my handout makes no attempt to explain when one should tell instead of show. But I wrote this handout to help me teach college students who tell habitually, giving long lists of things that catch their interest as they pop into their heads.

EL405 Students Tackle Blender's ''Gus'' Tutorial (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My New Media Projects students got into small groups and walked through my Flash version of Blender's "Gus" animation tutorial.

It looks like Blender3D saves some temporary files in such a way that the lab computer's security restrictions cause some issues, because two of the student groups experienced crashes, and one of the groups lost all their work a few minutes before the end of class.

That was a bummer, but the energy in the class was so great that the mishap didn't dampen it too much.

I'm still crossing my fingers and wishing hard that the Half-Life 2 modding class will go smoothly. The lab computers are locked down pretty tight for security reasons, so that leads to problems that I'm not authorized to handle (even if I could).

Video games are a viable storytelling medium, but the trouble is that video games always have the same protagonist, which is the player. And he always has the same set of motivations, which is to kill and don't die. That's not conducive to great novels. We have a character with this negative motivation and that character makes a lousy fictional protagonist. --Orson Scott Card discusses his new book/game/comic franchise, which pits the Red States vs the Blue States, in an interview by John Gaudiosi --Orson Scott Card Builds an Empire (Wired)

Interesting claim from an unrelated article: "In the last 20 years, Lucas' vision has arguably been far better expressed in video games than in movies." --Forget Film, Games Do Sci-Fi Best (That claim depends entirely on the criteria you choose to use when defining "best").

Video news releases are pre-packaged broadcast segments designed to look like television news stories, that are funded by and scripted for corporate or government clients. (See "Fake TV News: Introduction.") On April 6, 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy released a comprehensive report detailing TV newsrooms' use of VNRs. The report, "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed," named 77 TV stations that aired at least one of 36 VNRs tracked over a ten-month period. Not once were the clients behind the segments--such as Pfizer, Intel and General Motors--disclosed to news audiences. --Farsetta and Price --Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs (PR Watch)

Plunge should appear in the hed; the piece should be only a couple of sentences long; and it should "include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board"?a soccer team, church choir, or students?"as well as the distance of the plunge from the capital city." The words ravine or gorge should appear.
[...]
No matter what their editorial policies, newspapers of the era had a physical need for short articles. Typesetting was still a time-consuming industrial art, with craftsmen pouring molten metal into molds--"hot type"--to form a newspaper's words, sentences, and paragraphs. Because the length of a news story couldn't be calculated precisely until type was set, makeup editors would have to physically cut overlong pieces from the bottom to make them fit. If a story ran short, they would plug the hole with brief filler stories typeset earlier in the day. --Jack Shafer --The Rise and Fall of the ''Bus Plunge'' Story (Slate)

I made this with cleverpig.com's Whack-A-Pig tutorial.

FAR! FAR away, the Google lives, in a land which only children can go to. It is a wonderful land of funny flowers, and birds, and hills of pure white heather.
[...]
The sun is setting ?
Can't you hear
A something in the distance
Howl!!?
I wonder if it's ?
Yes!! it is
That horrid Google
On the prowl!!! --V.C. Vickers, 1913
--The Google Book (Google Blogoscoped)

One day when we're literally halfway through SQ4, Mark and I were called into Ken's office. We were asked what we thought about using the (dumbass) point-and-click interface that they were using, in I guess it was King's Quest 5 then, and what we thought about putting it in SQ4. We said we wanted to keep the parser. Ken and Bill Davis asked us to talk about it together and then tell them what we wanted to do the next day. After the meeting, Mark and I agreed without hesitation as we walked out Ken's office door that there was absolutely no way we wanted the point-and-click. The next day when we came in, Bill Davis tracked Mark down and asked him what we'd decided. Mark told him that we'd decided to keep the parser, to which Bill instantly replied something to the effect of, "But you can't do that. Ken has already decided that you have to use the point-and-click!" --Scott Murphy --Scott Murphy (Adventure Classic Gaming)

Legendary Sierra designer Scott Murphy, co-creator of the Space Quest series, reflects on the disappearance of the text-based parser that was part of all the early Sierra games.

For example, let's imagine that the protagonist's problem is that he is being bullied at school and he doesn't know how to deal with this. In order to simulate his problem, he could use a Pac-Man template and modify the original game. He would replace the Pac-Man with a cartoon version of himself and replace the ghosts with images of his harassers. In addition to this, he could also take away the score feature and the pills, leaving nothing but a labyrinth where he is being constantly chased. Once that game is posted online, the other members of the group could respond by creating variants. One of them could be to modify the structure of the labyrinth to create a small space where the protagonist could live isolated, safe from the bullies. But other players could say that this means giving up his freedom and, therefore, that it is not a good solution. Then, another player could suggest using violence, by introducing weapons on the environment. Another may suggest introducing more players (several Pac-Mans) who would stick together and defend themselves as a group of virtual vigilantes. Of course, somebody may argue that it is technically impossible to be all the time surrounded by your friends: the bullies will find you alone sooner or later. --Gonzalo Frasca --Videogames of the Oppressed (Electronic Book Review)

Frasca rather brilliantly follows a line from Brecht's theater of alienation through Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augosto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed," and hypothesizes an iterative, sequentially collaborative game development process that preserves the player's social distance from a character, yet enables the attempt to use the medium of the video game to find a solution to a social problem.

"I've been making up bedtime stories for my children and suddenly I've had a brainwave. These stories are good! These stories are brilliant! I would be failing in my moral duty to my adoring public if I did not put them down on paper."

If my theory holds true, it is scary, because it suggests that celebrities believe the hype about their own abilities. Worse, it implies a depth of public obsession about the famous that is even more extreme than we realise. It is one thing to want to know which celebrity is sleeping with which, who has fallen out with whom, the stuff and nonsense of tabloid prurience. But to want to listen in to the most intimate bedtime stories told by a celebrity to her or his child, irrespective of their worth, is bordering on the weird. --Ed Pilkington --Once upon a time (Guardian)

Dear celebrities:

Don't call me, I'll call you.

Sincerely,

A parent.

P.S. John Lithgow, I'll make an exception for you. Your kid books are pretty good, but you earned kid-cred by doing kid shows and a few CDs of kid songs. Farkle McBride and Marsupial Sue are OK with me. Oh, and that one about a mouse that paints pictures.

7. Become a Public Intellectual. Write a column for The Chronicle or an opinion essay for a major paper saying what you really think about something controversial, even if you have to risk burning some bridges in the process. One well-read column can have more impact than years of obscure scholarship. Or work in some new publication venue, like a blog, that has little professional respectability and the potential to revolutionize academic discourse. Support the colleagues who are taking those risks to reach a wider audience. --"Thomas H. Benton" --14 Things to Do Before You Retire (Chronicle)

Kudos to the pseudonymous Benton for bringing up this subject.

It is rather sad, though, that he feels "1. Get Tenure" is a prerequisite for everything else on the list.

Approving or Ignoring Comments on Old Student Blog Entries (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's that time of year -- students elsewhere in the world are going to Google, and finding old blog entries that my former students posted as homework. Sometimes the visitor will leave a comment that says "Great site! You really helped me save my grade!" But other times...

A few days ago, on a blog entry a student wrote about a few of Shakespeare's sonnets, a visitor left this comment: "pls send me figure of speech in sonnet 116 coz i have to give presentation.pls send me by mail urgently" (I didn't approve that comment.)

Yesterday, on a student's humorous blog entry about CompUSA tech support, a visitor wrote "i say that your collumn was not very helpful you ass." (I didn't approve that one either.)

On a blog named "The Land of Wild Horses," a student last year wrote a blog entry called "Habitat," describing her experience with Habitat for Humanity. About 4 hours ago, a commenter submitted the following comment: "why dont youll have a answer to a horses habitat?" (I didn't approve that comment.)

On a blog in which a student reflected on nature poems, just 22 minutes ago, a visitor posted the following comment: "i think that people realy need to make it easiere to find poems for a project and i have looked for fourty-five min. just to find one and there is no sign...... poetry stinks" (I didn't approve that one either.)

In my role as site administrator for blogs.setonhill.edu, I see all the comments that are left on the 300 or so blogs that are part of the site. Most of these blogs were created for students who were in my classes, and most of the students don't update their blogs when the class is over, but since we are a small school, English majors who blog for me in one class will often blog for me again.

If I didn't have anti-spam software installed, our installation would get literally thousands of spam comments for every legitimate comment. I've currently got the site set to hold all comments for approval, although if the site recognizes a particular blog entry as current and a particular commenter as someone whose comments have been approved in the past, it's possible that the system will fast-track some comments.

In order to speed the class discussions along, I routinely approve comments that a student makes on a blog entry that another student has written for class. Once the class is over, sometimes a student's blogging homework continues to attract attention. I don't routinely approve those comments, since I don't expect the student to be online participating in the discussion.

If a random visitor simply wants to add his or her opinion, or just wants to post a "thank you," I will often approve the comment. But if the comment is rude, too aggressive, or asks the blogger to do the poster's homework, I won't bother.

Last year, when the system was not very automated and I had to read and pass judgment on each comment individually, sometimes I would bulk approve all comments that I knew were posted during a classroom blogging session, but there might be 200 junk spams that I had to weed through to find the one good comment that a visitor posted in the wee hours of the morning. That meant that sometimes comment B would be approved after one hour, but comment A (that was written earlier) wouldn't be approved until the next day.

Ideally, of course, every comment would be approved automatically, but since it is not at all unusual for our site to attract dozens of spam comments per second, we have to make some decisions about what gets approved en masse and what gets ignored.

I recall a situation with a particular student who felt that I was deliberately slow about approving some comments in order to influence the discussions. If I had the time to pay that much attention to every blog discussion, I certainly wouldn't waste it by playing censor!