In the appendix to his final project, “Art Between Worlds,” crashingintowalls remarks: I struggle with the fact that much of the creativity present online draws energy from the embodied world but feels no compunction to reinvest in it, hyperlinking and posting comments instead. I find this comment very apposite to my present situation; that is, after a morning spent sitting here working on ideas for blog and wiki stuff, for thesis stuff -- and let’s be honest -- weeks spent drawing heavily on all my word-related sources of creativity, I hit yet another of those walls where I realized that I couldn’t write anymore, no less think anymore, until I stepped out into the world, exposed my ever-paler skin to the winter sunshine, and rediscovered the type of human contact that does not occur through a computer screen.

And it worked.

The other night, I actually took a break from work to hang out with people -- one of those self-enforced, “if I don’t do this I’ll go completely insane” sort of breaks, and man was it incredible -- and at some point during the night we wound up looking up POGs on wikipedia (I’m not going to bother explaining why), and that led us to this site, which offers a number of options for playing POGs online.

I was flipping through the NY Times today and came across an article, written by Stephanie Rosenbloom (still unsure how to naturally citein the blog--is the blog footnote far off?) about a new study done by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson in the field of proxemics. Proxemics is the study of personal space and how people perceive it. Their study concluded that avatars in a virtual universe have the same relationship to their surroundings as real people: "digital beings adhered to...unspoken behavorial rules of humans even though they were but pixels on the screen."

At first, this struck me as obvious. Of course these characters react in such a way because the gamers controlling them instinctually tell them to. If someone gets too close to you, you move back, whether its in a game or reality. But the more I thought about it the more strange it seemed. If we are really so instinctually connected to our avatars, should we also be troubled by allowing them to engage in explicitly amoral behavior? To clarify, is it easier for us to hack a stranger-avatar up with an ax than make eye-contact with them for an uncomfortably long time?

I don’t usually watch South Park and I’ve never played World of Warcraft, but last night these two super popular bits of pop-culture came together in a celebration of gross/nerdy humor. The episode basically lampooned the sad existence of gamers who play their game of choice to the point of ending all other activities (including bathing and walking). This isn’t exactly a novel idea, but I have to say that South Park did it in a ridiculously funny way. At the same time, though, especially in light of other posts about gaming, the whole thing was pretty sad in the old obvious ways: grown men who have no lives outside of their computer screen, kids who don’t play outside so they can spend more time on the computer…

I've stumbled across a few blogs ( goldenfiddle and hollywoodtuna) that I don't know what to make of yet. They include links to ridiculous things and commentary but a lot of the time they're just providing comments on how female celebrities look (from a guy's perspective). A lot of the stuff is pretty sexist, and it's strange to think about how quickly photos and gossip are put up on blogs. There's something strange about looking at pictures of what some female celebrity wore yesterday and reading about how the dress was see-through or how skanky she looked. I guess these blogs are providing some kind of service that people desire, like an ability to tear down the popular girls (like Go Fug Yourself), but the sexual tone of these blogs makes them different. Maybe I'm wondering if I should be more offended by them? I'm not sure, just some random thoughts.