Funk Dancing for Self-Defense

Player-Killing

2005-11-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

In an article from Wired's May 1998 issue, I encountered http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.05/ultima.html this article.

It's an interesting one - the female author goes into Ultima Online in order to investigate the sociology of warring "tribes" in the game.

It turns out that the easiest, fastest, and most exciting way to gain fame and fortune in that game is to simply kill other players, particularly new ones who are just getting used to the interface. There are lots of quotes about this - it's a pretty interesting article.

But the end of it made me laugh out loud. The author created a (female) character named DarkStarr and investigated one of these tribes for her story. I'll let her take it from here:

When they arrived, the brethren were hanging out, casually hurling fireballs at each other. They crowded around DarkStarr - "Who's the newcomer? It's a female!" - and made crude jokes. To entertain DarkStarr, they killed a wandering healer, ate some of the victim's body parts, and prayed together over the corpse, offering it as a sacrifice to the evil Guardian.

At one point, things turned really ugly. In a display of brute force, Bubba turned himself into a gorilla and threatened to sodomize Xavori with a thigh bone taken from one of the victims. Unintimidated, Xavori cast a blazing firewall at Bubba - but because of server lag (or perhaps bad aim) it hit DarkStarr instead, killing her instantly.
The hosts gathered around, staring down at the corpse in momentary dismay. One of them cried out, "You've killed the reporter from Wired, you moron!"

I love it. A perfect microcosm of gender in a male-dominated online world.

love online, actually

2005-11-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've posted. But in doing research for my final paper, I have run across a TON of articles about love online.

Some of them are about real human relationships that begin online, as from a dating service or even a chatroom that blossoms into something more. And this is an interesting and rich topic.

But I think it's essentially the same as "computer dating" of ten years ago (a computer matches up your profile with a compatible one - high tech for the time). And it's more or less a higher-tech version of meeting your perfect mate at the local bar. Or, in prehistoric times, the local cave.

I'm actually more interested in relationships that don't blossom offline. For whatever reason, they're left in the virtual world.

One reason for this might be a physical distance between the people, although if they really want to meet, they often find a way to.

Another reason, one that I find even more fascinating, is that both parties like the relationship just as it is.

Why would they feel that way? I don't know now, but I'm sure I'll find out as I research tangential articles for my paper.

The annoying people

2005-10-30T05:52:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend has a friend who looks like Miss Piggy. The thing is, she has a worse personality than Piggy as well.This chick married a dude who I really didn't like. Nobody liked him. She came up to my place to visit my girlfriend, and I barely was able to not kick her out of the house.

She showed us their wedding picture, and exclaimed, "Look at that expression on his face! He looks like Kermit the Frog!"So I said, "That would make you... mmfffmmmmffffioeohnop!" (That last bit is approximately the noise I made when I realized I didn't want to say what I had started to say and I grabbed a handful of cookies and shoved them in my mouth in order to stop myself).

I tried to convince my g/f to dump her friend - neither of of liked Piggy, and Kermit just dragged the whole thing down well below tolerable.But she was timid about it - we all saw that Seinfeld episode where he had to break up with an old friend.

So Kermit and Piggy invite us to an engagement party at their house in NJ. We went, and I resolved that I would never show more love for my girlfriend than I would by simply behaving myself.

Kermit left to pick up some chips or something, and Piggy told us this story:

Everyone hates Kermit. And that goes triple for people who have to work with him. So he can't hold a job to save his life.While they were in the midst of wedding plans (and living together), he got fired from his insurance job. Instead of telling her this, he got up every morning, dressed for "work", and went to the mall to sit around for eight hours a day. His voice mail at work still worked (although they took his name off of the message, he could still retrieve messages), so every hour or so he would call in to figure out if she called him at work. If she did, he'd call her back and tell her that he was too busy to get the phone.This went on for about three weeks - she saw little signs here and there, but ignored them. And he never told her that he didn't have a job, and continued to dress and leave every day for "work".

He decided to get a new job, and he figured that the best way to go was to fax resumes around. But they didn't have a fax machine. So he bought one so he could fax resumes when she was out.

One day she decided to do laundry (NOT her normal gig), and when she opened up the dryer to insert the clothes, she saw something in there. HE WAS HIDING THE FAX MACHINE IN THE DRYER!!!!So the jig was up - she put the pieces together and yelled at him when he got home that night.

And then, to punish him further apparently, she went ahead and married him.

On the three-hour ride home, I told my lovely girlfriend that she had to break up with Piggy, otherwise those two would come visit us more. They had, of course, driven away all of their friends who have any sense. She had come to the same conclusion, so didn't need much convincing.

She broke up with Piggy on the phone the very next day. As far as I know (they don't talk to us anymore), they're still married.

Talk about a warning sign - from her perspective, that must have given her a really big indication. If he's uncomfortable telling her the truth about that, how is he going to react when one of those really big marriage issues come up?

first-person shooter video games with an agenda

2005-10-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein

This is a link to the very first shooter game that I remember playing. It was rumored to have an agenda back then; the Wikipedia entry doesn' t really mention this.

Back then, I had heard rumors that the game was financed by the Nazi party (whether the American or German branch, I don't know), and that it was pro-Hitler. I didn't play it too often, but I remember thinking that this was hooey - I never saw any particular glorification of Axis stuff.

Open Source and Linus Torvalds

2005-10-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

This is a particularly illustrative Wired Magazine article about Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the father of open-source computing.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus.html

Wikipedia weighs in on Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

The big intellectual property corporations are shaking in their boots and trying to discredit Linux and Torvalds every chance they get. At stake is their very profitability and thus survival.

But at a consumer level, allowing the users of a system to change the system to meet their needs makes a lot of sense. Who better would know what they need?

Open Source has incarnations throughout history, but Henry Ford's Model T automobile is one of the first widely-hacked consumer products. Ford built it with an eye on the end user being able to fix it and even modify it slightly, and Open Source as a business model was effectively born.

"Truth" in editorials?

2005-09-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

I really hate when a source takes a quote from the philosophical opposition out of context to strengthen its own argument. Even when I largely agree with the source.

This seems to have happened in our class reading assignment. We were told to read http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org//speech/libraries/topic.aspx?topic=patriot_act&SearchString=internet. Specifically, this part got to me:

Others contend the ACLU’s attack against Section 215 is overblown. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, argues in an August 2003 column in The Washington Post that “Section 215 merely gives anti-terror investigators the same access to such records as criminal grand juries, with the added protection of judicial oversight.” She rejects the staunch opposition to the provision by many in the library community, writing: “By publicly borrowing library books, patrons forfeit any constitutional protections they may have had in their reading habits.”

This makes me angry. I believe that the books you read, the TV you watch, the Internet sites you frequent are your business, not that of law enforcement. Only in this way can open information be exchanged.

Well, it turns out that the quote at the end of my italics was taken out of context. The original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A34482-2003Aug22&notFound=true

The relevant paragraph:

The ACLU also argues that Section 215 violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. But like it or not, once you've disclosed information to someone else, the Constitution no longer protects it. This diffuse-it-and-lose-it rule applies to library borrowing and Web surfing as well, however much librarians may claim otherwise. By publicly borrowing library books, patrons forfeit any constitutional protections they may have had in their reading habits.

I really disagree with the author's point here. But the first time I italicized this, the author looked ill-informed and dumb. In context, she makes a nuanced argument after establishing a "fact". So although I believe she's wrong, she is not likely ill-informed or dumb.

The author of the first article listed here should be ashamed. He deliberately (my guess; I can't prove that) obfuscated a quote from his opposition in an attempt to prove his point. If he thinks that his audience can be persuaded to the other side of this argument by a disclosure of what's really going on, perhaps his argument is flawed from the start.

Interactive Fiction

2005-09-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a link:

In my last entry I talked about the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. The next generation of this form was in early computer gaming. At least, this is the next generation that I remember using.

The Zork games were probably the best-known and most popular versions of these entirely text-based adventures. That's right - no graphics whatsoever. As a child, I whined at my parents to buy me a computer just so I could play these games.

The link I started with has definitions for all of these, so if I confuse you, click there.

Zork was essentially a single-player MUD (or Multi-User Dungeon). This phenomenon is even more interesting. These were the first networked games - one could play with people in other countries or people sitting across the computer lab. My experiences with these started when I began college in 1993. I understand that they had been around since the mid-Eighties.

I witnessed some people who became too immersed in this culture - beginning real-life relationships with online buddies and ignoring studies or even personal hygene in an all-consuming drive to spend more time on the computer.

There were several competing MUDs back then. All were available via Telnet; you had to know the IP address of the hosting computer, but that's all. They were loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons-ish adventures with swords and sorcery and all, but many evolved into not much more than a chatroom. Relationships, alliances, and conflicts were all formed on these boards.

Again, you can read more about these things by following the Wikipedia links that I've provided. They're interesting stuff.

But this was my first exposure to the time-draining abilities of networked computers, and I learned my lesson. As soon as that became a priority in your life, you were lost to the real world. College is a time in which weak or addictive personalities often became marginalized, and no one was talking about Internet Addiction. It's not drugs or alcohol - there's an extensive warning and helping system for those types of addictions. This is something which blindsided my generation, and several people were lost to it.

Interactive media of the Eighties

2005-09-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

I'm 30 years old, and grew up in the Reagan years. Professor Jordeno has instructed us to read and watch a lot of original material from before my lifetime, much of which has reminded me of pop culture references with which I'm more familiar.

So I've decided to dedicate the blog to discussing these points.

We've been required to read Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths". Besides sounding like a swear word, this work is useful to our purposes in that it raises the spectre of a hypertext interactive novel.

This made me think of the types of interactive story-based media that I've encountered and (in some cases) really liked.

The first of these is the Choose Your Own Adenture series of books, summarized here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

You can read all about this if you like. My personal experience is that I was addicted to these from a very young age, and took them all out of the library when I could. By the time I had blown through all of them, I had forgotten the first one and read it again. I spent years happily going through these - I often put upwards of fifteen bookmarks in the book because sometimes you start down a road that you don't want to be on.

Tomorrow, I'll post and discuss about Interactive Fiction.

Who I am

2005-08-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

My name is Erik Strohmeyer. I grew up in North Jersey, and then went to college in Glassboro, NJ (South Jersey, by Philadelphia), graduating with a Communications degree in 1997.

Immediately upon graduation, I moved up to Connecticut to take a job at ESPN, which I interviewed for and procured during my last week as a student.

My degree was more general than job-specific, which is what I wanted. I didn't decide that I wanted to work in television until my Junior year.

So I've been with ESPN for eight years now - I've changed job descriptions several times and I changed departments about two years ago.

I had thought of myself as a sports fan and a writer, and figured that I'd end up in Production. But Production wasn't interested in me. I got a job as a studio technician, figuring that once I was in the door, I could change fairly easily.

But surprise! I was hooked. I found to my great surprise that I had a very analytical way of thinking, and a very technical way of performing. The various machines that I had to learn all fascinated me, and with new equipment rolling in all the time, I was surprisingly satisfied. I stayed in Technical Operations (as a studio technician) for six years.

In that time, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I have a certain intuitive way of being just good enough with new equipment to put it on the air and learn its nuances. After carrying a lot of stress trying to be perfect, I learned to let it go a bit. While I still strived for no mistakes, I grasped that everyone has moments where they do something dumb. The operators I admired were able to wriggle free of "sudden attacks of stupidity" very quickly, often with no one noticing their initial mistake.

I also learned that I disliked the hours that were being dictated for us to work. Tech Ops is an hourly position at my company - although overtime is not required, many of us got used to the paychecks that went along with long weeks.

I grew older, as most people do. When I was about 28, I realized that I love my girlfriend (same one as today; we met in college and have been together since) and my outside life far more than I love work. I began a search for a position that only expected forty hours a week.

I immediately found a position for "Satellite Access Control Engineer". Not having any idea what that is or what's expected, I applied. I figured that at worst I would learn something about another part of my company and meet a few new people.

Well, I hit it off with the boss right away. Some of the computers in the office were running VAX/VMS software - the same antiquated stuff I became proficient with in college. So I launched into a long series of stories about my deeds and misdeeds with that computer system (probably, in retrospect, not the best idea for a job interview situation). The boss loved it.

I had walked into the interview room a bit disheveled (I was on shift, and had no advance warning of the interview), with no expectations at all. I walked out completely determined to work in this environment.

Sure enough, the job offer came a week later. I had worried and worried about money - my base salary plus overtime were substantial, and I didn't know if this department could pay me. When the Human Resources person contacted me with a figure, I was stunned. It was more money than my salary plus overtime. I reflexively asked for a day to think it over and then chased the poor man down the hallway, screaming that I would take the position.

Anyway, that was two years ago. In that time, I learned a great deal about conditional access (don't get me started), and the specific job and requirements of my current position. After a time I realized that I suddenly had more time to myself - I had been averaging sixty hours a week in Tech Ops, and suddenly was down to about forty. So I decided to do something worthwhile with that time.

I dabbled in part-time employment, but wasn't happy with it. I tried "Continuing Education" at the local community college, and that didn't really get me anywhere I wanted to go. So I applied for the program at Quinnipiac, figuring that a Masters degree would be a wonderful thing to have. And just like before, as I learned more about the program, I got excited and immersed in the idea.

At the moment, I'm concerned about two things. First, I don't really know what kind of student I am. I've been out of school for so long and am such a different person than I was in 1997 that I have no actual idea about study habits or online learning. Second, I feel like I'm behind in the class already. I've never touched Powerpoint, and some of the presentations by my classmates are complete enough to intimidate me. For instance, I know that I can't do something as visually interesting as Serena did if you give me a month instead of a few days.

I hope that this course and this area of study challenge me, and that I respond in a good way to it. Please try to keep in mind that while you are learning about me, I am learning about myself.

Why I called the blog this

2005-08-27T15:40:00.000-07:00

I am a tremendous fan of The Simpsons, and I was watching the DVD of Season Five on my recent vacation. There were several scenes that were cut from syndication because the syndicators wanted to get more commercials into the shows. Most of these are stand-alone, and not very funny.

But in this one episode (it's called Secrets of a Successful Marriage and is coded 1F20), Homer passes a classroom with "Funk Dancing for Self-Defense" on a sign by the door. I'll copy and paste from The Simpsons Archive:

In the next class, Moe teaches gangsta rapper self-defense.  "All
right, here's the 4-1-1, folks.  Say some gangsta is dissin' your fly
girl.  You just give 'em one of these."  A rap beat begins and Moe
begins to break.  After a backflip, he grabs a shotgun at blasts three
rounds into the air -- much to the surprise and discomfort of his
students.

You'll need to trust me - it's very funny. I had shared a room with my brother for eighteen years, and have never seen him laugh as long or as loudly as he did on that sofa at Cape Cod.