A serious sense of work ethic.

The fire alarm just went off.... It didn't make any noise, it was just flashing. I heard one of my colleagues go up to our supervisor and say "The alarm's going off. Should we leave?"

He responded, "Are you dead? No? Then you're FINE."

We apparently take work here quite seriously. Yes indeed.

Blah Summer Blah.

School got out about a week ago, which was a bit of a shock to the system, really. When you're used to being so frenzied, it's really, really hard to just wind down. I'd find myself sitting on the couch and thinking "I need to do something." I went home and saw my mom etc. Ended up doing some chores she wanted (like sweeping the birch crap off the drive way which was completely futile since it thunder stormed and blew even more down the next day than there was originally... thanks, mom.) I celebrated my birthday a little bit with two new games I've been eager to play: The Orange Box and Viva Pinata. If you don't care about games skip the next two paragraphs.

The Orange Box is interesting in that it contains a LOAD of games: Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Episode 1, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. I wanted this game solely for Portal, which it took me about... 3 hours to beat? Maybe 4. I'm proud of myself because I didn't cheat by looking online for anything . The days of the 8-year-old me, taking 3 weeks to beat the first part of the Infocom text based Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because I didn't know what an analgesic was are long gone... these days not using the net to crack a puzzle it takes me longer than 5-10 minutes to muse over is a serious exercise in will power. Portal is EXCELLENT, hillariously dark, yet creepy in a way that still leaves room to be playful. It was witty and unlike anything else out there.

The other game, Viva Pinata, can mostly be described by saying that its target audience is probably...8 year old girls. Your goal is to make a garden and improve it with the sole purpose of attracting pinata animals, which you can either coerce into doing the "Romance Dance" to make more pinatas (giggady giggady) or beat them to death and watch in horrified glee as all the other pinatas eagerly devour the insides. I particularly enjoyed naming my pinatas things like PSYCHO DESTROYER and Mr. Gnads. I know, I'm really really mature.

Other neat things I got - the book "House of Leaves" which is supposed to be a very good read, the first bit of Transmetropolitan (a comic I've been hearing a lot of buzz about) and Penny Arcade's Dark Mantle.

I also set up a flickr account with a bunch of my art uploaded, mostly stuff I've done for classes. I'm working on locating a copy of dream weaver and setting up a site as a summer project.

Anyway, my do-nothing woes are decidedly over. For the next 3 weeks I'll be attending classes from 8-5 Monday through Wednesday, having exams on Thursdays and working tech support every possible hour in between. Farewell free time, Hello writhing agony.

It's okay, it's dark and I like it in here.

And I didn't even know.

I had always thought that I had no living extended family on my father's side apart from my grandmother and uncle. I'd never heard about anyone really, except some allusions that my grandmother had siblings, but it turns out I had a great Aunt. And I only found out because she died. Strange.

I guess that says something about how close my family is.

Why the Internet is Better Than Television

I was surfin' the tubes this afternoon and found a short, insightful piece by longtime internet activist Professor Clay Shirky. He wrote the article in response to an interviewer he spoke with earlier. Upon his explanation of the remarkable social and informational media we've created through Wikipedia she said, "Where [does everyone] find the time?" The article is about how people are starting to leave the television behind in exchange for more interactive forms of entertainment. People of today WANT to be entertained, but they're no longer satisfied with mindless absorbsions like Giligan's Island.

"So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.


And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change."


You can read the whole thing here, and frankly I found it really interesting and insightful.

I'm really tired people using the media to criticize us as a do-nothing generation of idiots. First of all, no generation is without its healthy number of morons and I won't be made accountable for them. But just because you're too ignorant to recognize what we do as something meaningful, that doesn't give you the right to stand on rooftops screaming at the top of your lungs to publicly denounce it. Not when past generations are just as (if not even moreso) guilty of wasteful recreations like boob-tube watching.

I've always considered myself a person who appreciates that no one generation of humans is fundamentally different from the next. I don't stand for the adolescent "You just don't GET me!!" argument. But I have arrived at the place where I am willing to accept that technology is going to shape humans in a new way, IS shaping us in a new way. It's something that hasn't been available to us before and it's something which we're adapting to, some more quickly than others.

If you don't get it yet, just close your mouth and watch. Don't condemn what you don't yet understand. Because if you let us show you what we're talking about maybe you'll see what an amazing world you can be a part of.

Students of Today.

I had to add one more Wesch video up here, they are so very good. This one is about the lives of today's students. It's hard for me to really know, but I assume that college students throughout time have always procrastinated, multi-tasked and BS-ed their way through class. I can't know, but I have to assume this is so, as it is true not only of myself, but absolutely everyone I know.

While we can assume that human nature does not change, much as surrounding geography manipulates the course of a river, technology funnels our human nature into different avenues and changes the way in which we react to situations. It's hard to explain what I mean. Students have always been busy, but the omni-present nature of technology in our lives has created a static halo around all of us, almost like an essence of "busy-ness" that is reflected in how we go through daily life.

People say that the youth of today are impatient. I wholeheartedly agree. I have no patience for things that I find unnecessary. I spend my life multi-tasking, getting the maximum amount of information through the minimum amount of effort. My relationship with the internet has taught me that this is acceptable, and I consider this stream-lining of my existence to be highly positive.

In class, when professors drone on and on rehashing concepts I understand, I feel no compulsion to pay attention to them. When they assign readings that I can understand by briefly skimming the conclusion, I will not read them. And my test grades and current GPA verify that this way of approaching education not only works, it is highly successful. Many of my friends only attend classes for the midterms and finals, of them I consider myself a very good student.

Do I feel badly?

The answer is no. Anything I want to know I can (and do) learn myself. If I want to know something the answer is only a few clicks away. If I have a question about a lecture I'll email the professor. Students of today have been changed by the technology and media they interact with, and have interacted with since they were born. If academic institutions want to maintain their control over students' attention spans then they are going to have to evolve with the times.

Our own brave new world

I found this fantastic video talking about the nature of our relationship with computers and the net, and it really expresses my feelings toward technology. As people we need to spend less time focusing on the negatives about being "chained" to technology and instead embrace it for it's positive qualities. Through the remarkable development of modern technologies we have the capability to expand our culture to a new level of interaction previously unfathomable.

Technology doesn't have to be the enemy. People as a whole need to learn to see it for its amazing possibilities.