Category Archives: Misc.

Migrating blog today…

so site might be down for a spell. Though then you wouldn’t be able to see this post… :p

Overthinking It on the Captain America movie and racism

(firstworldproblem: 140 characters isn’t enough so I have to do a blog post instead of twitter…)

Mark Lee on Overthinking It has a great post on a missed opportunity in the new Captain America movie wrt addressing racial problems in the US:

In other words, the struggle for racial equality isn’t the seedy underbelly of American identity. It practically defines it. And this is why I see the lack of any acknowledgement of racial tension in the Captain America movie as a real lost opportunity. As our idealized symbol of righteous American power, Captain America should obviously embody all of the great things about the American spirit, but he shouldn’t pretend that the terrible things about the American spirit don’t exist or ignore their destructive power. In fact, if he’s the Great American Hero we so desperately want him to be, then he should be confronting these issues head on.

Full post here:  The First Non-Avenger: Captain America and His Non-Struggles Against the Holocaust and Racism

wow, multitrack acapella Starlight – Francois Macre

via Urlesque:

mini game reviews… er game mini reviews.

This post is just to test Twitter Tools to make sure it auto-tweets whenever I post a new blog entry. Read the mini-reviews of games in my previous post and why I’ve decided to write them in the post before that. 🙂

Happy holidays!

and just a note: I updated this blog to latest wordpress release and went ahead and updated my plugins (and ditched some plugins I never use anymore). Let me know if anything is broken.

Haven’t posted in a while, but this was too cool to just share via Google Reader.

Visualizations of choose your own adventure books!

(via GameSetWatch, via Waxy)

o9 – The Evolution Of Space Cruiser Design

io9 – The Evolution Of Space Cruiser Design: A Gallery – spaceships

Neat.

Did You Know 3.0 video about world people and tech trends

2008 Latest Edition – Did You Know 3.0 – From Meeting in Rome this Year

amazing artistic visualizations of consumerism in the US


Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

by chris jordan

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

Working on paper revision today

I’ll post the draft when I get a chance. It was originally a paper on expertise development in WoW, submitted to Transformative Works and Culture, a new online journal. I didn’t have time to get into it as much as I wanted and turned the paper into one that highlighted ethnographic methods and how they were useful. I am now revising it, however, to be re-reframed back to being about expertise development, on the advise of the editors. Makes sense, and there’s plenty material… It’s just sort of haphazard now, though…

But anyway, I ended up cutting this paragraph out and thought it should be saved somewhere:

Part of the meaning players derived from playing World of Warcraft depended heavily on body performance. Playing successfully was not just a cognitive function but required experiential knowledge in a sort of physical sense—both the real aching, tired wrists and back after a long session of playing and the virtual movement and actions on-screen. For example, I experienced finding the “groove” for my character, hitting a particular tempo with the activation of his abilities that everything seemed to “flow” perfectly. While I don’t think “flow theory” (Csíkszentmihályi 1990) applies to most of the game, “flow” is an apt description of the perfect rhythm I was feeling and the muscle memory I was developing.