This past week has been a ridiculous affair for me as I've been scrambling to get all my final papers in and studying for finals. The internet has not been helpful at all, and this blog has definitely been a procrastination tool for me.

It's funny that this blog is simultaneously class-related "work" and also one of my main sources of procrastination. This past semester, whenever I am not in the mood to study or am simply in a procrastinating mode, my tools for procrastination have been the following, in this order:

1. Email
2. Xanga
3. Facebook
4. This blog
5. Our wiki
6. Youtube

What a lot of creative projects we saw today--I'm really impressed by what's been created. Everyone started with the same material but were inspired to develop such individual interpretations--hats off!

But anyway, I wanted to go a bit further with tophat1's post about the non-fictional nature of a lot of the hypertexts our class seems to have created. We've had "autobiographies," reflections on a Los-Angeles state of mind, family trees... They've all been really cool.

But this made me wonder: why is it that our memories seem to lend themselves so well to hypertexts? This seems to be something that Oz's project (as well as Nightowl's) are addressing. I keep thinking of silversprung's comment on how hypertexts, like thought, are associative. Is it this richness of association, all wrapped up in our memories, that we're seeing expressed in these nonfictional hypertexts?

There was so much going on today re:identity in our class presentations--I sort of got to thinking about it during tophat1's presentation, of course, but then so many of the other presentations seemed to hang around the same theme.

One particular example of what I mean came up during a bird's presentation--

a bird was saying that, although she had been advised to "change the names" on her project again and again, it just felt totally wrong to write a story about her sister (for instance) and then claim its subject had a totally different name than her sister's. There was, for her, this profound link between person/personality and name/identity.

I've been getting a bit back-logged on my magazine reading in the past couple weeks, so the Thanksgiving-break flight-time was an awesome opportunity to catch up.

I was reading in The New Yorker about video games, rather surprisingly. Actually the article is about game designers--more specifically Sim City (and more) designer Will Wright.

It was funny to read, especially in the context of our discussions last week about the role of the gamer vs. the role of the game designer. The article definitely manages to present Wright as an author, or at least, perhaps, as an artist.

Silversprung's entry about an encounter with a fellow student blogger over Thanksgiving break reminded me of two incidents I had over the break. Since taking this class, everything technology-related reminds me of this class. If I run across an article about videogames or blogging or anything remotely related, I suddenly think of this class. I'm beginning to get a little creeped out by this, it's literally everywhere! I wonder why I didn't notice these things before.

Anyway, onto the first incident. A good friend of mine writes articles for Escapist Magazine, a gaming magazine, and I told him about our class. He got super excited that we were actually learning about ludologists and all the theory behind video games. When I asked him about his thoughts on the gamer and academic divide, he confirmed a lot of what we'd discussed before. He said that in his experience, the more time a person spends gaming, the less time they devote to the theory and critique behind the games. I'd thought that perhaps there could be some kind of harmonious interaction between the two areas, but even he thought I was being naive. Hmm...I still remain hopeful, but I guess reality does make it hard to achieve.

Funny thing here.

It's sort of cool, if very weird, social software called Dandelife.

People post pictures/videos/texts recounting events in their lives that are associated with acertain day. The different posts get assembled into a giant timeline. Users can track the lives of people that they know, make their own accounts and add to the timeline, or simply wander from post to post.

Some of the entries:

--The first one that popped up when I arrived came from my birthday!
Sept 27, 1990: "One night, 13 years old, snuck out and lost my virginity.

But I admit to being a bit lost sometimes during our discussions of all of these social networks.

It's really because I'm not part of any of them. I'm never on AIM unless I'm desperately trying to find someone and all other routes have failed (my last conversation began with: "what?? you're online??!!! are you okay??"). I've never joined the facebook or myspace or anything similar. I've never had a blog, or edited a wiki, or played computer games (before this class). About as interactive as I get is listening to NPR through their website.

Maybe I should look into getting social security.

So this came up in my biochem class--A new permutation on the blog, it's called Adopt A Microbe. There's a microbe of the day... every day... with some funny pictures, pertinent facts, and (yes) even the opportunity to leave your own comments.

Shock and Awe brought up the question of education through play--what works and what doesn't (there was some neologism that applies here that I'm not remembering). Well, here's an example that I think turned out pretty well. I'm not sure how many first graders are tuning in to hear about the legionella pneumophilia or some other disease-related organism every day, but I find this a lot more of a fun, science-y related site that (oh, just for instance) Planet Jemma. And full of a lot of actually useful information.

I just got finished reading the Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.

And I just don't know quite what to make of it yet. I should perhaps preface this all by saying that I'm not much of a poetry person. I should also admit that it took me most of the poem to figure out the (somewhat obvious point) that it was about silicon (sand) vs. carbon (soot).

And while it was frustrating (but then, again, I find most poetry frustrating), I think I liked it.

I'm struggling to say exactly what it was that I liked. I think it had to do with the pictures (perhaps I am very lame).

The pictures somehow unified it—and they matched the text so well—particularly the Sisyphus project images of the ball swirling the sand. Indeed, it seemed as if the text could have been written for the pictures rather than the other way around. The text is so abstract (at least to me), that having the images there somehow gave me a grasp on what sort of emotions or relationships or … drives?... were being discussed in that moment. I would say the pictures were just as much a part of my "understanding" of the poem as the text.

Hey, so check this out.

This fellow, Robert Frenay, is having his book "published" online via the blog of his publisher's (the firm Farrar, Straus and Giroux) website. The book is a huge survey of what Frenay calls "the new biology" — "the coming age of systems and machines inspired by living things". I'm not sure I understand what this means, and I must say that the two chapters I glanced through didn't prove exceptionally enlightening. I think I'd probably have to start from the beginning.

But the thing is pretty long--it grows by two installments (posts) every week day and one every weekend. Somewhere I read that it's over 600 print pages at this point. So I don't think I'll scroll back and begin at post one any time soon...!