At a loss for words...

Currently reading up on Alternative Dance Competitions while MC Frontalot blares via Winamp in the background (more on the genre "Nerdcore HipHop" in... umm... never)... and i'm realizing the internets [sic] are a wonderful thing. A Slashdot debate pointed me in the direction of a Business Week article about a lawsuit that (from TFA) "is reviving debate over whether Web overuse may be classified as an addiction." Not going to touch that one with a ten foot pole, but it goes something along the lines of "Sure I was chatting in a sex chat room at work but... I've got a serious addiction to the interweb so you're not allowed to fire me."

The above title is my manner of expressing that when it rains, it really freakin’ pours, and also of giving voice to some of my frustration over how life-consuming academics can be. Is this in line with other people’s experience of the end of semester? It always seems to happen that each fall and each spring, right around finals time, everything hits at once, and work is demanding ALL of my attention, but so are a million other things, generally emotionally volatile things, and it’s the emotional things that are constantly gnawing at the edges of my thinking, and at the center of that thinking is the work, but it’s the emotionally gnawing things that I’d much, much rather be attending to.

While watching The Onyx (i spell it "onxy" every time, backspace backspace "yx") clips made available on the project's website one thought couldn't help but tumble about in my bewildered mind: What ever happened to Calista Flockhart?

I'm referring of course to Ally McBeal. I never really watched the show, save for the off-chances when I could catch glimpses of the then-unknown-to-me Lucy Liu (*swoons*), but I remember a really big deal was made about the first few episodes, because there were all sorts of... *ahem,* "wacky" Looney-Tunes-esque computer animated graphics and what not integrated into the show... She sees an attractive male and her tongue starts wagging, or a co-worker says something frustrating and she shoots them with a bow and arrow or whatever...Her imagination being played out on screen and what not. I think the point was something along the lines of "Lookit everybody! We're taking the traditional legal dramedy and making it all snazzy! Ally (yeah, you can call her that too!) is a normal person, just like you and me, and lookit all her madcap adventures and wacky reactions to the stuff that happens!" I think a more important point is that by the second season or so (possibly earlier?) they cut all the animated crap and gave their audience the same old stuff. It won Emmys (are those the awards TV shows get? I don't really "do" the TV thing...) and etc but i'm guessing the producers realized that the same old crap in a pretty bonnet is still the same old crap, and looks downright silly once people get bored of the gimmicky animated stuff.

A bit about me, because i just know you all care oh so much: I like silly. I'm one of the English Department work-study stooges, and whenever i'm in the English library shuffling stuff about i like to slide around on the rolling ladders. I can also devote oodles of time to mundane tasks with nary a second thought, a habit born of RPG grinding as a wee lad, or mayhaps time spent working at magazines / freelancing, trolling blogs and newsfeeds and such for hours, looking for stories to pitch to editors and the like. I'm also incredibly lazy. Frightfully so: deciding between going to get food or sitting on my ass is a difficult decision that requires a thoroughly contested list of pros and cons. I'm also woefully inattentive / easily distracted.

Found via Slashdot, it's a guest blog on someone's site, about a member of the World of Warcraft elite who's hanging up his... err... cloak? Axe?

Kind of wish this blog had an Anonymous Coward option, but here goes: My name is GrumpyMutt, and i'm an addict.

That being said, I get the feeling i'm doing alright. For those who won't bother to RTFA (slashdot-speak for Read The Fucking Article) the ex-Wow player goes on at length about the hazards of playing the incredibly popular MMORPG, talking about weight gain and skipping work / class and ruined relationships and etc. The comments that follow are also... intriguing, as a debate ensues (takes place on the slashdot site too) as to whether or not a video game addiction can be compared to a drug addiction. Umm... yeah. So i don't play WoW. I've tried it, and to be honest, i got bored really quickly. But it does get me thinking: Hey, this is a lot like Diablo 2 (coincidentally, also made by Blizzard), except with more players. And updated graphics. And the Warcraft theme. And you've got to pay to play it. And then i thought back to Diablo 2...

This post has been festering for a while, and the germ of it came out of Pimm's conclusion to a post on Ong: "I hope these thoughts and questions made as much sense in my writing as they do in my head!" My thoughts usually don't, or at least they don't make nearly the same sort of "sense" as the one they had before I translated them into writing. My thoughts are generally not scripted--rarely do they occur as a linear stream of words, ready to be spoken or written down. Instead, they tend to take shape as a simultaneous barrage of images and sensory impressions that I then have to sift, order, and translate into sound-images that are renderable in speech or text. Apparently, this classifies me as a "visual spatial learner". What this means for my reading of Ong is twofold. On the one hand, I think that he couldn't be more right when he tells his reader that "technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior tranformations of conscious, and never more than when they affect the word" (81). Words absolutely transform my consciousness, and that's part of why I'm an English major; they have a texture, an artifactual thingness that is fascinating to play with. On the other hand, I find that Ong's presumed internality of language and script bear out in disturbing ways.

Growing up, i was the kid that hated "Edutainment." Hell, i'm still the kid that hates Edutainment. Reader Rabbit, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Math Blaster... all those educational products thinly-veiled as "Games" that were "Fun" that my peers and i sat through in our poorly-funded Computer class back when i was wee. An inner-city public school in Brooklyn, New York, there were maybe four of those new-fangled Macintosh computers, single button mice and graphical interfaces, and most of the kids would fight tooth and nail to use them once class started, ooohing and aaahing at icons and the like while an anthropomorphic bunny explained the proper way to say "gopher." Or something. Meanwhile, those who were "in the know" headed straight for the Commodore 64s that populated the rest of the room, in front of whose monochrome screens i spent countless hours trying to get my damn oxen to successfully ford the river, or blasting at rabbits with that pixel o' doom that spat out of the mouth of my rifle. Ah, The Oregon Trail-- i can honestly say i learned far more about technology fumbling around with 5 and 1/4" floppies, and far more about decision making and the like with a draconic UI (user interface... more on that in a sec), plotting the ideal time (April, in my humble opinion) to set out on that perilous journey out West (being hardcore, i was always the farmer). Having developed a rather irrational abhorrence of the Mac OS at a young age, i spent a lot of time roaming around the more affluent neighborhoods (Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, for those w/ some knowledge of Brooklyn's geography) dumpster-diving for discarded parts until i pieced together my first working PC. Ah DOS: 5 or six lines of commands to accomplish what my Mac owning friends were doing with a single click of their "Mouse" (whatever the hell that was, i decided); i felt like some kind sagacious aristocrat: "Your Mac has a calculator? That's cute. I just wrote a program that can add AND subtract in BASIC. Yeah, i'm a badass." And then of course came my first copy of Windows (pirated, of course. i'm realizing now i've never actually *paid* for a copy of the OS) and my first mouse, and suddenly everything was so much easier! A calculator that could add, subtract, divide, multiply, etc. Microsoft Paint. File menus and folders to keep everything organized et wot, and everything just a click away... i'd stumbled upon some kind of technological Nirvana, in 256 colors no less. Gone somewhat was that feeling of being some kind of Golden God, but at least the whole "keeping up with the Joneses" didn't mean succumbing to the beast that was Apple.