Friday, February 20, 2004
Crazy kittens
Have you seen those nutty Viking kitties on VH1? They show up in between the commercials, and they play some tune, like "Welcome to the Jungle," or something, and they sing.
I thought they were so funny, and I wondered where they came from. Just thirty seconds of odd, unexplained, unprefaced, dancing, singing, angry Viking kittens.
Well, here they are. From what I can tell these little videos are shown on UK television. I've asked four people today about them and they had already seen it. Maybe I'm the last person to hear about this, kind of like it seemed for Home Star Runner. It was like when you hear a new word for the first time, or drive a car for the first time, and then you hear that word or see that car everywhere, when you never noticed it before. One night I heard about it, and then....
Now, at least, I know where to go for my fix of the foot-stomping, German-speaking feline regiment of the Red Army.
Well, we polluted Mars.
That didn't take long at all.
They announced today that one of the rovers on Mars found some weird thread things. They don't know what they are, and of course they will need to do some further investigating using all the magnificent tools onboard the rover. But I think their hunch that it's a piece of the fabric strewn across the landscape from the landing airbags is probably correct.
The article at Space.com, written by Leonard David, is a good one; David points out how contamination of the scene to be examined taints its untouched nature. Understandably, it makes it tough to know what's martian and what's not if, when you get there, you throw earth garbage everywhere.
It's not that I think the JPL engineering crew should have been a bit "greener" in their designs for Spirit and Opportunity; really, they were lucky to get the things down there and working in one piece to begin with. It reminds me of that unignorable piece of quantum theory that questions the notion that we can observe something without changing it, but am I the only one that wishes there'd be a way to just swing on by Mars and take a quick looksee without messing the place up?
Digital sunsets
Torill speaks eloquently about the physical sense of changing seasons, and points to the lack of sensory experience in the virtual world as its ultimate limitation.
She's right. The internet can't show you what sun feels like, and looking clothes online doesn't give you the chance to feel them and try them on. Torill's mention of video games that engage the body, like dancing games, is important, because even at their most bodily inclusive these days, like those where people step into "skis" and navigate their digital avatar as it careens down a slope, the body essentially becomes a large, complex controller, limited to a certain number of inputs. It's the same as when a person picks up an Xbox control and has twelve buttons, plus two directional sticks and one directional pad. Part of the problem isn't that we cannot code sensory experiences. It's that our level of interactivity with virtual worlds is so limited. There are only certain things you can do, very specific limits to the ways you can interact.
Yet at times I find myself amazed by the virtual worlds I can encounter--the first time I played Halo I spent more time walking around and looking at the trees and the rocks, and zooming in on the arc of the ring world above that I practically forgot to shoot things. And sometimes I play the newer Grand Theft Auto games, like Vice City, not to accomplish anything, but to simply fly around in the helicopter, park on top of a building, and watch the sunset over the water.
Torill's analysis is likely to hold true for a long, long time--it will take unknown, science fiction-styled leaps to make digital realities as involving as real ones. But one of the barriers for that is breaking down in the new generations of games--you're still limited by how you physically interface with virtual realities (i.e., with controllers), but what you do within them is changing; people are discovering the games we want to play more and more are the ones that give us opportunities to be who we are--or who we want to be--within them. We're already limited in how we can physically interface with virtual realities; these days it seems binding to play a game that tells you exactly how you should act, too. It seems to me that the game that best has the opportunity to surprise me is the game that will take me someplace I have never been to, and to give me the choice to do everything, or nothing at all, there.
Good Eats in Guangzhou...er, Omaha
Last night I met some friends at a new little restaurant after work. It is called Back to Guangzhou, and I was so worried that they would shut the place down before I would have a chance to eat, as it was practically ten p.m. when I found it. But I was surprised to learn the restaurant was open until eleven. And that was just the first surprise.
Fantastic Cantonese cooking. Our server was wonderful, and she explained everything about what all the food was. The four of us shared our food and ate as best as we could with chopsticks (resorting to forks when we ate the rice), and we were unanimously blown away. After the meal our server, Angel (she also does the traditional Chinese tea ceremony, which you can order), came out to our table and told us the story of Guangzhou, which is in the southern part of China. Angel told us Guangzhou has ten million people, mostly crammed into a town about the size of Omaha, which has only about 350,000 uncramped souls. She talked about how warm it was there, and how she missed it, and she passed around a dozen lovely postcards.
She also told us that the area is renowned for its food. And if this place was any representation, I can understand why. Their restaurant just opened a couple months ago, and it's a shame it's located way far from downtown Omaha. It's the kind of place Omaha--or any American town, really--would be a worse off place without.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
WSJ vs. KCNotDPRK
The Wall Street Journal is a very cool paper, much cooler than most people realize.
Today's interesting front page offering tipped me off to a...differently slanted news source, the Korean Central News Agency of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Seems there's a group of Japanese Koreans who disperse all of N. Korea's state-run news articles through the broader press channels like the AP.
Now I know where I can stay up on "iron-willed supreme commander" Kim Jong Il.
I'd send you to the WSJ to check out the article, but you'd have to be a paying subscriber to read it.
No free access to today's news at the WSJ. Score one for the communists.
Tinker
I've been playing around with this today, and looking for html tips. It's a good thing the internet is filled with helpful people, like the folks at htmlgoodies.com.
From researcher to blogger
I think I've come to blogging through a strange back door. I have one of my lovely girlfriend's classes to blame.
She's a graduate student right now, and she's taking a lit class on rhetoric and technology. She's writing a paper about blogs, and she's been generous enough to share her research with me. Sometime while I was reading Jill and Torrill's article, "Blogging Thoughts," (which you can get from Klastrup's Cataclysms here), I decided to give this a shot.
My first blog experience was yesterday, when I barcoded myself after following the link from Jill's page. Turns out I'm worth $8.63. Does'nt sound like much, but my darling girlfriend scanned in at only $6 and some change, and we both beat out the Nigerian women we barcoded, who were worth $.06 to $.09. As downright cool as the concept is, there's still something just plain strange about it when someone puts a dollar amount on you. And when you have to face your plunging dollar value against today's Euro.
Feeling nostalgic? Buy a Nintendo T-shirt.
My brother sent me this link today. It's for a clothier that sells 80's icons, from movies to television and videogames. The old t-shirts for Nintendo products were really the ones that got to me.
It's appropriate that he sent it to me, and also that I should open my blog with this link, for a couple reasons, really.
I've seen the high school youth at my church wearing clothes with old Nintendo controllers on them. I don't consider myself as old, but I wonder if they really know how a five-hour Ninja Gaiden session thrashes the pads of your thumbs.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; it is more than likely they've seen Back to the Future, or the Goonies, or heard a couple songs from Def Leppard's Pyromania, or anything else from the 80s that makes a flashy knit cap. But videogames have aged so differently. Sometimes I plug in the old Atari 7800 and play through those old games. Some, like Joust, always suck me in. Others leave me wondering how I could have ever played them for hours at a time.
So maybe those kids at my church aren't missing so much since they've missed their chance to play "Werewolf: The Last Warrior", but maybe some day I'll have them over, blow out the cartridge to get it to work one last time, and see what they think.
My brother sent me this link today. It's for a clothier that sells 80's icons, from movies to television and videogames. The old t-shirts for Nintendo products were really the ones that got to me.
It's appropriate that he sent it to me, and also that I should open my blog with this link, for a couple reasons, really.
- He's been my companion growing up in a digital age, and as rather unsporty children we grew up renting videogames together in our small town, and playing them on that lovely original Nintendo;
- It shows something about who people my age are--people defined in an age where computers became a part of every day life. We grew up around computer games and computer systems, and in many ways they grew up around us.
I've seen the high school youth at my church wearing clothes with old Nintendo controllers on them. I don't consider myself as old, but I wonder if they really know how a five-hour Ninja Gaiden session thrashes the pads of your thumbs.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; it is more than likely they've seen Back to the Future, or the Goonies, or heard a couple songs from Def Leppard's Pyromania, or anything else from the 80s that makes a flashy knit cap. But videogames have aged so differently. Sometimes I plug in the old Atari 7800 and play through those old games. Some, like Joust, always suck me in. Others leave me wondering how I could have ever played them for hours at a time.
So maybe those kids at my church aren't missing so much since they've missed their chance to play "Werewolf: The Last Warrior", but maybe some day I'll have them over, blow out the cartridge to get it to work one last time, and see what they think.
