June 25, 2007
10:51 am
Links list: 06-25-07.
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June 19, 2007
4:29 pm
Links list: 06-19-07.

Gotta close some tabs, as my machine is slower than dirt…

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June 18, 2007
10:54 pm
Links list: 06-18-2007.
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June 15, 2007
10:35 am
The new dayjob!
GAMBIT

So, for those of you who have been wondering what I’ve been alluding to for the last couple of weeks or so, methinks it’s time to finally let the cat out of the bag. I’ve been offered, and accepted, the position of Communications Director for the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, or GAMBIT for short. Basically, I’m going to be handling websites, newsletters, conferences, outreach, and so on for our department and for the new video game lab – which is basically the same kind of thing I was doing before grad school – but also conducting research into interactive narratives for GAMBIT and helping to teach the interactive narratives class at MIT in the fall, and in so doing learning more about how to teach the stuff I love.
While I’ve only been working here for a couple of weeks now (graduation was last Friday, but the gig started up the last week of May), I can already tell you that MIT is a much different place to be when you can leave it behind at 5PM. It’s still an endless stream of fascinating people, projects, and challenges, but when it actually can stop at the end of a work day, it becomes endless and not unrelenting. I seriously love it here, and the job is a unique combination of my loves for teaching and storytelling and technology and design. I’m excited to be here, to say the least.
Onward and upward!

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June 14, 2007
8:08 am
A shout-out from Henry Jenkins.

Hey, I got a hat tip from Henry on his blog entry about Pirates of the Caribbean 3:

The secondary characters rely heavily on what my former student Geoffrey Long likes to describe as negative capability — they are well enough defined that we can imagine who they are, what they want, and why they are doing what they are doing, but much remains for the audience to flesh out from their own imaginations.

Very, very cool.

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June 14, 2007
7:37 am
Links List: 06-14-07.
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June 13, 2007
12:19 am
An expensive week.

Weeks will go by without something really truly purchase-worthy making its debut on the store shelves, and then a week like this comes along. First up was the release of Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron, where I snagged one of the 10,000 Best Buy exclusive DVD-and-figure packs this morning. (Ah, to open or not… Oh, what the hey.) Then Best Buy was holding a crazy sale, with any Fox TV boxed set going for $20 a pop, and I wound up buying the entire five-season run of Angel to go with my Buffy Chosen Collection, as well as the last few seasons of The X-Files. Back when I bought seasons 1-6, the adventures of Scully and Mulder were going for $100 a pop. Ah, how times have changed.
Now, tonight I find out that tomorrow’s comics delivery includes the second Perhapanauts trade, the second Hellboy Animated volume, the next issue of BPRD, and now I find out that McSweeney’s is having a mondo “Oh crap I think we’re in trouble” sale. My wallet can’t take it.
Tomorrow, perhaps, some more personally relevant news.

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June 11, 2007
2:42 pm
Keynotes getting worse?

Is it just me, or are the Apple Keynotes getting more and more disappointing? Today’s WWDC keynote featured the following:

  • EA returning as a Mac game developer
  • Stacks, folders in the Dock
  • Translucent menu bar and a 3-D dock
  • “Back to my Mac” .mac feature, which is essentially iDisk
  • Cover Flow in the Finder, which is useless eye candy
  • Quick Look, a moderately useful enhancement of Preview
  • 64-bit Finder, which might be useful but I’m skeptical
  • Core Animation, which might be useful but is more likely to be useless eye candy
  • Boot Camp built-in, which is already out in Tiger and admittedly done better by Parallels or VMWare
  • Spaces, which is pretty cool
  • Movie Time Dashboard widget, which is okay but nothing new
  • WebClip technique for widget building, which we saw last year
  • iChat Theater, which will be useful
  • iChat Photo Booth effects, which totally won’t
  • Time Machine, which is just a built-in backup system
  • Safari for PC, which will be great if it catches on
  • AJAX apps for the iPhone, which was a given

Seriously. No new hardware, no really jaw-dropping revelations for Leopard, a promise of 300 new features but nothing truly revolutionary demonstrated today, which suggests that the other 290 are all things like “changed the icon for the Canon printer driver”.
Apple computers have gone to suck. The iPhone could be cool, but they’re totally neglecting their original market. The writing was on the wall when they dropped ‘Computer’ from their name and just became ‘Apple, Inc.’ – where’s the Blu-Ray drive or HD DVD drive? Where’s the real increase in .mac value? Where’s the new hardware? Where’s, well, anything new for the Mac people?
It’s tragic that of all of this, the thing I’m the most excited about is a translucent menu bar and some new desktop photos. This keynote sucked, and so does the outlook for Apple’s computers. What a disappointment.

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June 11, 2007
11:17 am
Links list: 06-11-2007.
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June 6, 2007
1:44 pm
LOLbots.

Everyone and their brother has seen a variant of the LOLcats meme – a saccharine-sweet picture of a kitten (or kitteh, in LOLcats speak) with a l33tspeak-esque caption photoshopped on, often in bitmapped Helvetica or something like it. Well, rstevens of Diesel Sweeties fame has co-opted thememe and unleashed LOL BOTS upon the world. It must be seen to be believed.
My favorites: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, HOW I CLIMB STAIRS? and IM IN UR LITTERACHUR EMPATHIZIN WITH UR METAFORS. Awesome.

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