Lizjonesbooks

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Increasing the N! (Thanks, David!)

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New Orleans is a subjective town that demands a point of view. Depending on where you're coming from, you have a different vision of the city. So I felt it was necessary to tell people where I was coming from, so to speak, before I could tell my story of New Orleans.

I'm not from New Orleans, but I lived in Louisiana until I was nine years old--in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which is 282 miles northwest of New Orleans and four years older, the first town the French founded in what later became the Louisiana Purchase. That was back in the bad old days, the 1950s. In August 1960 (just before the desegregation battle erupted in New Orleans) we moved away, to El Paso. I never lived in Louisiana again, until 2004, when I was fifty-three. Returning to Louisiana all those years later, I was a kind of insider / outsider. As I tried to learn the ropes of living in New Orleans, all kinds of long-buried fragmentary memories came surging forward. Like, I already knew what it meant for a deliveryman to leave a package "under the house," because the houses are raised up off the ground. And no one had to explain to me about southern racism, because I went to a segregated school.

The main body of The Year Before The Flood is Part Two, which tells the story of our year in New Orleans. But there's a shorter Part One, a childhood memoir that explains what I was bringing to my New Orleans experience. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, which is called "Jump Jim Crow." If you want to listen along while you read, here's a clip of me reading it at Joe's Pub on November 20.

THE YEAR BEFORE THE FLOOD: CHAPTER ONE
(MP4 audio link)

Even in slavery days, "white" and "black" children might have personal contact, but in the South of my childhood we were kept as separate as humanly possible. We literally didn't know each other. I lived until I was nine in an approximately half-black town without ever having any social contact with a black kid. I don't mean I didn't have any as close friends. I mean I never had a single conversation with an African American child. As people say when they talk about those days, that was just the way it was. I can remember having it explained to me that no, their color didn't rub off when they touched things.

The polite way of describing southern society in those days is to say that it was segregated. But it is also fair, if less polite, to say that it was a white supremacist society. The program of the Ku Klux Klan had been implemented. African Americans were overtly, legally, literally second-class citizens.

When Mrs. Harrison asked us if we knew why our school would always remain all white, I hazarded a guess. "Because the Negroes have schools of their own?"

"Yes, they do," she replied, "and they're just as good as ours!"

Bullshit, they were just as good as ours.

She probably believed it. A lot of white people lived in fantasyland. But the push to integrate schools didn't come because black people loved being around white people so much that they wanted to come hang out with them. It was because if there were two separate school systems, the black one would get less of every resource. In 1950, "colored" 1 schools in Shreveport had no electricity, and the students used outhouses.

Which is not to say that no educating took place; African Americans who came up in that system remember heroic teachers. Jerome Smith, born in New Orleans in 1939, told me: "We had the worst books that you can imagine, but we had such dedicated educators that it gave us a kind of readiness... We didn't recognize that [at the time], but in the years that followed, we had a foundation." Not everyone was so lucky, and the deck was stacked against African American children getting an education. Overcrowding was the norm for their schools; the Macarty school in New Orleans's Ninth Ward had 2,536 children in a building designed for 1,200. No wonder Fats Domino dropped out of that school in the fourth grade.

No, Mrs. Harrison explained, the reason Northwestern Elementary would always remain white was that the nuns who deeded it to the state had included that as one of the conditions.

Well, that settled it. The deal had been cut long before we were born.

Our white-forever school was a lovely place. Located on the campus of Northwestern State College, where my dad taught, it had expansive, handsome grounds, with a long, sloping hill that led down toward Lake Chaplin, and big airy classrooms with a piano in every one.

We were raised with the southern ideal of the innocent, indolent child. With its pretensions to aristocracy and perhaps a French aversion to exercise, Louisiana was never big on making kids do calisthenics, so for physical education we played Drop the Handkerchief and singing games. I was what was later called hyperactive--I always had a rhythm, or a rhyme, or a song going on--and visibly bored. The class seemed to work on the alphabet all through the first grade.

My parents, being teachers, had taught me to read and do arithmetic at home, so I was considered a gifted child when I started school. This was surely, presumed my biologist parents, the result of good genes, though I think it was more the amount of attention and care they gave me. It was the era of IQ tests, and I was given batteries of them. When I was seven, in some kind of educational experiment that my parents must have had a hand in promoting, I was placed five grades ahead of my level, into a seventh-grade class, for two weeks. I found I could handle the academics pretty well, not because I was a genius but because they weren't that tough. Socially, however, I wasn't prepared to be in a roomful of seventh-graders all day.

That was the year Attack of the 50 Foot Woman came out--where is this kind of inspiration today, when our cinema needs it?--and I felt myself surrounded by fifty-foot women. There's nothing as mysterious to a seven-year-old boy as a passel of twelve-year-old girls. To further heighten the eroticism of the experience, they had portable transistor radios, and could summon up rock 'n' roll at recess. I could read better than they could, but so what? They had something else going on.

One of my enduring memories of Natchitoches dates from that surreal stint among the giants and giantesses of the seventh grade. The social studies class was instructed to break up into groups and write, and act out, scenes that were to dramatize . . .
A slave auction.

They had us play slave auction in social studies class.

I'm not sure what the purpose of that exercise was. But what it demonstrated for me was that some people lived between the piety of knowing that slavery was bad and the desire of living it once again. It proved something I already knew, even at that age: the white South loved to reminisce about slavery days.

Since I wasn't a bona fide seventh-grader, I was an auditor for this event, not a participant. No one interpreted the slave roles. No one would have wanted to. The slaves were imaginary. One kid, playing the role of an auctioneer, read haltingly from the script he had laboriously written himself:

"I. Don't. Like. To. Break. Up. These. Families," he read.

"But. What. Can. I. Do?

"It's. My. Job."

(c) 2009 Ned Sublette

Originally published at erin-go-blog!. You can comment here or there.

I probably shouldn’t be enjoying a snow day, given how much work I have to do/how much I need to accomplish with my students before Christmas break….but yeah, sometimes teachers want to sleep in, too.

Somewhere along the line, oatmeal became my breakfast of choice. When I don’t have to work, I VERY much prefer being able to make real oats (as opposed to “quick” oats, which is what I have when I have to get to work). In the summer, when peaches were in season, I was cutting up a peach and drizzling it with honey to have mixed in to my oatmeal. My fall treat is dicing up an apple, cooking with a splash of apple cider added to the water (along with cinnamon and nutmeg) and sweetening with a mix of brown sugar and Splenda. Yum.

I had a shoe tragedy yesterday…my go-to pair of brown loafers (pictured below) has a HUGE crack in the sole. Which I realized when I stepped outside and my foot got wet.

I’ve had them for a few years, and I wore them ALL the time. I bought them at JC Penney, because on sale/with coupon, they are much cheaper than the $75 price tag at the website. So I called JC Penney yesterday, and of course they no longer carry these in-store. I was able to order them from the JC Penney website, but of course this shoe was out of stock. So I got this one instead:

(I do also have a pair of these that I can’t wear anymore, because the lining has worn off the heel area and it was putting holes in the heels of my socks…) So that’s good, but I still want the other ones, too.

Anyway.

I’m having a hard time deciding what to do with my day…be lazy, or be productive? I should probably get some grading done. Maybe read for a bit. We don’t have a tree yet, but maybe I could get some of the other decorations up. Clean? Put on pants and venture out into the world? Sigh…I just DON’T KNOW!

I think I’ll start by emptying the dishwasher. I’ll let you know how it goes. Happy snow day!

In a couple of previous entries, I mentioned the ways in which Creative Journaling gives me yet another excuse to play helps inform and inspire my writing efforts. (If you missed those entries, you can access them here and here.)

I'm not the only one, of course. Earlier this week, author R L. LaFevers wrote a related entry for the Shrinking Violets' blog. Here's an excerpt of "Envisioning the Coming Year" (reposted with permission):

No lesser authority than Carl Jung has claimed that our best work originates in play.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. – Carl Jung

Now before you roll your eyes and think you left all that back in grade school, let me gently point out that collages and vision boards are a highly effective tool in helping focus your creative energies—either in a personal direction or in a project-related one.

There are a couple of different ways to approach a vision board. You can create one that focuses on:

Personal growth aspirations for the coming year
Professional goals
Creative goals
Spiritual areas you’d like to work on.
Qualities you’d like to more fully embrace or invite into your life
Whatever whispers to you, that’s what you should use for the focus of the board.

But perhaps you’re more comfortable working on something to do with your work-in-progress, and that’s fine, too. Some story collages capture the overall mood and feel of the book.

They can also be representative of certain scenes or parts of the book, maybe even parts you're having a hard time nailing down. When you work on a collage, you let your subconscious take over and then, watch out!

We’d LOVE to see some of the vision boards and collages you create! If you get motivated over the next few weeks (even after the holidays) please do send us a jpeg of your collage/vision board and we’ll feature them here on the blog. (We can absolutely share them anonymously!) And while sharing your project is definitely not required, we might even have a prize drawing for all of those who participate. If you'd like to share, send your jpeg to us here at Shrinking Violets, and we'll do the rest.

So there you have it: an invitation (with incentives!) to try it on for size.

I think I might adapt the idea of a vision board, maybe glue the images into the pages of my sketchbook instead of creating something poster-sized. The possibilities are endless--form and function, entirely up to me.

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For my next book, Makers, we tried again. This time Audible agreed to carry the title without DRM. Hooray! Except now there was a new problem: Apple refused to allow DRM-free audiobooks in the Apple Store--yes, the same Apple that claims to hate DRM. Okay, we thought, we'll just sell direct through Audible, at least it's a relatively painless download process, right? Not quite. It turns out that buying an audiobook from Audible requires a long end-user license agreement (EULA) that bars users from moving their Audible books to any unauthorized device or converting them to other formats. Instead of DRM, they accomplish the lock-in with a contract.

I came up with what I thought was an elegant solution: a benediction to the audio file: "Random House Audio and Cory Doctorow, the copyright holders to this recording, grant you permission to use this book in any way consistent with your nation's copyright laws." This is a good EULA, I thought, as it stands up for every word of copyright law. Random House was game, too. Audible wasn't. So we decided not to sell through Audible, which I was intensely bummed about, because I really like Audible. They have great selection, good prices, and they're kicking ass with audiobooks.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_Wss9I6ELhk/livescribe-pulse-sma.html

So here's a classic dilemma for me: I need to do an interview with somebody for a story I'm writing. It has to be in-person. It's in a place where lugging around my laptop and typing while the the person speaks isn't particularly feasible. And I won't have time post-interview/pre-deadline to go through a recording and transcribe the necessary notes 'n' quotes.

And here's a solution: Livescribe's Pulse Smartpen, a nifty piece of technology that can record audio every bit as well as my old voice recorder, while simultaneously making a digital copy of my handwritten notes and linking both notes and audio into a seamless whole.

I saw the Pulse for the first time last May at Maker Faire and promptly spent several months dithering about whether or not it was going to break my heart. I bought one last month, to help me keep track of research and interviews for a book I'm writing, and I'm happy to report that the Pulse lives up to my expectations. Granted, it's expensive and not particularly useful for everybody. But if you do a lot of note-taking (writers, journalists, college students, researchers... I'm looking at you), I think it's worth the investment. Here's why...

First off, let's talk money. I always hate it when tech reviews dangle something awesome in front of me and then spring the price tag at the end. This being my first tech review ever, I'm going to take the opportunity to switch things up. The Pulse Pens work with Mac or PC. There's a 2 Gb model for $169 and a 4 Gb version for $199. Both come with a couple of ink cartridges, a USB charger, and a small starter notebook. This is, however, not the end of your financial dealings with Livescribe. Ink cartridges will have to be replaced. Each fine point tip is supposed to last through about 56 pages of writing and replacements are $6 for a 5-pack. You'll also need special paper to use the Pen. A 4-pack of single-subject, college-ruled notebooks is $20, and there are lots of other notebook options, including Moleskin lookalikes. You can, however, also print pages of the stuff, for free, from any PC with a Color LaserJet Printer that is Adobe PostScript compatible and can print at 600dpi or higher.

Now, the fun. That special paper is important because it's covered with tiny dots that create a positioning system for the infrared camera in the Pen. The camera turns on when the Pen's tip is pressed into the paper, and turns off again when the tip is lifted. It's not really recording what you write, so much as it's recording the position of pen tip, on a coordinate plane formed by the dots.

I figured that out when the first Pen I got malfunctioned. Instead of turning off when I lifted the Pen away from the page, the camera would just stay on continuously. What I wrote on the physical page looked normal. But when I uploaded the digitized writing to my computer, I got not clean handwriting, but a crazy scrawl with a line recorded for everywhere the pen moved—whether on the paper or through the air above it. And that was how I learned Livescribe has great customer service. I called their phone line, the lady who answered was able to quickly figure out what was wrong, and she immediately got me a replacement in the mail. There was absolutely no hassle. Good stuff.

The replacement pen works perfectly. What I write on the physical page is recorded and looks great. I can use it without audio to make a digital (i.e., less lose-able) copy of my notes. If I want to record audio and writing at the same time, I use the control "buttons" that are printed at the bottom of every page of the dot paper—I just tap the space printed, "record", and tap "stop" when I'm done. To replay the audio, I tap the pen on the text I've written. I probably don't need to point out how incredibly useful this could be for note-taking during interviews, lectures, or even just keeping better track of your own thoughts and observations while you work. Plus, if you want, you can share your recorded audio and notes either with select friends, or the public, via a "Pencast". Observe:

So yeah, it's pretty sweet. The printed pseudo-buttons also allow you to set and jump between audio bookmarks, jump to a position in a recording, adjust playback speed, Pen volume, and set other Pen controls. There's also a calculator. Yeah. It's printed on the inside cover of the notebooks and you just tap the "keys" with the pen to make it work.

Another neat application: The piano. Choose this setting and the Pen will prompt you to draw eight boxes on the dot paper. Each box then becomes a note in the scale, which you can play by tapping it with the Pen. This is how you amaze your friends and make yourself feel better about not owning a smart phone. In my experience. Speaking of which, the Pen also has an online ap store, where you can pick up free and paid games, reference tools, a unit converter, a Spanish dictionary, and even a tool to teach yourself Hebrew chanting. Seriously. Right now, there's only a handful of applications. But I'm really looking forward to seeing how this grows in the future.

Bottom line: This thing does what it says it does, and does it well. If you're in school, or you have the right sort of job, the Livescribe Pulse Pen could really make your life easier. Someone also mentioned to me on Twitter that the Pen could be useful for people with memory problems, and I think it could work for that as well—provided the memory problems weren't so severe that you couldn't remember how to use the Pen. If none of this applies to you, though, the Pen is really just a nifty toy and probably not worth the cost of ownership. That said, you should still find a friend that does need it and get them to let you play with it a bit. Because it's really, really fun.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/QQu9gRr0Ok0/secret-copyright-tre-1.html

The opposition movement that formed in response to the "three strikes" rule is ready to take action on ACTA, to make sure that New Zealand's information policy is made democratically, and not through secret meetings in back rooms. They are organizing their response to the ACTA negotiations next April, and given their amazing mobilization against "three strikes" the last time around, I expect great things. If you're from .nz or live there now, tell your friends and loved ones about this: your family's ability to communicate, earn a living, get an education and participate in civil society could be jeapordized by the decisions the elite plan on making in your country.

And hey, Mexico! There's an ACTA meeting headed your way in January. Got anything planned?

Welcome | acta.net.nz (via Michael Geist)

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Little King's Story [Marvelous, Wii]

Little King's Story was a true left field surprise this year: a game about managing a township unwittingly put under your control, about protecting them and conquering the things they fear, a game about expanding your reign through exploration and field conquests, and a game that managed to do a better job of the mini-micro-management of your troops than even Nintendo's re-released Wii-control Pikmin that must have inspired it.

Its crayon and pastel fantasy surely didn't help curry any favor with the gaming hardcore, which is a shame mostly because it a.) belies the surprisingly challenging and strategic game underneath and 2.) be honest, lends the game an undeniable storybook charm. Truly one of the year's best adventures that too few have played.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes [Capy, DS]

Coming in as the year's best 11th-hour surprise, Toronto indie Capy's puzzle/strategy/RPG take on the Might & Magic universe was just covered here on Boing Boing, so I'll reiterate that here:

Like Puzzle Quest -- Infinite Interactive's similarly dangerously time-devouring puzzler -- before it, Clash overlays its fantasy RPG tale with battles that play out via color-matching vertical lines of troops to create, fuse and link attacks launched against your enemies, and doing the same horizontally to put together defensive lines to guard against theirs.

Its ruleset is so intricately devised and delicately balanced that it'd take an article in itself to explain them fully, but for all its richness and complexity, it's a system that takes only minutes of practice to mentally snap together, and all your remaining hours of the day to happily master. If you have any proclivity toward brainy puzzling, do not hesitate to pick this up: it's got all the trappings of being one of the handheld's underdog classics.

Noby Noby Boy [Namco, PS3]

Those that said that Noby Noby Boy -- the Katamari Damacy follow-up from creator Keita Takahashi -- had no point themselves missed the point. While it's true that the design of each individual play session is as lackadaisical and boundless as the BOY himself, its overarching goal is an achievement in itself as gaming's most massive massively-multiplayer undertaking.

Underneath the surface is a story of, ideally, countless BOYs (as of this writing we're just ten players shy of 100,000) all vying to impress the universe's only GIRL by doing the only thing they were put on Earth to do: swallow and stretch their coiled bodies as far as they can. By converting those impressive and hard-earned meters into the love that propels her own body further into the solar system, in real-time, she unlocks the planets she reaches for all the players in the world.

So, yes, there is a goal, and there is an end-game, which we'll only see if and when our PlayStation 3s (or, very soon, iPhones) are still functioning in the time it takes to push her the remaining ponderous distance from Jupiter to Pluto.

Is it a willfully and near-recklessly devised design, particularly for thrusting hugely delayed gratification on a generation of players accustomed to instant/constant feedback and reward? Absolutely, and that's exactly what makes it one of the year's best.

Plants Vs. Zombies [PopCap, PC/Mac]

It would be easy, and cynical -- and more importantly, wrong -- to assume that casual powerhouse PopCap simply rode the crest of tower-defense and zombie-lust that defined much of gaming in 2009. Instead, it appears to have brilliantly anticipated it, having started and been in production nearly two years ahead, and could be instead seen as instrumental in propelling both memes into wider consciousness.

Going viral by nature of its basic premise alone, and then again by Laura Shigihara's perfectly ludicrous music video, it would have been disastrous if the resulting game couldn't fulfill expectations. Thankfully, it did, giving the tower defense genre a much-needed shot in the arm of accessibility without uprooting the core entirely, and the imminent move to iPhone -- letting us finally take the game away from our desktops -- is still one of our most anticipated.

Retro Game Challenge [Namco, DS]

Publisher XSEED had an unenviable task on their hands in bringing Retro Game Challenge to the West: taking a game that's inextricably derived from Japan's best games-related TV show that the rest of the world has never seen (Game Center CX), and is soaked through with references to Famicom nostalgia rather than the U.S.'s own NES nostalgia, and somehow making it relevant to us.

So we'll forgive them in going a half-step too far in shoe-horning in the 80s of Max Headroom and Valley Girl, and for working in 90s era U.S. game magazine references that flew over the heads of all but about ten people outside journalist-circles, because in the end none of that really mattered.

Well, the nostalgia does, because that's precisely what Retro Game Challenge is a game about: that once-every-three-months-a-new-game past of our collective youth, that afterschool poring over cheat codes past, a time when developers were inventing genres as often as games themselves.

Challenge is at heart a collection of remade early-days NES classics that never were, and your task (as goes the title) is to work your way through a series of prescribed challenges in each, whether it be finding hidden warps or defeating RPG bosses, and it manages to perfectly evoke that nostalgia that we thought only emulators could manage to do these days.

The sad news is that even as one of the year's most original and rewarding games -- a game that overtly celebrated the games culture that made up its target audience -- sales don't seem to have been up to snuff for the publisher to consider Westernizing the Japanese sequel, leaving a whole other legacy of first-gen Game Boy and 16-bit era "classics" behind.

Rhythm Heaven [Nintendo, DS]

Rhythm Heaven probably won't be showing up on near as many 2009 lists as it should, not because it's not brilliant -- it is -- but because it took so long for Nintendo to finally bring it to the West that it feels like ancient history (in digital years, obviously) to its core supporters who had imported and impotently raved about it long before.

Heaven's the truest example of a music game that's purely about rhythm, and not just about Simon Says-ing patterns or following bars down your screen to the tune of your dad's favorite classic rock. It's about rhythm as an unbroken line, or (at its best) an unbroken agreement between performers, about teaching and keeping steady tempo.

It's also one of the year's funniest, and desperately deserves some December love, if nothing else than to prove to Nintendo that a game this non-traditional can still find a wide, appreciative audience.

Rock Band: Unplugged [Harmonix/Backbone, PSP]

Though clearly overshadowed by its big console brothers and their new friends The Beatles, Unplugged -- and to a slightly lesser degree the DS version of Lego Rock Band -- were semi-shoutouts to the fans that made developer Harmonix the stadium-supergroup headliners they are today.

Take away its hard rock 'performance' and replace it with looping techno rave-up ambiance and you're right back where the developer began: flipping back and forth through lanes of sound, trying to keep each alive in sequence to make the parts a whole song, just as they pioneered in their PS2 originals Frequency and Amplitude.

You didn't need to know this, and you don't need to care, for Unplugged to work its magic: you just need the willingness to escape into music without the fake plastic mediator in between.

Recent news that Harmonix would no longer be converting its massive library of original recordings for Unplugged DLC stung fractionally harder than the bait and switch of offering only a five-song Lite version as the PSPGo's pack-in, with still no full download available on the PlayStation Network (which has to be down to digital publishing rights for particular bands and not willful neglect, right?), but for those still clinging to Sony's UMD-laden past, this is one of the UMDs most worth clinging to.

Scribblenauts [5TH Cell, DS]

Alongside Plants Vs. Zombies, Scribblenauts was the game that carried itself best throughout the year on a tidal wave of viral acclaim solely for its premise alone. But what a premise that was: it promised to let players conjure essentially any object imaginable -- krakens, keyboard cats, Gods, time-traveling robot-zombie-smashing T-rexes -- to solve puzzles via the furthest-most outer-reaches of our imaginations.

Did it work? Errr... yeah, I mean, mostly: developer 5TH Cell will be (and overtly has been) the first to acknowledge that its very touchy touch-based controls could have used some refinement. But even more surprising (for me, anyway), was in just how limited my own imagination was when it came time to put it to the test.

Need to rescue a cat off a roof, or wave away an angry bee? Much to my disappointment, I found I was just as apt to use, you know, a ladder and a bit of bug repellent, rather than any flights of fantastical fancy.

But its essential magic -- even if that 'magic' was simply the fortitude to sprite-sketch their way through untold reams of dictionary entries -- remained untouched, and it's still a thrill to try and stump the system and learn that they've got you covered.

Shadow Complex [Chair, Xbox 360]

Shadow Complex was the best retro revival this year that had no predecessor of its own. For once, it wasn't lazy to give the game the comparative nod back to Super Metroid: it was unabashedly right there in front of you, in its color coded barriers, in lead character Jason Flemming's tight crawls through narrow passages (here just crouched, rather than rolled into a morph ball), straight down to a 'Justin Bailey' referencing achievement.

And yet even the ones most prone to cry foul -- to call the game out for taking some of Japan's best classic design and running it through a Western mill until its plot and characters were offenders of the worst nameless, faceless, bottom-shelf would-be Tom Clancy degree -- had to admit: fair enough to that, but the game turned out completely wicked.

Harnessing the full power of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for charmingly/ironically yester-year ends, this was exactly where we thought our 16-bit games were headed at the time: recycled but beloved design with drastically improved fidelity. We were wrong then, of course, but Shadow Complex proved maybe we shouldn't have been.

Uncharted 2 [Naughty Dog, PS3]

My pithy one-liner to encapsulate Naughty Dog's blockbuster adventure? It's the finest rollercoaster of the year that makes you climb off the train and rebuild the engine at the bottom of every hill.

Uncharted 2 easily managed to outshine the rest of the year's big-budget bids and managed to make a true believer even out of me, even if what it did best -- giving you some of the most hyper-vivid, lush and gargantuan ancient ruins and relics any developer has offered to let you explore -- was punctuated by over-technical firefights with your constant trigger-happy pursuers.

That's not to say the shootouts didn't work well on their own -- they are, probably, some of gaming's most realistically modeled, with every unwilling and amateur participant pressed firm against or dancing between cover and skittishly hazarding the occasional shot -- but the frequent breaks to dispatch another round of guards felt at times at odds against the relentlessly cinematic flow of the exploration.

In the end, you pressed through, though -- you had to -- guided by the promise of an even greater cliff-hanging thrill than the one you just narrowly scraped through, and the game never left that promise unfulfilled. Just next time, please, Naughty Dog: less of the shoot-shoot-bang-bang and more of the clamber-climb-marvel-amaze.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7h95IrJVlI4/if-web-services-were.html

web services covers therapy (via Superpunch)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/mK17X-ArcK4/videos-of-dudes-stic.html

The YouTube video "3000 Toothpicks In My Hair (new hair style)" is a response to "2222 Toothpicks in my Beard," and a bit more noodling around yields even more like this. I am both be-creeped and delighted. (thanks, Antinous!)

What I found: The idea of war wasn’t glamorized or made trivial by the game. Instead, it made me better appreciate the bravery of those who fought in the war as well as the strategic insight (of lack thereof) of those who were in charge.

Posted in BoardGameGeek.com:
Overview of my first wargaming experience, with photos.

Mirrored from Debbie's Blatherings.

I’m so excited to finally share the giggletastic podcast I did with Maria and Deirdre at Mt. Kisco Public Library. I had so much fun talking with them about Shadowed Summer, library ghosts, library newts, Byron and Black Eyed Peas songs. No, really! Come check it out!

Originally published at MSUFaL. You can comment here or there.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/yKHq712r_z0/astronaut-catches-a.html

Astronaut Dale Gardner using MMU to travel to Westar VI satellite (via Fogonazos)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/uFzhUpB6uDY/hes-all-over-the-sho.html

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xljXqEkdTqo/che-the-graphic-biog.html

In addition to narrating the remarkable story of Guevara's life, Che is a very good backgrounder on the geopolitics that gave rise to Guevara's pan-Americanism, the Cuban revolution, and his tragic and brutal execution (the press that published Che, Hill & Wang, were last mentioned here for their graphic biography of Leon Trotsky).

The graphic format is especially well-suited to these geopolitical sequences, in which multi-page spreads are used to connect the dots between historical events and nations to give a compact but extremely informative tour through the complex story of Latin American colonization and independence as well as the Cold War.

This background also sets the stage for the complex story of Che, the man; and Che, the symbol. Both are fraught -- Che, the man, was fierce, brilliant, flawed, vicious, and compassionate. As a symbol, Che has become a revolutionary icon devoid of any substance, for sale on mugs and t-shirts (a warped mirror of Guevara's veneration in Cuba itself, where his larger-than-life image has likewise become an ideological icon).

As with every biography, the biographers have had to take sides, and, by and large, they side with Che. They don't whitewash his actions in war, or the disastrous blunders in Africa; but they also give just appreciation to Guevara's bravery, his commitment to justice, and his integrity.

The contemporary popular narrative of Che has two grossly oversimplified sides: sneering neocons who dismiss him as a butcher or a fool and denigrate those who sport Che badges as naive kids; and the worshipful reification of Che as a kind of revolutionary saint who could do no wrong.

The reality is subtler and more important than either position has it. The colonial story is one of immense greed and profit-taking by rich countries at the expense of the poor; it's the story of corruption and brutal repression, and it's the story of revolutions attempted, betrayed, and destroyed by internal and external forces. Guevara's life is a lens for understanding what colonialism does to its participants -- as Guevara says, "imperialism bestialises men."

Che: A Graphic Biography