Plugged In
I know, it's been a while. This is a pattern with me. Every year or so I get fed up with myspace or facebook and come back here, hoping to find something better. Livejournal used to be so much simpler. Now I'm not sure how to see my page the same way others see it. I can't find my RSS feeds or groups. This place looks more like WordPress than I remember. I guess everything changes. Navigation feels so awkward, yet the place is still familiar.
At least I don't have porn spam like on myspace or applications spam like on facebook. Livejournal is still a solid platform, I think. If they didn't try to charge people to blog here the social network would build out and LiveJournal would be a force to be reckoned with.
It's good to have an old blog to come back to, though. I'll fiddle around till I get used to it. Maybe I'll move back here and stop blogging on facebook. Facebook and Myspace don't want my blogs anyway. They express this lack of desire for my blogs through their interface. Livejournal wants me to write.
So... what have I been up to?
I'm a junior economics major at IUP. I built and run the most trafficked college sim in SecondLife with my girlfriend. I am fairly competent at creating YouTube videos, flash games and other things like that. I am working on learning more web design so I can hack around with social networking web site APIs. I dream of getting into a real new media studies program at Harvard or MIT or University of Kansas. IUPs comm media department is useless to me. That's why I major in economics. I'm a new media specialist. They don't teach what I do here... hell, I doubt that most people even comprehend what I do here. Does that make me a visionary or an idiot? I don't know.
I picked up Gibson's Spook Country the other day... only got through the first dozen or so pages so far, so it's too early to judge it. I haven't read any good cyberpunk literature since before I came back to college, and the last thing I ready by Gibson was Virtual Light. I hope he didn't loose his touch. Gibson's blog has been more active lately.
Speaking of cyberpunk authors, last semester we virtualized Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and put it in our build in Second Life. It's creative commons, so it's all cool. I sent a message to Cory Doctorow telling him about it, not really expecting a response, but he actually got back to me within hours... and he said what I did was really cool!
Yeah, that's right... you other fan boys can bow down to my superior nerdiness... Cory Doctorow thinks I'm cool! :)
I'm working on a research paper for class on ideology on Wikipedia. What does that mean, exactly? I don't know yet. I'll know it when I find it. This started as ideology then changed to hidden bias, which expanded my research into bias inflicted by typeface, community, layout... even the very code of a web site can reveal a hidden bias. Did you know that the field of typeface studies is absolutely gigantic? Seriously, it's overwhelming how much information there is out there on typeface. So I'm going back to ideology and still need to cut back a bit. It's hard to say anything meaningful about something so large and amorphous. I'm thinking about specifically looking for clashes of corporate ideology. I love watching suits when they go for the jugular. It's better than boxing.
So, yeah, I'm in a coffee shop in Indiana, PA typing this out on my tiny netbook. I love my netbook.
Anyway, back to the homework...
At least I don't have porn spam like on myspace or applications spam like on facebook. Livejournal is still a solid platform, I think. If they didn't try to charge people to blog here the social network would build out and LiveJournal would be a force to be reckoned with.
It's good to have an old blog to come back to, though. I'll fiddle around till I get used to it. Maybe I'll move back here and stop blogging on facebook. Facebook and Myspace don't want my blogs anyway. They express this lack of desire for my blogs through their interface. Livejournal wants me to write.
So... what have I been up to?
I'm a junior economics major at IUP. I built and run the most trafficked college sim in SecondLife with my girlfriend. I am fairly competent at creating YouTube videos, flash games and other things like that. I am working on learning more web design so I can hack around with social networking web site APIs. I dream of getting into a real new media studies program at Harvard or MIT or University of Kansas. IUPs comm media department is useless to me. That's why I major in economics. I'm a new media specialist. They don't teach what I do here... hell, I doubt that most people even comprehend what I do here. Does that make me a visionary or an idiot? I don't know.
I picked up Gibson's Spook Country the other day... only got through the first dozen or so pages so far, so it's too early to judge it. I haven't read any good cyberpunk literature since before I came back to college, and the last thing I ready by Gibson was Virtual Light. I hope he didn't loose his touch. Gibson's blog has been more active lately.
Speaking of cyberpunk authors, last semester we virtualized Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and put it in our build in Second Life. It's creative commons, so it's all cool. I sent a message to Cory Doctorow telling him about it, not really expecting a response, but he actually got back to me within hours... and he said what I did was really cool!
Yeah, that's right... you other fan boys can bow down to my superior nerdiness... Cory Doctorow thinks I'm cool! :)
I'm working on a research paper for class on ideology on Wikipedia. What does that mean, exactly? I don't know yet. I'll know it when I find it. This started as ideology then changed to hidden bias, which expanded my research into bias inflicted by typeface, community, layout... even the very code of a web site can reveal a hidden bias. Did you know that the field of typeface studies is absolutely gigantic? Seriously, it's overwhelming how much information there is out there on typeface. So I'm going back to ideology and still need to cut back a bit. It's hard to say anything meaningful about something so large and amorphous. I'm thinking about specifically looking for clashes of corporate ideology. I love watching suits when they go for the jugular. It's better than boxing.
So, yeah, I'm in a coffee shop in Indiana, PA typing this out on my tiny netbook. I love my netbook.
Anyway, back to the homework...