10.30.08
Halloween at Microsoft
Today I stumbled upon some very strange pumpkins in my workplace, courtesy of the SkyDrive team. This was my favorite.
(Don’t get it? Click here.)
10.11.08
Creative Anti-Piracy: Adobe Space Monkey
I stumbled on this very awesome anti-piracy measure (or easter egg?) near the end of an all-nighter in college. I was trying to get some results charts cleaned up for the paper I’d been working on, and I launched Photoshop. The splash screen appeared, and…
Very disconcerting at 7am, let me tell you. The screen stayed there for about 15 seconds, then the app quit.
Thanks for having a sense of humor, Adobe.
05.14.08
ROFLCon: a new kind of nerdvana
I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about ROFLCon for a few weeks now. At first I was catching up on sleep, then on homework (it’s cool mom and dad, I’m actually gonna graduate on time), and then I just slacked off. But now Diana Kimball, in her infinite wisdom, has handed the ROFLTeam a hard deadline for posting our postmortems. And that deadline is, um, now. So now I’m on it.
As Diana and many others have mentioned, most attendees probably weren’t sure what they were signing up for. Namely, they weren’t sure if it was going to be “a conference/convention about internet memes and web celebrity” or “a totally unmitigated shitshow ‘planned’ by a bunch of twenty year olds who are totally unprepared to deal with a physical manifestation of the internet.”
Before the keynote: Tim, me, abject terror. photo: kdreke
We were pretty sure it was going to be the latter. I spent a lot of time during the event on “security planning,” which mostly meant pouring over MIT floorplans with other ROFLStaff trying to remember everything I’d ever learned from action movies. EPIC (fail? unclear).
The one possibility I never seriously considered was that the first ever ROFLCon would be entirely disaster-free.
And not only was it not a critical fail, it was actually very “edutaining”. I think we succeeded in straddling (and ridin’! sorry nm) that line between academic discourse and omgthatsrandallmunroecanitouchhim. ROFLCon was nerdy in the academic way and nerdy in the fanboy way.
// Warning: I’m going to talk about feelings now, like the mushy psychology major I am. Please bear with me.
Many of the attendees felt a strong sense of community, and felt it almost immediately. I think this was at least partially due to the combo scholarly/funfest vibe. We nerds who love internet culture and also yearn to study it, WE FOUND OUR PEOPLE. All us webtards who spend so much time interfacing with computers actually had a great time interfacing with each other (that’s what she said). And even attendees who are snarky assholes online (and I mean come on, who isn’t?) got OOC and found some kind words. At one point I twittered that I was in nerdvana. I was drunk, but it was true. I’ve been at many gatherings of geeks, and this was the first one where everything just clicked for me. These are my people.
// Ok, feelings are over now. On to Serious Business:
My personal agenda/wishlist for next time (if there is a next time (and I’ll do my best to make sure there is a next time)):
- Gender in relation to internet culture. People were itching to talk about it, but we weren’t ready. Next time, though, you can bring it. My geeky feminist thoughts, let me show you them.
- Race and internet culture: this is another thing people wanted to talk about, and that we weren’t ready for. But like the gender thing, this is a topic where it won’t be hard to find us an academic or two to moderate discussion.
- The word “fag.” Anonymous covered this in their excellent panel about project chanology, but I wasn’t satisfied with how that went down. If I may summarize and paraphrase, they said “it’s part of our culture, we’ve got no problem with queers, and if people can’t adapt to us and our language then they don’t belong on the internet.” Harsh but fair? Fucking dumb? I’d like to hear more.
- The non-English web: they probably have memes too, guys. Several people pointed out that we could have been more explicit that this was a conference on memes that have taken root in the English-speaking web, and not other areas of interwebs. IMO, this was our bad. Personally, I know jack shit about internet culture that’s not in English. But I would like to learn something about it. Also, the English-speaking web can always use more cracked-out videos in other languages.
- Moar con. ARG? Costume contest? Meme-imitation talent show? I dunno, but I do know that their will be more con-type events next time, because you can’t desconstruct why we love Japan so much all the damn day.
I wish I had a great pithy sum-up to close with, but my experience of ROFLCon defies that kind of containment… but this is blog post, so I will try: I learned, I lol’d, I partied (kind of hard), and I survived to tell you that I can’t bear the thought that this will never happen again.
05.09.08
Transform!
I got tipped off about the St Andrews Face Transformer over an email list today. It’s terrifying and hilarious. Terrilarious. Anyway:
Me as an old woman.
Check it out: St Andrews Face Transformer
02.13.08
Yes We Can… Has?
Who’s the latest kid to come crashing through the door of the party that is LOLCats? (Because I know you were consumed with curiousity.) It’s yeswecanhas.com, a site of LOLCat who are pro-Obama. Srsly. And I’m excited.
A sample:
01.17.08
House party with all of your favorite 2.0 big players personified as college kids
Guests include Facebook, Paypal, Ebay, Wikipedia, Snopes, Digg, Youtube, MySpace, craigslist, and more.
Watch it here: The Internet Party: What Happens When Google’s Parents Leave Town for the Weekend?
(Not to be confused with the party of the internet, which is a part of the all-amazing ROFLCon.)
12.22.07
When (science) fiction becomes reality
I read (and watched) a lot of science fiction growing up. I was in it for the adventure, the aliens, and the thinly-veiled social commentary. But mostly I was in it for the technology, which was really neat. I wanted a holodeck to play in. I wanted to travel in a spaceship that would talk to me. And I wanted a transporter to take me to school so I could sleep in for 20 more minutes each morning.
Imagine my delight as I grew older and realized that many of my sci-fi dreams were coming true. We have cell phones that fulfill the function of Star Trek’s communicators. We access extraordinary amounts of data through personal terminals. We have machines that learn, robotic pets, and mechanical replacements for human limbs.
Technovelgy.com is a fantastic catalogue of science fictional concepts that are becoming reality. Of course, not all of these were inspired by sci-fi. But some of them definitely were: for example, the US military’s PHASR gun.
Other neat real life inventions that were inspired or predicted by sci-fi include this NASA tricorder, a cellborg, and this holodeck for crickets.
Technovelgy summarizes the inventions, usually with photos or videos, and connects them to the sci-fi “source” of the idea. For example, if you’ve read Frank Herbert, you’ve probably read about chairdogs. From The Tactful Saboteur, first published in 1964:
He indicated a chairdog against the wall to his right, snapped his fingers. The semi-sentient artifact glided to a position behind McKie. “Please be seated.”
And yes, here’s an awesome concept video for an implementation of chairdogs:
In conclusion, Technovelgy rocks. Hat-tip to Prof. Stephen Burt for showing us this site in English 182, Harvard’s first course on - you guessed it - Science Fiction.
