In the last year or so our mail is consistently misdelivered to our neighbors and vice-versa. It’s very likely the reason why we missed the deadline to pay for her benefits this past summer and why we keep missing important stuff and/or have to request original senders to resend stuff. What a pain in the ass.
Robin did a search on the web and found others with similar problems. Check out this great thread:
I want my snail mail! (via Ask MetaFilter)
I just applied for the Spencer dissertation fellowship this morning! It took a bit of writing and several revisions.
It strikes me as odd that there are probably several students who are applying from UW’s College of Ed this year, yet we haven’t talked to each other. Wouldn’t it be nice to know about the others and form a support/reading group? I’ll suggest that to ASCE (Associated Students of the College of Ed) for next year.
In line with this desire for more transparency, below is my abstract (200 word limit), and I posted the personal statement (400 word limit) I used on my About page. I’ve also uploaded the full 10 page proposal of my dissertation in PDF (10 pages is difficult!). Some of my best writing I think, but it seems so unfinished…
Players of massively multiplayer online games have to master a meta-game of learning the social norms of their sub-culture and achieving a certain level of social mobility in order to complete game goals. Certain players navigate this social networking meta-game with much more ease than others. How a particular player learns to participate in the community’s practices is bound up in layers of socio-political dynamics that originate from both in and out-of-game contexts. The role of educators is to help people understand and critique their social world. Yet online games culture is at a critical point where inequalities of everyday offline life will continue to be the norm in online life. Thus it is extremely important to look at the ways in which players come to understand their social contexts while learning to participate and work collaboratively. I document through ethnographic means how two groups of World of Warcraft players learned to work on common in-game goals. They did this through various online communication tools that were mediated by a shared understanding of the game artifact and the socially constructed roles they each played.
This post was created using ScribeFire, a FireFox addon for making blogging easier… I’m seeing if it handles tags and categories.
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(via a guildie, Euthan)
Fun 2D Flash web version of the Portal game that is getting a lot of press since it’s included in the Orange Box.
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A new kind (new to me) of spam has started happening on my blog. Here’s how it works.
Some fake blog links to your blog by posting about your post. As far as I can tell, it just takes an excerpt and prefaces it with something like “This is good…” You then get a pingback listed under your comments section which links to their blog. Then somewhere on the fake blog are links to porn sites (like in the footer or sidebar), a sidebar full of Google-generated ad stuff, or whatever.
At first I thought, maybe its benevolent spam since it benefits me to have other blogs link to me. But now I am thinking it is rather lopsided since I bet I get a lot more hits than the fake blog does.
Guess I will find a way to block these from happening… or be more vigilant about deleting them.
After some searching, I found more info about it! Apparently, I mean “trackback.”
You know how Miis can mingle? Is there a way to hook a Wii up to a website so that we can have a social network kind of website with Miis and stats and stuff? Or does that exist already? I don’t have a Wii.
Bloodspell is a 14-part film made using a game engine (AKA machinima), in this case Neverwinter Nights.
The full length film (which features some reshot and revoiced footage) is now ready to download and watch in its entirety (DivX or QuickTime)!
Liz Losh’s blog with lots of good reflective write-ups on AoIR8. Not like my shorthand notes kind of drivel. 🙂
Top 7 WTF? endings written by Charlie Barratt at Games Radar
Hilarious!
So, I’m still updating the AoIR stuff, but I got side-tracked by something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I put 3 different versions of my WoW paper up, along with 2 different versions of the slides. I’ve always wished academia, including the writing process, was more transparent. Why not start with me?
I also plan on uploading different versions of my dissertation (and proposal) as well as the complete data set I am working with (after I get it packaged and nicely organized) so anyone can use my data and see if I’m talking shit or bring their own lens to a complex social situation that I’m sure I’m only seeing only a focused fraction of. One thing that worried me is the fact that a lot of the in-game WoW chat is so specific to WoW that only other WoW players could understand what’s going on. But I can at least try to explain some of the terms and make it open for inspection. Anyone who has questions can just ask me to translate, by god!