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.
Category Archives: Life
The TV Show animated short
The TV Show animated short
via Drawn!
Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation
So, I played Dragon Age for a couple of weeks. It’s engrossing. Very engrossing. But I *was* disappointed with how little change there is to the plot or storyline with each of the six different starting conditions. Each start story was really well done, so to have the narratives from a particular one be mostly forgotten once you get to the main game… Well, on the official forums, SLPr0 wrote up a nice overview of some of the ways in which the plot could have been so much more (included after the break). Head on over to the forum thread (Literary Criticism in Regards to Flopped Plot Opportunities and the Human Noble Origin) to read the ongoing discussion.
And, of course, there’s Yahtzee’s take on Dragon Age, which is, as with all his Zero Punctuation videos, hilarious and spot on in that scathing-yet-there’s-a-bit-of-truth-there kind of way.
Currently working on…
- Dissertation (simultaneously working on proposal and actual diss, to be finished this year as a collection of previous papers plus intro chapter and new chapter on the enrollment of a third-party mod to my raid group in terms of distributed cognition and actor-network theory).
- Toying with the idea of a paper on exploring activity theory, actor-network theory, and positioning theory through two DS games, Valkyrie Profile and Devil Survivor.
- Applying for academic jobs starting next school year right now. If nothing comes through, applying for other jobs. Looking for a research position in Learning Sciences or maybe Comm or Media Studies that lets me focus on learning in games, collaboration in games, games culture, new media culture, etc.
- Also, obsessively playing Dragon Age. Very strong betrayal theme in the game’s plot and in the world’s lore. Makes me think about previous Bioware games to try to identify the the one-word theme for each… Doable?
- Editing paper with Sarah Walter on comparing collaboration in WoW and Lord of the Rings Online through a distributed cognition lens. It’s turning out pretty good, I think!
moved server
My previous post announcing that the server was about to be changed no longer exists!
It’s like the Twilight Zone! omg!! rofl!!1!!
ahem… anyway, it seems like my permalinks are broken so things like my CV and About page and any page, really, including single-post pages, are broken…
Fixing it ASAP, especially since I’ve started sending out job applications and include my url in my contact details…
Fixed! <undelete> though I had to change my permalinks from markdangerchen.net/year/mo/dy/post to markdangerchen.net/?p=nnnn which, personally, I don’t prefer since I think seeing the date in the address bar is more meaningful than the post ID…</undelete>
For reals now… thanks Erik!
Uh… I had to switch it back to default permalinks again since for some reason my CV page wasn’t working…
Changed the name of my CV page which fixed the permalink.
Deskbike
My new WoW setup:
More photos on my Facebook page, or if people ask I can throw them up on my Picasa album.
Just installed a different custom ROM for my Google phone
So, last night I read a new post on JesusFreke’s blog that he’s decided to stop new development on his custom ROM image for Android devices (such as the T-Mobile G1 phone that I have). In his post, he lists Cyanogen’s ROM as a good alternative.
I went to that url (a forum thread, really) and tried to remember how I “rooted” the phone and installed JesusFreke’s ROM back in May. Rooting is the term used for hacking the device to get root (or admin or superuser) access to the operating system (OS), letting one then flash or install custom OS builds rather than the one that T-Mobile or whoever provides.
Why would I want to do this? Well, back in May, I installed the ROM before T-Mobile pushed out their Cupcake build of the Android OS, so I was able to get access to the touch-screen keyboard, enhancements to the map and browser, etc. before the official push. And last night, as I read the feature list for Cyanogen’s ROM, two things jumped out at me immediately that made me want to upgrade: 1) the ability to install apps to an SD card rather than the phone’s internal memory, and 2) Cyanogen’s claim that a general principle of his builds is to make the OS faster and smoother.
The biggest complaint I have had about the G1 phone is that it was sluggish sometimes. But also in the last month or so, it’s been crashing once in a while, and I think it’s because I was running out of internal memory.
So, last night, I started clicking on the various links from that initial forum post and saw that Cyanogen also released a recovery image that can be used to boot into (rather than the standard phone OS) to flash ROMs, get access to various utilities, etc. It took forever trying to get this installed. For some reason whenever I booted into my old recovery mode (which was jesusfreke’s 1.42 build) and got into the terminal program, the recovery OS could not read the sdcard nor load up the flash_image executable.
I ended up wiping the phone completely and trying again, which worked though maybe I coulda gotten it working without wiping the phone. Anyway, after wiping it, since I was sort of starting over, I did a quick search in the forum on xda-developers and found this guide written by nephron that lists all the step-by-steps needed for someone starting from the beginning with an unrooted phone. I skipped the rooting bits (and it looks like Cyanogen’s ROM doesn’t need the SPL update, so that step was superfluous). And now I have a new OS that’s all spiffy and fast and is installing all my apps that I download on to my SD card!
BTW, there’s a very handy forum post that lists how-to guides and whatnot. Worth a bookmark if you’re considering diving into Android hacking. Here’s the general first guide to read to get started rooting your phone.
posting / consuming
I just got the wordpress app for Android devices and am posting this w my phone. It seems I haven’t posted in a while but that’s just part of what seems like my general cyclical pattern. I’ve been here before. I will be here again.
I seem to continually go back and forth from consuming to producing. or maybe it’s just that I’ve been working a lot on my dissertation stuff and that’s filling my productivity needs to stay happy. or maybe I keep finding cool feeds to subscribe to so that my time has to continually be spent on consumption. or maybe I’m in a rut.
whatever. here’s a post. from a phone! ironic that I keep finding ways to be connected yet instead of saving me time or letting me be more productive, I end up consuming more. yet… maybe consuming more means I *am* being productive in a general self-improvement sense.
I’m rambling now. there’s a new post by someone I follow that needs reading. back to sporadicity. email or comment if u want tips for some good feeds to follow / consume.
New York last week
So I was at the State of Play conference last week, which put me in New York City!
Stayed with cousin Lee-kai on the west side. It was brilliant except that our busy schedules meant that we only actually hung out for like 3 hours total: a game of Race for the Galaxy when I arrived on Tuesday and lunch at Crema with Jafe (friend from high school and husband of Crema owner, Julieta) the next day. Lee-kai and his friends know RftG really, really well and basically kicked my ass even though just the week before I won a game at home. In my defense, I guess, I had some really crappy cards throughout the game and waffled on which specialization I should take. I don’t think that game is about diversifying at all, and I paid for it.
Crema was as fantastic as the last time I was in New York back in April 2008. Mmmmm. Other restaurants I got to try out were Big Nick’s (got a guacamole burger), Penang (got sizzling tofu which was good but had that weird slimy coating that I sometimes see on tofu; what is that stuff? Also, Krista-Lee thinks she got sick on the curry chicken… 🙁 ), Buona Notte (“the best” claimed the street hawkers), the cafe above Fairway on Broadway, Golden Unicorn (full on Chinese banquet, ftw!), and Katz’s (hot pastrami sandwich, yum). Pretty much great food all around.
Since I think the conference sessions were summarized pretty well by others (Raph, Tim, Bart, Sara, Greg L at Terra Nova, twitter hashtag #sop09), I’ll stick to the people I met. Anyway, I place more importance on the connections made and individual and collective collisions of people and ideas than I do on the sessions, so it’s pretty appropriate to list the fine folks I met.
Telephone Pictionary online
We can finally play Telephone Pictionary online at BrokenPictureTelephone!
Thanks Aaron for forwarding this!