Here is my first experiment with animated GIF montage. It’s pretty hard to do, and this attempt is from perfect, but I am starting to get a sense of how this works—and want to do a series focusing on David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone to figure this out.
The 1950 film Gun Crazy has been on my mind a bit these days, particularly the first scene wherein the protagonist steals a gun from the local hardware store.
The whole film centers around the morbid fascination with guns in the U.S., and I wanted to see if I couldn’t capture that spirit with a montage GIF. I failed. The kid’s obsession with guns is much more richly conveyed in the full scene than the abbreviated GIF I created which isn’t all that interesting in the end. Nonetheless, it’s a first attempt at a larger series of montage GIFs, which I hope will build up to pulling together a coordinated series of GIFs from a film, TV show or some other animated episode (somewhat similar to what Michael Branson Smith did with his North by Northwest animated GIF movie poster). A series of GIFs or coordinated montages have been pretty common practice for a while now in the GIF world, but I haven’t really experimented with this approach yet. I particularly like this mashup of The Shining and Gangnam Style for eternal editing purposes, and this episode from the Scary Snowman is kinda like an animated GIF real-life comic book/tv episode, but then again not really any of those.
Anyway, while scanning through Gun Crazy I couldn’t resist GIFing Joseph H. Lewis’s homage to the final scene of Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 classic The Great Train Robbery. If you haven’t seen Gun Crazy I can’t recommend it enough, it’s one of the two best b films of the noir genre, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is the other.
So, this is my first official entry for the GIF Festival, I hope to get a more coherent series of GIF montages and episodes together over the next couple of weeks—we’ll see.
I was searching the UMW library database for a James Ellroy novel I wanted to re-read this break (The Big Nowhere), when I stumbled across his introduction to an Everyman’s Library Edition of some of Dashiell Hammett’s stories and novels. I was excited by the discovery because both Hammett and Ellroy factored heavily into the hardboiled class I taught this fall, and I was dying to know what Ellroy made of Hammett. I walked over to the library—what a privilege it is to have one so close!—and grabbed the book. (As is often the case these days, the introduction is also available in its entirety online as an article in the Guardian titled “The poet of collision”, who knew?)
As usual Ellroy didn’t disappoint, and the first paragraph of his succinctly jumpy introduction frames the tension at the heart of Hammett’s vision:
“We Never Sleep” The Pinkerton Detective Agency Motto and Icon
Dashiell Hammett was allegedly offered five Gs to perform a contract hit. It is most likely a mythic premise. He was a Pinkerton operative at the time. A stooge for Anaconda Copper made the offer. The intended victim was a union organiser. The stooge had every reason to believe Hammett would take the job – post-first-world-war Pinkertons were a goon squad paranoically fearful of all perceived reds. Hammett’s mythic refusal is a primer on situational ethics. He knew it was wrong and didn’t do it. He stayed with an organisation that in part suppressed dissent and entertained murderous offers on occasion. He stayed because he loved the work and figured he could chart a moral course through it. He was right and wrong. That disjuncture is the great theme of his work.
The great moral disjuncture Ellroy frames here was in many ways at the heart of the first three writers of the hardboiled course. From Hemingway to Hammett to Fante, the post-first-world-war meditation on the moral void of contemporary culture opened up like a huge, gaping hole at the center of the century, and all the Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx I tried to shovel into it couldn’t begin to fill it up. This is part of the reason why I’ve been drawn so deeply into the first three seasons of Boardwalk Empire, as a contemporary series it is embedded within that disjuncture, there is no clear moral course through it. A few students noted on the final exams I graded yesterday that the novelists we read during the second half of the course (Himes, Paretsky, Ellroy, Mosley) were attempting to right the wrongs of the earlier novels—a fascinating take on the class. There was a continuation of the same themes in the later novels, but rather then remaining within the ocean of moral uncertainty as Hammett does, the later writers surgically try and remedy the moral disjuncture historically.
Beyond that, Ellroy’s introduction vindicates one of the biggest omissions on my syllabus: Raymond Chandler. His work is included tangentially through films like Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951), but we didn’t read any of his novels. In fact, I made a conscious choice to put John Fante’s Ask the Dust in instead of The Big Sleep.
…Hammett’s vision is more complex than that of his near-contemporary Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be – gallant and with a lively satirist’s wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be – tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue.
Marlowe always seemed far too right, too pure—the dark side was purely slumming in his books. Personal triumphs aside, the other theme that comes up again and again this semester is the idea of work versus labor that pervades the genre. Ellroy gets at the tension between detecting as a job versus the fiction quite nicely:
Detective work was by nature prosaic. File prowls, blown tails, attenuated stakeouts. Crime stories demanded near-continuous action. File prowls must yield revelation. Blown tails must provide climax. Stakeouts must further plot. Hammett knew this going in: crime fiction was preposterous melodrama with a gnat-sized reality base. Never had there been a single case rife with multiple shootouts, homicidal seductresses and wall-to-wall mayhem succinctly resolved at tale’s end. Hammett had to fit social realism into a suffocatingly contrived form. He did it with language – densely spare exposition and multilayered dialogue.
I love how Ellroy reminds us of how far apart the reality and the fiction are in this sphere, re-situating the hardboiled crime novel within the realm of “preposterous melodrama” (which is interestingly linked to my other hang-up this semester: Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas). The narrative action of Red Harvest is preposterous, as Ellroy notes a bit further on:
The body count accretes with no more horror than pratfalls in farce. It doesn’t matter. The language is always there.
The language is all that matters, and it is rooted in work-a-day stiffs whom are private operatives working for corporate overlords at a meager wage. These are not workers within a larger social context of solidarity that defines the labor struggle of the early twentieth century, but rather alienated wage slaves. And what are they working towards? Well, to crush organized labor.
Hammett’s workday men risk peril for trifling remuneration and never question the choice. The great satisfactions of the job are the mastery of danger and the culling of facts to form a concluding physical truth. These facts comprise the closing of the case and thus the story. Hammett’s men stand hollowly proud in their constant case conclusions. They are in no way affirmed or redeemed. They have survived. They are hopped-up versions of the schmuck clerk who got through one more shift at Wal-Mart. Their mundane world swirls around them and ignores them.
Updating Hammett’s Continental Op to a “hopped-up” version of the “schmuck clerk” at Wal-Mart is frighteningly accurate caricature of contemporary culture that illustrates the train wreck that is the labor movement in the US. The historical and cultural themes underpinning hardboiled fiction and noir film are myriad, but this is the the theme that has been haunting me all semester—and Ellroy brings it home like a shiv in the neck. Hardboiled literature is violently hostile to organized labor. The vision of the lone, hardboiled detective as romantic hero acts as a trope to romanticize the institutional oppression of labor—and the flaccid, middle-aged, unattractive detective stands by helplessly watching and moralizing to no effect—then on to the next job. Ellroy points this struggle out when trying to make sense of Hammett’s operative work as “fascist tool” for the wealthy alongside a concomitant guilt that drives a literature of violent atonement that ultimately results in powerlessness.
Hammett saw himself as complicit. The realisation may have fuelled his self-destructive path with alcohol and women. He was a Pinkerton. He signed on to work for an enforcement agency that squashed workers flat. He knew it was wrong. He knew he was wrong. He did the job on an ad hoc basis and couched his Manoeuvrings within The Manoeuvre in a personal moral code. The monstrous force of systemic corruption cast his code and his own job holder’s life in extreme miniature and rendered everything about him small – except his guilt.
I love how Ellroy frames Hammett as a twisted character obsessed with his own guilt. It’s like a page from The Black Dahlia. We are our criticism.
I finally found some time to play through the modded level of Duke Nukem 3D called The Shining II that I wrote about a little while ago. Turns out the gameplay is actually quite good, but even more than that the 8-bit fan art created as an homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece is really impressive. The game was created back in 1997 by Bryan Arnett, and the attention to detail is impressive—what’s more it is really imagined as a sequel—the story goes Wendy and Danny escape in Mr. Halloran’s Snowcat and arrive at the local town of Lantis, Colorado and tell the local authorities the story of Jack’s madness. Turns out the first team that went up to the Overlook Hotel in search of Jack’s body couldn’t find it. Never fear, however, they have called in a specialist, yep, you guessed it: Duke Nukem! Below is the last bit of the fan fiction backstory setting up the sequel:
Suddenly, he heard music coming from one of the hallways. Distant at first, then making itself known loud and clear. It was one of those big band ballads with a syrupy-voiced boy crooner. Duke knew the song… ‘Midnight, the Stars, and You.’
“Work’s done, Jacky boy.” he said out loud crossing the
lobby, “Come out and play.”He cocked his gun and was swallowed by the black of the
hallway.
And that’s where the game starts. I love the simultaneous homage to both The Shining and Duke Nukem—and I have to say this might be the most satisfying fan art I have come across yet. Special thanks to Joe McMahon for figuring out how to get Duke Nukem 3D running on the Mac, you can find both the EDuke32 emulator and The Shining II level packaged up here. To play it on your Mac just unzip and then select and open both the REDRUM.COM and REDRUM.GRP with the EDuke32 application. And maybe the coolest thing about the whole thing is Arnett’s freely giving his fan art back to the community
This package was created as a tribute to Stanley Kubrick and his great film “The Shining” and it is being offered as a free work of art to the fans, all over the world, of Kubrick and his movies.
Thanks, Bryan, it is greatly appreciated and you are a genius!
Anyway, to return to a point I was making earlier, the level of detail and creativity that went into the 8-bit art of this level is pretty remarkable. It was fun to just cruise around the Overlook and try and makes sense of the space. What’s more, you know you have created something amazing when it gives Rob Ager the inspiration for his video essay on spatial anomalies in the film. In my adventures playing the game I stopped and took some pictures, and for any of you out there who are fans of the film, I would imagine these might hit home.
Anil Dash has quite an remarkable post titled the “Web We Lost” (thans for the heads up Tim). I really like the bit below because it gets right at the heart of the Domain of One’s Own pilot we are running at the University of Mary Washington.
In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
That’s beautifully stated, my only problem with that post (like many eulogies about the good ole days of the web five years ago) is that nothing is lost. Sure folks might have fallen into the corporate silos, but there is plenty of time to re-examine those choices and re-imagine the future. To this end I recently ordered (and just received) Jon Udell‘s Practical Internet Groupware because I’m increasingly inspired and fascinated by the ideas that started to break open both the thinking and reality of web as distributed platform. I want to get a sense of the thinking more than a decade ago in this realm in order to approach this particular bullet point by Anil Dash with a larger and deeper context rather than through the omnipresent apocalyptic ruins of the now.
Udell’s thinking represents a refreshing, optimistic approach to understanding why the web we are working towards is anything but lost. In a recent post on the Wired blog, “Goodbye Fax, Hello Personal Cloud,” he uses a story of sorting through the quagmire of medical bills and insurance claims to unpack the vision of a personalized domain as far more than an online address, but as an aggregator, syndicator, and router wrapped into one wherein we control and streamline the processes of connecting and communicating our personal information:
I authorize them to access my personal cloud. And the authorization is granular. The auto insurer has write access, so it can poke the Exhaustion of Benefits (EOB) token into my cloud data store, but no read access, because it doesn’t need that. The hospital and the clinic have read access to just that one document. (Separately they have write access so they can poke bills into my data store.) The hospital and the clinic can also subscribe to notifications, so when the EOB token hits my cloud they know it’s there and can access it. Since all access to my cloud is audited, I know when that happens — or if it doesn’t.
We’re faced with myriad problems that impede effective communication on a daily basis, how can a more intelligent design and architecture of the web help us solve some of those problems? This is the basic question Udell seems to approach most issues he faces ona regular basis, and it’s why I find myself returning to his work. There’s no doom and gloom sensationalism, rather its equal parts pragmatism and idealism, and all class. I want to be compelled to think long and hard about how we can teach for the future so that Johnny Can Syndicate—not play forlorn so that we can stop taking responsibility for what’s happening to the web.
Today is the seven year anniversary of bavatuesdays. Andy Rush and I are working on a more creative take on the bava’s anniversary coming soon that’ll pay homage to my third year on the bava post, so stay tuned. Seven years is a decent amount of time to have spent regularly documenting and sharing the work I’ve done, and what’s always special about December 13th for me is that it also marks my seven year anniversary at UMW.
Add to that the fact I just passed the 2000 posts mark (2002 to be exact) and over 10,000 comments (10,261) you can see I am the proprietor of a regular blogging empire. On average, I’ve written 286 posts a year with roughly 5 comments per post. That stat blows my mind (basically a post everyday save weekends). The heavy traffic on this site came and went back in 2008 and 2009, but the habit of writing and creating hasn’t waned as a result. In fact, back in July of 2009 I wrote my 1000th post, which is almost exactly three and a half years ago, suggesting there is a regular rhythm to the process for me. I love the dogged, everydayness of blogging—it has become the last of my bad habits.
The site has seen the birth of UMW Blogs, EDUPUNK, Edtech Survivalist, ds106, Summer of Oblivion, hardboiled,and Domain of One’s Own to name just a few of its idea babies. The tale of the tape is all here. I have brought it hard the last seven years, and I am proud of that fact. Blogging has enabled me a voice I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and while the traveling and presentations have grown laborious for me as of late, I’ve never gotten tired of the blogging. It’s my space, it’s a part of who I am, and it reflects all the ideas, dreams, and possibilities I come across in my thinking about film, literature, storytelling, edtech, and much more. It has been an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds, and while not always pretty—and I make to apologies for any of it— its as authentic a space for personal expression as I can muster.
Oddly enough, I still can’t seem to avoid the occasional controversy despite the fact I am evermore congenial, but even that is pretty trivial and ridiculous when I think about it. This space continues to be an evolving document of my thinking, and that is something anyone else out there can take or leave, but for me its a goldmine of my intellectual development, and you can be sure the bava isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I am gonna spend much of the next month-long vacation reflecting on the hardboiled class, working through the Internet of Attractions ideas, doing a general clean-up and archive of the bava (still suffering after my YouTube account shutdown), work around cassa bava, as well as some engage in some serious gaming (that’s the one part of my life I have been failing at for the last seven years). So, here’s to seven year’s on the bava and all the irreparable harm its caused me.
Larry McCallum, Web Librarian for Thompson River University (TRU), posted his thoughts about my presentation on Domain of One’s Own this past Friday at The Day for Learning conference. And besides the suggestion that I must resonate deeply with the shallow, modern-day campus culture of sexpots, pumping iron studs, German cars, and local radio (what an eclectic collection of traits Canadian University students have!) I’ll forge on in hopes that all the nostalgic babyboomers retire sooner than later 🙂
But what do I know? The world has whirled on its axis. I came of age when young women wore shapeless dresses and no makeup as a matter of pride. Today, campuses are fashion shows and female students would-be sexpots. Boys pump iron. Campus events feature German cars and local radio stations, but nothing deliberately political.
Groom fits this vibe better than I do. He uses a comic-book-superhero avatar, speaks in a steady stream of movie references, peppers his writings with high-wattage expressions (“excited”, “blown away”), and runs a sidebar of “testimonials” adjacent to every blog post. (Ed tech, like many spheres, can be a heady mutual-admiration society, as the conference bore out.)
Attacking me as a meth-head hipster I can understand, but the students? NOT THE STUDENTS!!! Funny thing is, I was lucky enough to hear two awesome TRU students, Ryan and Mark, talk at the conference this past Friday. And oddly enough, they looked and acted nothing like the caricatured vision of students that McCallum frames above, which is a shame cause I wanted to see some sexpotted muscles in a BMW listening to Kamloops radio. In fact, Mark and Ryan were passionate, articulate, in decent shape (but not particularly muscular), and intellectually engaged with the idea that a university can deeply challenge and shape one’s evolving notions of self and identity.
I appreciate McCallum’s post because it helps define the contours of the project for me a bit better–particularly what it is not. The one, half-thought out critique McCallum had suggested was how an online identity project like this apes the brand-driven reality of the third-party services I seem to be railing against.
But isn’t shaping an online identity what corporations themselves do obsessively? So, does grooming a personal Web identity turn a person into his own spin doctor, not to mention a mirror-gazer unduly concerned with appearance?
I guess if UMW were centered around navel gazing and spin doctoring I’d respond affirmatively to the rhetorical question above. But it’s not—and I am sure TRU isn’t either. Our courses are a space to empower students, encourage and engage critical thought, and think deeply about the full complement of problems and possibilities our historical moment presents. Why would the intellectual by-products of such a process be understood as morose narcissism? Is he inferring students have no power to think critically about the web landscape they find themselves in and how it relates to all domains of learning across the university? Does he question the ability of professors to engage this conversation alongside them? If so, why is he working at a university at all?
I guess the only thing that pains me more than not being able to articulate Domain of One’s Own is a patent dismissal of the quality of work that students produce:
I know I run the risk of sounding like a harrumphing, hidebound stick-in-the-mud, pining for a mythical time when kids were, gosh, just kids. [NOOOOO!] But it did used to be the case that students merely stuffed their typewritten assignments in a forgotten desk drawer, if they kept them at all. In a pre-looking-glass world no one cared about your long-ago minutiae — and really, I doubt anyone does today. So why are we fetishising these things, implicitly telling students that their “portfolios” will matter? Because it reflects well on universities as career-engines?
So, to recast this a bit, we should be telling students their work doesn’t matter, their ideas are meaningless minutia, and they’ll be happy we destroyed all their data for them. To misquote Nobody quoting William Blake: “The vision of university that thou doth see is my vision’s greatest enemy.” There could not be a statement more opposed to the vision that has inspired the work of Domain of One’s Own. It celebrates the meaningless dance of our subsumption into an alienating and disempowering system and nostalgically immortalizes it as the pre-looking-glass “good ole days.” That’s not only bad history, it’s downright dangerous thinking! Are those the same good ole days of racial segregation of First Nation residential schools? (As an aside, one of the most powerful presentations I’ve ever seen took place earlier in the day when Estella spoke of her experience at a residential school in the 1950s—which makes McCallum’s “mutual admiration society” comment in reference to the conference that much stranger, not to mention his vision of the past as somehow purer that much creepier.)
The comment I left on McCallum’s blog earlier today was far more conciliatory than this post. I was trying to start a conversation, even though his tone suggested he would probably not be interested in one (which makes me wonder why he used trackbacks to this blog to begin with). But the more I thought about it, the more I started to think his post was not only rude (which it definitely was), but also quite hostile to the core of what I believe as an educational technologist. And whether or not he had any intention of publishing my earlier comment (I am including it below), I figured I would post this as a response in my own space that he can’t control. And if it turns out all he really wanted to do was offer a weak intellectual critique of my idea in order to attack the academic caliber of the students and faculty at his institution, then I figured simply pointing all this out on the bava would be enough of a response. Suck it.
Here is my earlier comment, which I now formally retract 🙂
Larry,
I appreciate this post because it helps define the contours of the project for me a bit better. I really don’t know where this leads, and the question of online identity can quickly become a brand-driven reality. I particularly like this comment:
“But isn’t shaping an online identity what corporations themselves do obsessively? So, does grooming a personal Web identity turn a person into his own spin doctor, not to mention a mirror-gazer unduly concerned with appearance?”
For me the question is how do we engage the idea of online identity as greater than the omnipresent vision of branding? Might there be a more authentic vision (and I understand how problematic a term like authentic might seem from a comic book character edtech person
) wherein an academic community can support and encourage students and faculty alike to enter into a discourse around their professional field, hobbies, and/or passions. I am wondering if a space that students are asked to consider and experiment as an intellectual and personal journey of sharing and reflecting through on their learning might lead to some interesting possibilities. We’ve had some greta success with this with UMW Blogs already, and I think what Domain of One’s Own adds to this discussion, if anything, to talk to the ShatteredAccountants points, is the ability for students to have a deeper understanding of how these services and the corporate exchange in data during our moments shales them in ways they can;t control. I appreciate the candid feedback because it helps me further fine tune a vision that is still very much emerging, and the fact that it remains deeply uncertain is why it is attractive to me, which may be a psychological issue
Image credit: Conrad Viedt from the 1928 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs
This is my last word on James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia because I need to write about the re-emergence of black capitalism in Walter Mosely’s Devil in a Blue Dress. At the beginning of Tuesday’s discussion about Devil in a Blue Dress (to be posted separately soon) we talked about the recurrence of the Joker from Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) in several student posts. Early on Jessica photoshopped the Joker’s head on Bruno from Strangers on a Train to highlight his insanity. And again, when reading Ellroy’s Black Dahlia, both Brenna and Jesse invoked the similarities between Betsy Short’s being “slashed from ear to ear” to Heath Ledger’s Joker from the Dark Knight. In fact, Brenna referred to Dahlia as the first Joker and Paul Bond (who has been nothing short of amazing in #emboiled, but that is fodder for a whole ‘nother post) followed up with this comment framing a much longer history for the first Joker going back to Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs, which is actually the key to Bucky Bleichert figuring out who really murdered Betty Short. There’s a portrait of Gwynplain (the mutilated character from Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs whose mouth has been slashed ear to ear) that haunts Bucky. And after doing research, Jane Champion gives Bucky some history:
“It’s a Frederick Yannantuono original, and it inspired by an old classic novel—The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. The book was about—”
There was a copy of The Man Who Laughs in the shack where Betty Short was killed. I was buzzing so hard I could hardly hear what Jane was saying.
“—a group of Spaniards back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were called Comprachicos, and they kidnapped and tortured children, then mutilated them and sold them to the aristocracy so that they could be used as court jesters. Isn’t that hideous? The clown in the painting is the book’s main character, Gwynplain. When he was a child he had his mouth slashed ear to ear. Bucky, are you all right?”
MOUTH SLASHED EAR TO EAR.
So not only does this tie into the Joker theme students have run with, but it also frames a larger literary history Ellroy is leading us to, but also French film history given the gorgeous film adaptation of the book made in 1928 starring Conrad Viedt, pictured above. I wonder how much research Nolan did when drawing Ledger’s Joker along the lines of Hugo’s Gwynplain—which was the original inspiration for the character Joker in the DC Comics of the 1940s. A beautiful, tangled web of cultural connections, indeed. This is when a literature class is at its very best—and its has been a ride. Despite the difficulty of doing a class well on the first run (I definitely want another go at hardboiled), the willingness of the class and the seemingly unlimited generosity of time and thoughtful participation by Paul Bond really made this experience amazing, but like I said, more on that anon.
One of the many awesome Gary Larsen’s The Far Side comics
Earlier this week Jeff Young and Warren Arbogast (a UMW alumni!), of The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast, invited me on their program to work through some of the ideas at the heart of University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own project. You can listen to the half hour long episode here.
What I’m enjoying about conversations like this about Domain of One’s Own is that the concept is starting to make a bit more sense in my mind as people push me to frame it as succinctly as possible. It’s not easy because, as Jeff and Warren note, at its core Domain of One’s Own is “heady stuff” —it’s a conceptual shift in how we think about controlling data, syndicating content, aggregating ideas, and, more importantly for UMW’s purposes, empowering faculty and students alike.
There’s no one easy way to frame this project as an elevator pitch because it’s a very small, experimental instantiation of a much larger vision of Jon Udell‘s that pushes us to imagine highly personalized digital domains wherein we manage myriad elements of our online lives from school work to personal photos to dental records to electric bills. A private/public domain of personal data that tells the stories of our lives and as a result is crucial for us to control and decide who sees what and what goes where. A digital social security number of sorts, a tolken that is secure and frames a context digitally that was heretofore not only been unnecessary, but unimaginable.
And all of this is that much cooler because two hours before this interview I got to sit down with Krystyn Moon’s History Research Methods course that is piloting the Domain of One’s Own project to get a sense of what their experience has been thus far. I was surprised at how effusive they were. They were excited about the idea of having a personalized portfolio of their work they owned, they also liked the idea that they (and their parents) could find the domain on Google. I became the object of bragging rights with their friends at other colleges that didn’t have this option—how awesome is that?! What’s more, they were wrapping their heads around subdomains, the possibilities of imagining such a space for organizing their academic lives.
I was blown away by both how thoughtful and genuinely interested these students were, but not everything they said was positive. They felt it was coming way too late in their careers (most were Sophomores or Juniors); they wanted access to this space and how it works as Freshman, and they felt it would be important to integrate it into the Freshman seminars somehow—if only as a week-long how-to and here’s what it is. In that way every Freshman would be exposed to the initiative and have the option to experiment—which is encouraging because that is exactly what were thinking for the rollout in Fall 2013. There was also concerns about support and this project being more closely attended to than we have thus far. More documentation, more class time, and more experimentation with what they have—all things we are gearing up for now. Kudos to Krystyn Moon and her students for not only taking the time to really experiment with Domains of One’s Own this semester, but also for spending a class giving us feedback for the pilot. I am hoping Andy Rush and I can sit down with a few of these students and get some of their amazing reflections and suggestions documented for follow-up video to The Culture of Innovation gem. It’s getting very exciting up in here!
I first heard about the Duke Nukem 3D mod of Stanely’s Kubrick’s The Shining while watching Rob Ager’s brilliant video essay on spatial anomalies. I saw bits and pieces of the Overlook Hotel map in the video essay, but never actually played the game or saw an entire walkthrough. That changed this morning when I stumbled upon this video that features a walkthrough of the Shining II mod. And let me tell you, the attention to detail and evidence of love for the original is everywhere apparent—it’s an absolutely brilliant example of creative fan art. Below is the video walkthrough, and here is the actual mod that you can download and play if you already have the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic edition installed.
I haven’t tried to install and play Shining II yet, but I will be sometime very soon. I’m not sure how straightforward it is, or isn;t on the Mac, but when I figure out the details—I’ve heard some forum rumblings about an eDuke emulator for Macs, etc.—I’ll try and document the process for any potentially interested souls. What a great time suck to tide me over during Christmas break.
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