11:15 pm. July 31. Where did the month go? Or as marc puts it, "Jason? Is that you?" If you check the few posts I left here, you'd think I spent most of my month troubleshooting server problems for the Wordherders, reposting KF's cfp (which I wish I could afford to submit to), and reading Harry Potter.
Not too far off, actually. At least as far as personal digital time goes.
See, June was a long month. Action-packed, one might say. Conferences, deadlines ... just busy all 'round. The "July Retreat," as we'll call it, wasn't so much a retreat from anything but a screen. I tended to surf less (Internet and TV) and read more, plowing through some Atwood, some Coupland, some Powers. And, yes, some J.K. Rowling (though that took just under 24 hours, so it hardly counts). I go through these bursts of technical hibernation at times, where my game play drops to near nil, and my reading picks up to 2-3 novels a week. Old school immersion. Screenless (except for a full viewing of the partial-season DVD of Joss Whedon's Firefly. How I wish that show was still on).
The other half of the story is that since my wonderful wife clocked overtime helping me through June, I tried to do a bit more to give her time in July (I never quite feel as though I measure as much time for her, and remain amazed how she's able to give so much up for me). The critter, meanwhile, is growing like a weed and constantly wants to go to the pool so she can kick her legs and say "I swimming, I swimming!" Seriously. She wakes up and says "pool?" By mid-afternoon, she hunts down everyone's bathing suit and drags over the beach bag. The kid loves the water. Blog, or swim? Pretty easy decision.
So, I have a bunch of overdue blog posts. On Tribble-gate. On Guild Wars (Decent enough game so far, if you have a friend or two to play with. They have capes. The writing, however, is ... unimpressive). On Atwood and narrative communication. On >Getting Things Done (almost done with the book, and about to begin my reorganization ... my question: PDA or paper notebook ala Franklin-Covey? I'm leaning towards the Zire 31). I have pictures to upload to Flickr from our trip to Nags Head last week ("I swimming!").
But mostly, friends, I'll be dissertating and reading, when I'm not at work (or, if my daughter gets her way, at the pool). So no promises on too many blog posts.
Stuff to read after work:
What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050727/sutherland_01.shtml
Civilization Watch by Orson Scott Card
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-06-26-1.html
GamerDad
http://www.gamerdad.com/
I should note that while my wild guessing was dead wrong before (as the comments so politely reveal), here is my prediction, one day before the true revelation of the Half-Blood Prince:
Hagrid.
EDIT: Alas, I'm not so good at this guessing game.
KF of Planned Obsolescence is circulating the following CFP for a panel at next year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver:
Database/Narrative: The Forms of Digital MediaCritics including Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich have posited, in so-called “new media,” the replacement of narrative by the database; other theorists and practitioners, including Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project, have imagined the future of media as developing precisely in the nexus of narrative and the database. This panel will explore, across multiple media forms, the intersections and divergences of narrative and the database in the contemporary media ecology. Papers might address a range of topics, such as recent experiments in documentary production, the role of narrative in digital gaming, or the structures of such forms of social software as wikis and blogs. Such an exploration might help bridge the apparent gap between traditional narrative forms such as film and more recent technologies such as the Internet, creating a useful dialogue between “cinema” and “new media.”
Alas, my kingdom for a travel budget. If you have a paper that would fit, send it in. Vancouver is beautiful to visit, and KF is a hoot to hang out with.
Hello readers and fellow wordherders -
Due to an avalanche of spam this weekend, our host had to disable our cgi scripts to prevent server overload. I have asked that they allow us to continue using our normal scripts, except for comments.cgi which runs our commenting features, until I upgrade to the newest version of MT later this week.
So, the herders can now post again, but comments will be disabled until I get a chance this week to upgrade the MT build. Meanwhile, since this will be an upgrade, and since by my nature I'm both suspicious and pessimistic, I ask that all herders back-up their data immediately (instructions in the link). I will also backup the mysql database. Obviously, I believe in redundancy.
Sorry for the confusion and frustration. Hopefully MT 3.17 will solve some of these problems and prevent this from happening again.