This blog has (among many other, more important functions) shown me the multitude of different ways in which people procrastinate. For what it's worth, I procrastinate by reading the news compulsively, and I just came across an article on BBC.com about this game called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces." Maybe some of you have heard about the Left Behind book series, which is a Christian series about, as far as I can tell, the apocalypse. The series is bestselling, and it looks like now they've made a game based off of it. Sounds like a pretty typical formula.

Grand Text Auto recently posted a description of an open tenure-track position at U of Baltimore:

"Assistant Professor, Information Arts and Technologies

The School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor to begin August 2007. Doctorate or other terminal degree in computer science, interactive media, instructional technology, or human-computer interaction is highly desirable. Advanced degrees in other areas may be considered.

I ran across yet another serious use of blogs while reading the news today. It seems like our friend the blog, whom we tend to think of as fun-loving, gossipy, and a bit ADD, has a serious side, too.

This article in the New York Times is talking about how a grassroots organization, Perverted Justice, which runs a blog by the same name (http://perverted-justice.com), has been remarkably effective in catching pedophiles. They have a group of 65 trained adult volunteers who pretend to be underage girls and boys in chat rooms, and when a pedophile agrees to meet the "child" in a certain location, he ends up meeting (and being arrested by) the police instead.

Something else kinda interesting I came across recently (now that my brain is automatically on the lookout for good electronic writing):

The Washington Post and Newsweek have together set up a blog called On Faith which-- you guessed it-- is about religion and spirituality. The format of this blog is a little unusual: the Post solicits well-known and well-respected figures in the world of religion-- their first writer was none other than Desmond Tutu—to write short pieces about some aspect of religion or spirituality. Anyone can comment on a post.

When I was at the gym a few days ago, I read the New York Times magazine that someone had left in the magazine racks. The cover story was about how wikis and blogs could change how we gather intelligence in the future, and I thought, “I actually have some experience with wikis and blogs-- I might understand this!” and read the whole article on the elliptical trainer. Alas, the article, which is called “Open-Source Spying,” is now archived, so you can only access it if you have TimesSelect. So much for open sources, NYT...

Basically, one of the big problems facing the various U.S. intelligence agencies-- the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, you name it-- is the difficulty of sharing information between agencies. There is a program called Intelink that tries to promote this sort of information sharing, but because no agency requires that its analysts post anything to it, it’s of limited use. Our intelligence agencies, as you may recall, took quite a lot of (probably justified) heat after September 11 when it was discovered that individual analysts had been in the possession of clues that, had they been shared, might have been able to foresee or prevent the terrorist attacks. Information-sharing is also more important today than it used to be during the Cold War because security threats materialize much more quickly and because these threats are global in nature, so one person can’t be an expert in them-- you need many people collaborating to get a full picture.

I've been thinking about my own project in a few different ways after seeing what other people have been thinking about this semester. (I guess that is one of the points of presenting, huh!)

crashingintowalls' post and presentation this afternoon struck me because his role in his final project is so different from mine. I am like the control-freak mother who creates and nurtures my baby of a hypertext. (Wow-- that analogy was creepier than I meant it to be.) One of the things that seemed to define crashingintowalls' relationship with his project, in contrast, was the lack of control that he had over it-- although he certainly desired that control.

As I re-read Walking Mornings for this afternoon's class, I realized that, ironically, my own relationship to this text has been similar to my relationships with hypertexts. It's ironic because in this essay, Joyce is trying to distance himself from the new technologies, like hypertexts, that he has been so involved in.

Now that I look back on it, reading this essay for the first time felt somewhat hypertextual, largely because of the recursive nature of the text, which hovers around and returns repeatedly to the sentence "I walk mornings" in exploring the different meanings encapsulated by those three words. It is, as Joyce says, a meditation, and in its lack of a clear linear progression, it resembles hypertext narratives.

I wanted to share with you all something that happened to me over Thanksgiving break that I think you might appreciate. My family went over to our family friends' house for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was talking with the daughter, who is my age and goes to school at George Mason University, a Virginia state school, about this and that-- how our semesters had been.

And then she mentioned that one of her classes had a blog! I got really excited (embarassingly so, now that I think back on it) and asked her how it was incorporated into the class. Apparently, their blog's purpose is to serve as a place where they post their responses to the readings, 2x a week. The subject of the class has nothing to do with technology-- it's on the reconstruction of post-WWII Japan. And it seems like the blog doesn't really change the nature of the class in any fundamental way-- I'm not even sure if they comment on each other's posts-- but that it's just a way for the professor to collect reading responses such that students can also read their classmates' responses.

Take a look at this Washington Post editorial called "The Rise of Gaming." It uses Nintendo's weekend release of Wii, its newest video game system, to tentatively ask whether video gaming is, in fact, a legitimate form of entertainment-- not just one for geeky teenage boys.

The editorial says that 'social observers' (who are these mysterious observers? paid stalkers?) "are beginning to deem video game design an emerging art form, especially as companies ratchet up production values. Games now come in a range of genres -- from World War II simulators to strategy games to brain exercises. Creating one is almost like producing a film." It's true that as production values improve and there are more different kinds of games produced, games will probably gain even more legitimacy in the cultural world. The Post is almost endearingly hopeful that the present generation of gamers "will eventually demand more than just shoot'em-ups on its Wiis," and I do think that it has the right instinct. The Post just probably doesn't know that things like Facade and other interactives, which make an entirely different use of games and play than shoot'em-ups do, already exist.

Waaaaay back in the beginning of the semester, I posted something about how blogging wasn’t for perfectionists, because it thrives on a kind of spontaneity that is in tension with the planning and revision that perfectionists need.

Reading (browsing? surfing? floating in?) GAM3R 7H30RY, I felt a similar tension—between linear and nonlinear modes of reading. In GAM3R 7H30RY, you read the text itself, on those digital index card-looking things, and then you have a choice about whether or not to read the comments. Now, it seems that the comments are often the most interesting part of the text, so you really shouldn’t skip them. On the other hand, the importance of the comments doesn’t seem to lessen the value of Wark’s text, because without the original text, the comments wouldn’t exist. So although there certainly is some sensation of the linear, of accomplishing something, of moving progressively forward as you advance from card to card, this sensation is undercut by the “digression” (into the most important part of the text) that is required when we choose to read the comments.