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Bobby Syvarth Live at Sarah Street, playing Fire in Brooklyn....

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:26:36 -0400

Bobby Syvarth Live at Sarah Street, playing Fire in Brooklyn. Beautiful song, lyrics, band & soul. Check it out!

Technical Functionality and Gaming

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:10:25 -0400

Technical understanding of whatever we might be doing or planning on doing is, needless to say, essential. Otherwise, we might at some point find ourselves in a position where we might feel hindered or stuck because we don’t have the appropriate technical know-how. This is especially true now, when we are seeing an increasing interest and use of technology in so many different ways. It’s hard to escape it.

As far as a technical understanding within gaming is concerned, it is fairly easy to say that a user with a greater understanding of how a game functions will be able to get farther within the game than one who does not understand it at all, or one who has limited knowledge. The degree of knowledge depends on the user’s personal interest. More often than not, if a user continually is seen as returning to the game, he can be said to have interest and with time, he/she can gain a little technical understanding simply by repetition and a little exploration.

An undeniable element, of course, remains the difficulty of the particular game in question. Take for instance, Second Life: if you do not have any technical understanding of the how it works, you cant really use it, or your use will be limited. In a complicated environment like Second Life, it might take you longer to get used to or understand the code, and that too if you know how to read code or have any interest in it. You might not succeed if you don’t understand the technical functionality of games. On the other hand, if you do understand technical functionality of the particular game, you could gradually master the levels, or try to gain the maximum score, or act in whichever way the game functions to win the game ultimately.

Ted Talk: When games invade real life

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:13:00 -0400

Ted Talk: When games invade real life

Cyberattack on google hit password too.

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:12:55 -0400

Cyberattack on google hit password too.

It's all connected.

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:27:32 -0400

It can be quite difficult to separate intentions and/or impact technology, invention, discovery, etc. in other words, any object or service that did not exist before, can have on society (I use this term loosely). As per the Winner reading, certain technologies do have very calculated political consequences, case in point, the highways in Long Island to keep the lower income folk out of certain neighborhoods.

Regardless of what sort of technology we might be talking about, it is bound to have an impact on several different levels and on several different aspects. That is to say that technology through it’s use is bound to have a social, political and economic impact, whatever the technology might be. This same concept ties well with the Tim Wu article on net neutrality. Wu tries to explain using the fast food chain, KFC as an example, comparing it’s exclusive deal with Pepsi to hypothetical situation in which a particular highway would only allow GM cars to go on it’s roads. Here, the decision to allow only one vendor or one car company on the roads is a decision that will have an impact on a massive group of people. Folks eating at KFC cannot order Coke products and the non-GM cars cannot be allowed on the roads. So, one decision, be it small or big, will undoubtedly show ripple effects on everything around.

This article just came out yesterday:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/07/digital-economy-bill/

The bill just went through a Third Reading with little opposition, and still has a way to go before it will become a law. It will be interesting to see how this is going to affect media in general and the direction it will take.

U.S. Court Curbs F.C.C. Authority on Web Traffic

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:08:55 -0400

U.S. Court Curbs F.C.C. Authority on Web Traffic

FCC to Mandate Net Neutrality for the Web

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:06:51 -0400

FCC to Mandate Net Neutrality for the Web

Apple confirms iPad's issues with dual-band wifi routers

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:48:53 -0400

Apple confirms iPad's issues with dual-band wifi routers

iPad's actual cost, as per iSupply

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:47:25 -0400

iPad's actual cost, as per iSupply

10 Essential Design Tools for Social Media Pros

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:20:04 -0400

10 Essential Design Tools for Social Media Pros

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth. Using metadata from...

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:36:31 -0400

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth. Using metadata from existing images online from other users and adding more to create not just a network, but in the process “something bigger than its parts”.

Trololo Cat. A meme featuring a mashup of Russian singer Eduard...

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:09:50 -0400

Trololo Cat. A meme featuring a mashup of Russian singer Eduard Khil’s accidental viral hit “Trololo” with a cat video.

What if Woody Allen had directed Watchmen?

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:06:15 -0400

What if Woody Allen had directed Watchmen?:

makingofmovies:

fuckyeahwoodyallen:

I’d give anything.

Web 2.0. The machine is using us

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:06:21 -0400

Web 2.0. The machine is using us:

This little video considers the role of web 2.0, linearity, narrative, HTML, etc.

Vote for Andres Otero's film: Leaving Ground Zero

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:32:59 -0500

Vote for Andres Otero's film: Leaving Ground Zero:

Andres Otero is a Hunter student, whose film is up in the final 3. Please vote for his film so it be broadcast at Reel 13 this Saturday. Voting ends at 5pm today.

Bobby Syvarth performing at Sarah Street. Howard Alper on drums...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:53:00 -0500

Bobby Syvarth performing at Sarah Street. Howard Alper on drums in the background. 3.6

Cruel But Fair

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:46:00 -0500

Cruel But Fair:

Video #3 from Cruel But Fair. Another song by The Stuntcocks called “Noisy F*uck”.

Cruel But Fair

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:44:00 -0500

Cruel But Fair:

Another video from the in-production music documentary, Cruel But Fair. The song’s called “Superfero” by The Stuncocks.

Narrative in New Media

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:31:46 -0500

The ever present database in new media: it’s everywhere we look. As suggested in the Folksonomies reading, a new kind of narrative is being constructed. The example at hand: the Flickr photos with a tag, ‘sometaithurts.’ Although, the narrative constructed through user-created metadata in the above mentioned site, is rather unconventional, yet it is fairly prominent and ubiquitous within the new media. What is responsible and enables the generation of this sort of narrative is the fact that the metadata is being produced by the user, where one does not follow convention when adding metadata to uploaded files. The same photographic image, for instance, is tagged in several different ways. A professional and a non-professional producer bring their own perspectives and professional and/or personal lives into the mix when they create a piece and add metadata.

Through this process and approach, the structure thus created, ends up being non-linear unlike a more conventional narrative that is usually expected to have a beginning, middle and end. With data that is so spread out in a non-heirarchical way, where all data exits at the same level, so-to-speak, it becomes hard to maintain a linear narrative. For instance, on Flickr, a tag ‘cat’ could encompass many random, seemingly unrelated images. The only narrative a viewer could find under that tag would be mostly images with cats in them.

This leads to the question: what is narrative, then? My argument to this dilemma is rather simple. The lack of narrative is also a narrative. What we had been referring to all this time as a “narrative” can be classified as a “conventional narrative” where, as I mentioned above, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. What is produced now via the new media is also a narrative, just one that many are not used to. It still is a narrative, organised differently. It might also be fair to say to an extent, that there is no organisation to this narrative. Each individual user creates his own narrative depending on their own experiences while interacting with new media, deciding for themselves through these decisions what they choose to access. Take, for instance, the exercise done in class on Wikipedia: clicking on 10 links, each of which lead to very different, often very unrelated content, i.e., unorganised or random.

While using new media, it becomes the user’s initiative or responsibility to navigate through either which way he/she pleases to, thereby, creating individual, and perhaps, unique narratives.

"Dakota" by Heavy Industries.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:13:00 -0500

"Dakota" by Heavy Industries. :

Very cool animation done with text and synced audio. Link courtesy of Prof. Miranda.