Well, it's on the school's website so it must be official! I'll be giving a talk on the art of videogames at Whitman in Walla Walla, WA, this Thursday. I'm still working on the slides... but I will post them here after I give the talk.

And I want to eat these! (My posts lately have been about my desires, haven't they...?)

Also, I want this.

I think I am actually Chaotic Good and weaker/less agile, but ...

I Am A: Neutral Good Half-Elf Rogue (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-10
Constitution-9
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-13
Charisma-17

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Half-Elves have the curiosity and ambition for their human parent and the refined senses and love of nature of their elven parent, although they are outsiders among both cultures. To humans, half-elves are paler, fairer and smoother-skinned than their human parents, but their actual skin tones and other details vary just as human features do. Half-elves tend to have green, elven eyes. They live to about 180.

Class:
Rogues have little in common with each other. While some - maybe even the majority - are stealthy thieves, many serve as scouts, spies, investigators, diplomats, and simple thugs. Rogues are versatile, adaptable, and skilled at getting what others don't want them to get. While not equal to a fighter in combat, a rogue knows how to hit where it hurts, and a sneak attack can dish out a lot of damage. Rogues also seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to avoiding danger. Experienced rogues develop nearly magical powers and skills as they master the arts of stealth, evasion, and sneak attacks. In addition, while not capable of casting spells on their own, a rogue can sometimes 'fake it' well enough to cast spells from scrolls, activate wands, and use just about any other magic item.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Oh, Amazon. You know me so well!

This is interesting and inspiring -- people posting photos of their workspaces in a flickr group: unclutter.

I am torn between going completely bare and clean in my home office and keeping around bits of color and shape that I find inspiring. Right now my office is also the disorganized storage space where borrowed items, surplus goods, and outdated game technologies live. My nature is to keep things, I am not sure why. But I get a little pleasure out of knowing that I can still dig out my N64 and fire it up to play GoldenEye or Mario Kart 64 or Ocarina of Time. I have a PS1 too, which is almost utterly useless except if I want to play old-school Final Fantasy Tactics again....

But I do like having some color and interest in my office. The textile designer Etsuko Fuyura had some beautiful animal/floral designs that I thought would make a fantastic cover for the wall behind my desk, just under my shelf. But I can't seem to commit to just one.

In any case I do need some suggestions for how to better organize my power cords and all my computery accessories. Right now they get shoved into a drawer and when I need them I spend a few minutes pulling out cords and puzzling over them. What's the solution? Labels?

I wasn't at the keynote at SXSW because I suspected that Zuckerman would not be a very interesting interview. He's well-known placidly toeing the Facebook company line. Apparently, I was wrong -- not about Zuckerman, who certainly didn't disappoint my expectations, but about the combination of Zuckerman and his interviewer Sarah Lacey. Many people who were at the keynote called it a "disaster" and a "train wreck."

Looking at video coverage of it, it doesn't really seem that bad, to me. But my friends say "you had to be there."

Why?

Well, I think this has to do with mob psychology, a phenomenon that tries to explain how mass movements happen, how otherwise reasonable, kind people can whip themselves up into a frenzy of ecstasy or rage.

When I was a history student at UC Berkeley, this phenomenon utterly fascinated me, and I tried to understand, form a historical perspective, how and why it happened, trying to piece together the data that set up situations like this. In both Japan and France (the two areas of enduring interest for me throughout my academic career) there were famous instances of mobs gone insane -- mobs of otherwise ordinary and decent citizens pulling people out of their homes to beat them, cut off their body parts, and parade them around the city. Outsiders (people who watched from their windows, for example) were utterly horrified; but those who participated were swept along by mob logic, if one can call it "logic" at all.

I don't believe that any of us are immune to the pressure of group action. And now I think we see from the Zuckerman keynote that technology creates its own special place where mob psychology can flourish. Those of us who have spent any time on forums already know this to be the case. But applications like Twitter can produce instant results, in real time. From Tim Leberecht's astute commentary on the incident:

Twittering (on Twitter and elsewhere) pushed people to act out; it accelerated interruption. People who did not like the way the interview was going had assurance that the crowd was with them; and it intensified those feelings. In traditional passive audience situations, for every person who acts out, the ratio of those who wanted to but didn't, is probably much higher. Instead, because people knew that not only the people sitting next to them, but also those in all four corners of the room had the same gripes--or pointed out new ones--many people acted out. As Lacy said, what we got was "Digg-style mob-rule." Essentially: Twittering lowers the threshold for lash-out.

Interesting. Tim goes on the suggest that the interview could have been saved if the interviewer had been following what was going on in the room; of course, in the olden days performers had direct feedback form the crowd's energy through other means -- body language, attention paid, in more extreme cases, applause or boos or other vocal signs of approbation/disapproval. I suppose now all those reactions are sublimated and streamed through the ether. One much tap into that to get a sense of where the mob is headed...