I know. I am applying right now. I have my master's dergee in cultural studies. I wrote my thesis on videogames. I want to do my phd on videogame players as a subculture. get out there and interview my fellow gamers. just like people go talk to homeless people, or punks or people in papu new guinea. but it is a horrible time to be trying to get into a phd program. i talked to the graduate advisor at my old progam and he said that for their small department (5 profs) they had 180 applicants this year. i think they had like 50 the year i applied. none of my friends got accepted to phd programs last eayr. we can't ALL be stupid. our theory is that with the downturn in the economy lots of people are tryig to go back to school. so untill i get back into school, i'm working at a riverboat casino. not the most intellectually stimulating job in the world and trying to get stuff published to make me look better.
IN my emails to yahoo, they basically finally ended up saying that yeas, that.geo thing used to work, but not now. its too late to change it. its there forever. unless that letter to the copyright person thing works.
I have the sma eproblem. I had a geocities site with teh old street style adress. back in the day i was stupid enough to put my email adress on it. I forgot all about it untill last year when it occured to me that that email was getting an incredible amount of spam. I finally got through to yahoo and they basiclly said after months of telling me to try this and this and this, "Oh since you didn't change it back then you can't get into it at all now." so its still up there. i still get tons of spam at that email address. i see that others have said write their copywrite person. anyone have teh adress handy to post here? or a link to it?
See, for me the problem with this is that this is all your opinion. I gave up on the show after 2 or 3 eps, but was any of thiese expalnations you give even hinted at in the show? It really seemed that things were that way, just because they thought it was cool and never explained why they were that way.
i'm sort of amazed at where they have decided to draw the line. after hear so much hype about the sims, i finally broke down and bought it and was amazed at how narrow the career choices were and how much it just devolved into go to work so you cam buy stuff, so that you have to go to work so that you can buy stuff. personally i found the game pretty offensive in its relentless celebration of consumerism. but once they make it overt, then you get upset?
It almost seems as if the trendy thing is to dislike corporations (or certain ones at least, I don't seem to hear much about EA's relentless whoring out of the sims franchise...) and so people complain about that rather than look at the conditions that lead to the corporations in the first place. The game is about buying things, isn't that the problem? not that you can buy mcdonalds...
.."Damn DCMA got passed..doesn't seem to have effected my download of 20 gigs of warez and mp3's a day, but it's still evil!"
but isn't that kind of the point of why people don't like it? It doesn't do anything to stop people from downloading music, but it does stop people from doing other things that aren't nearly as questionable leagally.
i can't really comment on the decision. i'm not a lawyer. but i do think it is sad that the airline spent all this time and money on lawyers instead of making their site easier to navigate. even a little, "If you are blind, please call 555-5555 for help" might have helped. but no they spent their money on lawyers.
A couple of clarifications. the guy from MIT was Henry Jenkins. THere was no audience on the donahue show. what happened was that the other two guests were protrayed as concerned parents and he was protrayed simply as an academic, but he is a concerned parent as well. Jenkins wrote up his experiences and it was posted at Salon.com.
Secondly, i beleive that it was not oprah, but the today show that had a guest who claimed that teh sniper may be a gamer. This comment was pciked up by nearly all the major news outlets. do a search at news.google.com for video game and sniper and you will find the article.
the problem with this commentis that it came from Florida lawyer Jack Thompson who was a lawyer in the court case in paduca where a school shooting occured and they were trying to sue the videogame companies. so of course it is in his best interests to blame videogames every chance he gets. what he said, can be found at CNN. Basically his logic is that the sniper is alleged to have left a taro card that says "I am god" Thompson cliams that gamers say this all the time. of course i don't know what gamers he is talking about. since i don't really recall hearing this in any of the games i play online. and mentioned god mode in games, but totally got it wrong. so despite the fact that he was completely wrong, now people think that the sniper is a gamer. I posted a rant on this on my blog if anyone cares.
on a related note, a couple days ago on headline news, a reporter went to a sniper school. he had never touched a gun before, but was able to hit the target with the sniper rifle. so you don't even need to know what youare doing to be able to hit a person.
this article is not about gen-x'ers whining!
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
NO one will probably read this since there are already a million posts on this story but anyway... several people have summarized this story as being about gen-x'ers whining. but it isn't. it is about a baby boomer who wrote a story and tried their best to make gen-x seem worse than their genreation. really, how many gen-xers read fortune in comparison to their other readers? their target demo is not gen-x but baby boomers. this is an article to make the baby boomers feel better, "Look how great we are compared to these damn kids." does anyone REALLY think that our best earning years are over? no. not a chance. it's not gne-xers whining, its baby boomers looking for a story.
I hate these ets guys. $105 dollars to take the test -- which is computer scored, so there is very little cost to get the score. then if you want your score reported to more than a certain number of schools (4?) it is more money. if you forget your scores, more money. have to call them? its not an 800 number, its a regular long distance number. these guys are raking in the money and their realy is very little reason for it. they charge that much because they can and because there really is no alternative to their tests
What's worse is that in the radio version of the commercial, Piggy mentions they were going to eat French and Kermit indignantly says, "I don't do French" thus pointing out that these characters are made up of meat, and that Kermit won't eat his own kind. But Piggy will???
but do the European versions have the commentary tracks? I looked at a couple uk DVD vendors and they don't mention it. If not it might be more worthwhile to take some time and hunt down the North American one's used.
I've had both earthlink and aol (couldn't pass up the free hours)and didn't have any trouble cancelling them. AOL even offered to give me another free month.
I did a brief google search and I did not find any evidence that the movie ratings are reinforced by laws. Can anyone show me that the policy of not letting minors into R rated movies is anything but a self inforced policy? I certainly can't and would rally like some clarification on this.
Additionally, since my subission of this was rejected, let me say that the ramifications of this videogames aren't free speech has already spread to the national level.
According to his web site, on May 2,
Congressman Joe Baca (California) introduced H.R. 4645, The Protect Children
from Video Game Sex and Violence Act of 2002, would create penalties for
those who sell at retail or rent "violent" video games to a minor. The full text
of the bill including co-sponsors can be found here. It is interesting to note that almost all of the cosponsors are from California and Texas. Perhaps
the most chilling aspect of this is that they referenced the video games aren't
free speech ruling as one of their reasons.
I've been following the progress of this channel for a few week. Over at their website they have been advertising "only X days till launch" and people have been clamoring for a listing of cable companies that will carry it. So the big day comes and its only on Comcast, and it isn't even beginning programming. Pretty crappy if you ask me. I didn't evpect to get it on my cable system (even though we have like 4 financial cahnnels in a rather rural ohio college town...) but I did, and I'm sure that everyone frequenting the G4 message boards were expecting actual programming to start that day.
Hey folks, why not post some of these comments over at joystick101.org instead of here? That site, like slashdot is (potentially) made better and more interesting by user input. If you have a relevent comment to make and are tired of your comments never getting read over here why not post them over there?
I have used staroffice for a couple of years now and have never had a problem with it. I primarilly use only the word processor and only for term papers. I have never had a problem transfering files between Staroffice 5.1,.2 and 6 beta for windows to microsoft office for windows or mac.
I constantly tell my collegues who similarly only use office for writing essays about staroffice, but none of them have downloaded it yet. Why? Because they have old copies of microsoft office that came with their computers that, if necessary, they just install in their new computers.
I will probably never go back to microsoft office. But why will the majority of non-techy consumers switch when microsoft office comes free a computer bought from most of the big vendors? I am pondering buying a new laptop and just like you can barely buy a computer without windows, you can barely buy a computer without some version of microsoft office, or works at least. Just like you can't get windows without internet explorer. Buisness as usual for microsoft...
It is said that people like to think that videogames can be educational but that they can't teach people to kill, which is contradictory. I don't see anything wrong with treating videogame ratings the same way movie ratings are treated. You must be a certain age to buy this game. Fine.
However, carding kids is a bandaid on a gaping wound. If we are to try to address issues of violence in children, then why aren't we concerned about activities children are ENCOURAGED to participate in that aren't simulations of violence, but actual acts of violnce, namely contact sports? You can't have it both ways remember? You can't say that videogames teach children to be violent but sports such as football, wrestling, boxing, and hockey don't. Serioulsy people, think back to high school, who were the people getting into fights? Gamers or jocks?
So fine, I'll admit that it is contradictory to say that games can be used to teach but that they don't teach violence just as soon other people admit that to assume that virtual acts of violence can teach violence when actual acts of violence don't is just as silly. So when are people going to admit that athletics could POSSIBLY, for SOME people, OCCASIONALLY teach them to be more violent? The same time people get tired of looking for easy answers to difficult problems...
I am a graduate student and teach an introductory level course. Now because the department I teach in is called Popular Cultre, most people think that all we do is watch movies and critique them (an before anybody makes any jokes about my chosen discipline at least go to the department's website beforehand, ok?)
So if one of our students decide they want to write about the Simpsons, some of them get papers off of the web. Well, guess what? They very often stick out like a sore thumb because they are just biographies or rolling stone style fan worship pieces. In short, they aren't cultural studies papers.
In my department we have had kids cut and paste stuff from amazon.com, roling stone, and most commonly the first search result that comes up from google. I haven't caught any of my students, perhaps that is because I am a technology guy and I show them sites like turnitin.com and scare them (of course I don't tell them you have to pay to use it), either that or really am stupid.
And that is how I look at plagiarism. If they turn in a plagiarized paper, they are basically insulting my intellegence and saying that I'm too stupid to catch them. I have been in college for quite a while and I've done all my own work and so should they. I would take great joy in nailng the bastard to the wall if they did plagiarize in my class. We had several cases last semester (one kid even was so dumb that when we confronted her she with the web site that the paper was from she asked, "Is it plagiarism if I got it from someone who turned it in last semester?), so plagiarism is on the rise, at least in our department. However, as I said, I make a concerted effort to show them that I know where to get free papers as well as where to check them and so I haven't had a problem with suspicious papers.
Perhaps the best place for people to do their buy and return activism would be at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest sellers of music in America. If we can get Wal-Mart to notice that a signifigant amount of Universal's CD's are being returned, then they might raise some hell with Universal. Universal is much more likely to pay attention to complaints from a huge corporation like Wal-Mart than they are individuals.
I worked at a casino as a cashier for nearly two years. The worst part of the job was not getting holidays off. It's not that I cherish holidays or family time, but working the same days without any of those bonus days off that holidays represent it leads to quick burnout. Plus casinos are typically busier during the holidays, so I had to work even harder.
Of course this is subjective. What is it worth, to whom and why? It is worth an extra $33 dollars to have bragging rights? Perhaps. Is it worth and extra $33 to browse the web? Almost certainly not, an bottom of the line emachine is more than enough.
It is nice to see that the old philosopy of buying the second fastest processor does have its merits in relationship to the cost/performance ratio though.
Yes I completely agree, this journal is not about the scinec of creating a game it is about the discussion of its cultural and artistic merits. It is similar to something like discussing the way a building is built, as contrasted with discussing the aesthetic beauty of the building.
They are discussing the way the game plays and looks, not the way that it was made. For most of the cultural studies work on gaming, the actual things that make up the game really aren't that important. As another analogy, it is similar to discussing the cultural impact of a classic car, a '57 chevy for example, the way that the car was made is not of the utmost importance for the discussion of its cultural impact of beauty. This si what they are trying to do with gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
I know. I am applying right now. I have my master's dergee in cultural studies. I wrote my thesis on videogames. I want to do my phd on videogame players as a subculture. get out there and interview my fellow gamers. just like people go talk to homeless people, or punks or people in papu new guinea. but it is a horrible time to be trying to get into a phd program.
i talked to the graduate advisor at my old progam and he said that for their small department (5 profs) they had 180 applicants this year. i think they had like 50 the year i applied.
none of my friends got accepted to phd programs last eayr. we can't ALL be stupid. our theory is that with the downturn in the economy lots of people are tryig to go back to school.
so untill i get back into school, i'm working at a riverboat casino. not the most intellectually stimulating job in the world and trying to get stuff published to make me look better.
IN my emails to yahoo, they basically finally ended up saying that yeas, that .geo thing used to work, but not now. its too late to change it. its there forever.
unless that letter to the copyright person thing works.
I have the sma eproblem. I had a geocities site with teh old street style adress. back in the day i was stupid enough to put my email adress on it. I forgot all about it untill last year when it occured to me that that email was getting an incredible amount of spam. I finally got through to yahoo and they basiclly said after months of telling me to try this and this and this, "Oh since you didn't change it back then you can't get into it at all now."
so its still up there. i still get tons of spam at that email address.
i see that others have said write their copywrite person. anyone have teh adress handy to post here? or a link to it?
See, for me the problem with this is that this is all your opinion. I gave up on the show after 2 or 3 eps, but was any of thiese expalnations you give even hinted at in the show? It really seemed that things were that way, just because they thought it was cool and never explained why they were that way.
i'm sort of amazed at where they have decided to draw the line. after hear so much hype about the sims, i finally broke down and bought it and was amazed at how narrow the career choices were and how much it just devolved into go to work so you cam buy stuff, so that you have to go to work so that you can buy stuff. personally i found the game pretty offensive in its relentless celebration of consumerism. but once they make it overt, then you get upset?
It almost seems as if the trendy thing is to dislike corporations (or certain ones at least, I don't seem to hear much about EA's relentless whoring out of the sims franchise...) and so people complain about that rather than look at the conditions that lead to the corporations in the first place. The game is about buying things, isn't that the problem? not that you can buy mcdonalds...
.."Damn DCMA got passed..doesn't seem to have effected my download of 20 gigs of warez and mp3's a day, but it's still evil!"
but isn't that kind of the point of why people don't like it? It doesn't do anything to stop people from downloading music, but it does stop people from doing other things that aren't nearly as questionable leagally.
i can't really comment on the decision. i'm not a lawyer. but i do think it is sad that the airline spent all this time and money on lawyers instead of making their site easier to navigate. even a little, "If you are blind, please call 555-5555 for help" might have helped. but no they spent their money on lawyers.
A couple of clarifications. the guy from MIT was Henry Jenkins. THere was no audience on the donahue show. what happened was that the other two guests were protrayed as concerned parents and he was protrayed simply as an academic, but he is a concerned parent as well. Jenkins wrote up his experiences and it was posted at Salon.com.
Secondly, i beleive that it was not oprah, but the today show that had a guest who claimed that teh sniper may be a gamer. This comment was pciked up by nearly all the major news outlets. do a search at news.google.com for video game and sniper and you will find the article.
the problem with this commentis that it came from Florida lawyer Jack Thompson who was a lawyer in the court case in paduca where a school shooting occured and they were trying to sue the videogame companies. so of course it is in his best interests to blame videogames every chance he gets. what he said, can be found at CNN. Basically his logic is that the sniper is alleged to have left a taro card that says "I am god" Thompson cliams that gamers say this all the time. of course i don't know what gamers he is talking about. since i don't really recall hearing this in any of the games i play online. and mentioned god mode in games, but totally got it wrong. so despite the fact that he was completely wrong, now people think that the sniper is a gamer. I posted a rant on this on my blog if anyone cares.
on a related note, a couple days ago on headline news, a reporter went to a sniper school. he had never touched a gun before, but was able to hit the target with the sniper rifle. so you don't even need to know what youare doing to be able to hit a person.
NO one will probably read this since there are already a million posts on this story but anyway...
several people have summarized this story as being about gen-x'ers whining. but it isn't. it is about a baby boomer who wrote a story and tried their best to make gen-x seem worse than their genreation. really, how many gen-xers read fortune in comparison to their other readers? their target demo is not gen-x but baby boomers. this is an article to make the baby boomers feel better, "Look how great we are compared to these damn kids." does anyone REALLY think that our best earning years are over? no. not a chance.
it's not gne-xers whining, its baby boomers looking for a story.
I hate these ets guys. $105 dollars to take the test -- which is computer scored, so there is very little cost to get the score. then if you want your score reported to more than a certain number of schools (4?) it is more money. if you forget your scores, more money. have to call them? its not an 800 number, its a regular long distance number.
these guys are raking in the money and their realy is very little reason for it. they charge that much because they can and because there really is no alternative to their tests
But wasn't one of the points of Apple's lawsuit to prevent Sorenson from making money that Apple claims Sorenson weren't entitled to?
What's worse is that in the radio version of the commercial, Piggy mentions they were going to eat French and Kermit indignantly says, "I don't do French" thus pointing out that these characters are made up of meat, and that Kermit won't eat his own kind. But Piggy will???
but do the European versions have the commentary tracks? I looked at a couple uk DVD vendors and they don't mention it. If not it might be more worthwhile to take some time and hunt down the North American one's used.
I've had both earthlink and aol (couldn't pass up the free hours)and didn't have any trouble cancelling them. AOL even offered to give me another free month.
I did a brief google search and I did not find any evidence that the movie ratings are reinforced by laws. Can anyone show me that the policy of not letting minors into R rated movies is anything but a self inforced policy? I certainly can't and would rally like some clarification on this.
Additionally, since my subission of this was rejected, let me say that the ramifications of this videogames aren't free speech has already spread to the national level.
According to his web site, on May 2, Congressman Joe Baca (California) introduced H.R. 4645, The Protect Children from Video Game Sex and Violence Act of 2002, would create penalties for those who sell at retail or rent "violent" video games to a minor. The full text of the bill including co-sponsors can be found here. It is interesting to note that almost all of the cosponsors are from California and Texas. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this is that they referenced the video games aren't free speech ruling as one of their reasons.I've been following the progress of this channel for a few week. Over at their website they have been advertising "only X days till launch" and people have been clamoring for a listing of cable companies that will carry it. So the big day comes and its only on Comcast, and it isn't even beginning programming. Pretty crappy if you ask me. I didn't evpect to get it on my cable system (even though we have like 4 financial cahnnels in a rather rural ohio college town...) but I did, and I'm sure that everyone frequenting the G4 message boards were expecting actual programming to start that day.
Hey folks, why not post some of these comments over at joystick101.org instead of here? That site, like slashdot is (potentially) made better and more interesting by user input. If you have a relevent comment to make and are tired of your comments never getting read over here why not post them over there?
I have used staroffice for a couple of years now and have never had a problem with it. I primarilly use only the word processor and only for term papers. I have never had a problem transfering files between Staroffice 5.1,.2 and 6 beta for windows to microsoft office for windows or mac.
I constantly tell my collegues who similarly only use office for writing essays about staroffice, but none of them have downloaded it yet. Why? Because they have old copies of microsoft office that came with their computers that, if necessary, they just install in their new computers.
I will probably never go back to microsoft office. But why will the majority of non-techy consumers switch when microsoft office comes free a computer bought from most of the big vendors? I am pondering buying a new laptop and just like you can barely buy a computer without windows, you can barely buy a computer without some version of microsoft office, or works at least. Just like you can't get windows without internet explorer. Buisness as usual for microsoft...
It is said that people like to think that videogames can be educational but that they can't teach people to kill, which is contradictory. I don't see anything wrong with treating videogame ratings the same way movie ratings are treated. You must be a certain age to buy this game. Fine.
However, carding kids is a bandaid on a gaping wound. If we are to try to address issues of violence in children, then why aren't we concerned about activities children are ENCOURAGED to participate in that aren't simulations of violence, but actual acts of violnce, namely contact sports? You can't have it both ways remember? You can't say that videogames teach children to be violent but sports such as football, wrestling, boxing, and hockey don't. Serioulsy people, think back to high school, who were the people getting into fights? Gamers or jocks?
So fine, I'll admit that it is contradictory to say that games can be used to teach but that they don't teach violence just as soon other people admit that to assume that virtual acts of violence can teach violence when actual acts of violence don't is just as silly. So when are people going to admit that athletics could POSSIBLY, for SOME people, OCCASIONALLY teach them to be more violent? The same time people get tired of looking for easy answers to difficult problems...
I am a graduate student and teach an introductory level course. Now because the department I teach in is called Popular Cultre, most people think that all we do is watch movies and critique them (an before anybody makes any jokes about my chosen discipline at least go to the department's website beforehand, ok?) So if one of our students decide they want to write about the Simpsons, some of them get papers off of the web. Well, guess what? They very often stick out like a sore thumb because they are just biographies or rolling stone style fan worship pieces. In short, they aren't cultural studies papers.
In my department we have had kids cut and paste stuff from amazon.com, roling stone, and most commonly the first search result that comes up from google. I haven't caught any of my students, perhaps that is because I am a technology guy and I show them sites like turnitin.com and scare them (of course I don't tell them you have to pay to use it), either that or really am stupid.
And that is how I look at plagiarism. If they turn in a plagiarized paper, they are basically insulting my intellegence and saying that I'm too stupid to catch them. I have been in college for quite a while and I've done all my own work and so should they. I would take great joy in nailng the bastard to the wall if they did plagiarize in my class. We had several cases last semester (one kid even was so dumb that when we confronted her she with the web site that the paper was from she asked, "Is it plagiarism if I got it from someone who turned it in last semester?), so plagiarism is on the rise, at least in our department. However, as I said, I make a concerted effort to show them that I know where to get free papers as well as where to check them and so I haven't had a problem with suspicious papers.
Perhaps the best place for people to do their buy and return activism would be at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest sellers of music in America. If we can get Wal-Mart to notice that a signifigant amount of Universal's CD's are being returned, then they might raise some hell with Universal. Universal is much more likely to pay attention to complaints from a huge corporation like Wal-Mart than they are individuals.
I worked at a casino as a cashier for nearly two years. The worst part of the job was not getting holidays off. It's not that I cherish holidays or family time, but working the same days without any of those bonus days off that holidays represent it leads to quick burnout. Plus casinos are typically busier during the holidays, so I had to work even harder.
Of course this is subjective. What is it worth, to whom and why? It is worth an extra $33 dollars to have bragging rights? Perhaps. Is it worth and extra $33 to browse the web? Almost certainly not, an bottom of the line emachine is more than enough.
It is nice to see that the old philosopy of buying the second fastest processor does have its merits in relationship to the cost/performance ratio though.
Yes I completely agree, this journal is not about the scinec of creating a game it is about the discussion of its cultural and artistic merits. It is similar to something like discussing the way a building is built, as contrasted with discussing the aesthetic beauty of the building.
They are discussing the way the game plays and looks, not the way that it was made. For most of the cultural studies work on gaming, the actual things that make up the game really aren't that important. As another analogy, it is similar to discussing the cultural impact of a classic car, a '57 chevy for example, the way that the car was made is not of the utmost importance for the discussion of its cultural impact of beauty. This si what they are trying to do with gaming.
Sort of like what I am already doing? My masters thesis is on first-person shooters and gaming subculture. Check my stuff out here.