Sunday, December 31, 2006
2007, Here We Come!
I am a procrastinator and I am not alone.
I had to drive up to Massachusetts this afternoon to buy alcohol for the New Year's party I'll be attending because it's Sunday and Connecticut does not sell alcohol on Sundays. The funny thing is: As I was waiting in line, which stretched from the register to nearly the back of the store, I noticed that the majority of people in line were flashing Connecticut driver's licenses. All of those people, myself included, just couldn't get it together and get their procrastinating butts to the liquor store before Sunday. Instead, we all drove miles from home and waited in 15-minute lines with our fellow Connecticut procrastinators. Happy New Year to all.
This year, I've decided to avoid setting myself up for failure. I'm not going to make grand, life-altering resolutions. I'm just going to make some small goals and slowly work toward them as 2007 progresses. These include, but are not limited to: blogging more, focusing on my creative writing and perhaps sending out some material to literary magazines, collecting rejection letters from aforementioned literary magazines, deciding my thesis topic, and learning to cook and bake.
There. I've blogged. I'll now reward myself with the all-too-appropriate "Millennium" episode of The X-Files.
I had to drive up to Massachusetts this afternoon to buy alcohol for the New Year's party I'll be attending because it's Sunday and Connecticut does not sell alcohol on Sundays. The funny thing is: As I was waiting in line, which stretched from the register to nearly the back of the store, I noticed that the majority of people in line were flashing Connecticut driver's licenses. All of those people, myself included, just couldn't get it together and get their procrastinating butts to the liquor store before Sunday. Instead, we all drove miles from home and waited in 15-minute lines with our fellow Connecticut procrastinators. Happy New Year to all.
This year, I've decided to avoid setting myself up for failure. I'm not going to make grand, life-altering resolutions. I'm just going to make some small goals and slowly work toward them as 2007 progresses. These include, but are not limited to: blogging more, focusing on my creative writing and perhaps sending out some material to literary magazines, collecting rejection letters from aforementioned literary magazines, deciding my thesis topic, and learning to cook and bake.
There. I've blogged. I'll now reward myself with the all-too-appropriate "Millennium" episode of The X-Files.
Labels: Procrastination, The X-Files
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Irrelevant & Weird. Skip Ahead, Please.
I love the way Flukeman breathes in the X-Files episode, "The Host." It's so sinister and threatening!
Labels: The X-Files
Friday, November 03, 2006
You (Didn't) Ask(ed) For It
Well, Dan's blog prompted me to explore my corner of internet fandom, The X-Files. And the massive amount of websites, forums and blogs has prompted me to consider delving deeper into this, perhaps culminating in a final paper. So, without further ado...
X Marks the Spot, or Good X-Files Sites:
-For a brief synopsis of the show's characters, plot lines and history, Wikipedia actually does a pretty nice job. I guess that makes sense because, as we've talked about, many of the people on Wiki are geeky, passionate types with strong (obsessive?) interests in one or a few subjects. Perhaps glaring errors on The X-Files Wiki page have been avoided because the fandom is enormous and its members are so fastidious.
-A great episode guide, including summaries and memorable quotes, can be found here.
-There are quite a few forums, but the definitive one (in my opinion) is Idealists Haven, a registered users only forum with scads of XF material. It's a wonderful fan space. This one is newer and smaller, but a bit more personal. Television Without Pity has one. TV.com has one, too. To name a few.
-Myspace has an interesting set up of all of the characters. Mulder and Scully's blog entries are voice overs lifted from various episodes. I'm not at all sure how this works. Is one person controlling them all? Is each one a different individual pretending to be a character? Do many people edit each one?
-Livejournal has great a blog community of XF fans.
Even though this particular topic is of interest to no one but me, it's interesting to consider both the vast amount of websites, blogs and forums there are for only one subject and to consider how they are run, how the information spreads and what codes or what rules each website follows.
The internet has been a perfect place for fandoms. Before, if you were really interested in something or someone, you could join fan clubs for a fee and wait anxiously to receive a newsletter or a promotional piece or new information. There wasn't as much contact with other fans. You might have known they were out there, but meeting them or communicating with them was a difficult process. With the internet, obsession can blossom. You can communicate with other people who are interested in or passionate about the same things as you. You can blog about your obsession. You can explore many fan sites for free and with just a click of the mouse.
It's kind of brilliant, really.
X Marks the Spot, or Good X-Files Sites:
-For a brief synopsis of the show's characters, plot lines and history, Wikipedia actually does a pretty nice job. I guess that makes sense because, as we've talked about, many of the people on Wiki are geeky, passionate types with strong (obsessive?) interests in one or a few subjects. Perhaps glaring errors on The X-Files Wiki page have been avoided because the fandom is enormous and its members are so fastidious.
-A great episode guide, including summaries and memorable quotes, can be found here.
-There are quite a few forums, but the definitive one (in my opinion) is Idealists Haven, a registered users only forum with scads of XF material. It's a wonderful fan space. This one is newer and smaller, but a bit more personal. Television Without Pity has one. TV.com has one, too. To name a few.
-Myspace has an interesting set up of all of the characters. Mulder and Scully's blog entries are voice overs lifted from various episodes. I'm not at all sure how this works. Is one person controlling them all? Is each one a different individual pretending to be a character? Do many people edit each one?
-Livejournal has great a blog community of XF fans.
Even though this particular topic is of interest to no one but me, it's interesting to consider both the vast amount of websites, blogs and forums there are for only one subject and to consider how they are run, how the information spreads and what codes or what rules each website follows.
The internet has been a perfect place for fandoms. Before, if you were really interested in something or someone, you could join fan clubs for a fee and wait anxiously to receive a newsletter or a promotional piece or new information. There wasn't as much contact with other fans. You might have known they were out there, but meeting them or communicating with them was a difficult process. With the internet, obsession can blossom. You can communicate with other people who are interested in or passionate about the same things as you. You can blog about your obsession. You can explore many fan sites for free and with just a click of the mouse.
It's kind of brilliant, really.
Labels: The X-Files
Monday, October 09, 2006
(Almost) Back in the Saddle
I try to avoid getting too personal in my blog, but it seems that I, as a blogger, tend to migrate toward the personal stuff, whether it be serious or exciting or mundane. It's what I like to read and what I like to write. So without divulging too many uninteresting personal facts, it's been a rough week: The Illness, the Literary Studies paper, and the unfortunate (though not unexpected) death of a member of my boyfriend's family. But. The Blog must go on.
This quote stuck with me: Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component
parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots.
Doesn't that sort of define blogging? Or maybe it's better said this way: Doesn't that describe the essence of blogs? The whole blogosphere is smarter than the sum of its parts in the sense that its components, even the most highly regarded or complex blogs, operate very simply. A blogger types and links and posts in his or her small block of the internet, and that small block connects with other blocks through links and through the information it spreads, and those other blocks connect to still other blocks. And when you zoom out you see this massive information-spreading system, far more complex than any individual blog.
Emergence is probably why I can spend hours on the internet when only intending to check my email or check my friend's blog.
Also, Chris made a great point about emergence and homework. I whole-heartedly agree.
Johnson's point about signal-to-noise is interesting. Obviously, emergence lends itself to a cacophony of opinions, useful information, some useless information, problems with communication, unwanted messages, etc. What's interesting is that part about Slashdot:
Malda and his crew didn't have the luxury of putting a bunch of people on staff to do it, and I don't think they were temperamentally inclined to do that anyway. They thought it would be better to let the community do it, and follow an open source model in developing a community itself. And so they built the karma system where everything was evaluated by other members of the community, and if you contributed a lot your karma increases. Moderation filters enable you to look at highly rated things and eliminate things that are not highly rated by the community. And it created a kind of currency within the system that enabled quality contributions to rise to the surface.
I wonder: If you try to develop a sort of rating system in blogs, will it eventually become chaotic too? Can everyone agree on what's high quality? I'm not sure about that one.
All of this has me thinking not just about blogs but about forum as well. Forums (fan forums, cooking forums, forums about movie stars, whatever strikes your fancy) are a form of emergence, wouldn't you say? I mean, The X-Files forum is monstrous, and I've gotten lost in it many a day.
...Guess I let the geek out of the bag with that closing line.
This quote stuck with me: Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component
parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots.
Doesn't that sort of define blogging? Or maybe it's better said this way: Doesn't that describe the essence of blogs? The whole blogosphere is smarter than the sum of its parts in the sense that its components, even the most highly regarded or complex blogs, operate very simply. A blogger types and links and posts in his or her small block of the internet, and that small block connects with other blocks through links and through the information it spreads, and those other blocks connect to still other blocks. And when you zoom out you see this massive information-spreading system, far more complex than any individual blog.
Emergence is probably why I can spend hours on the internet when only intending to check my email or check my friend's blog.
Also, Chris made a great point about emergence and homework. I whole-heartedly agree.
Johnson's point about signal-to-noise is interesting. Obviously, emergence lends itself to a cacophony of opinions, useful information, some useless information, problems with communication, unwanted messages, etc. What's interesting is that part about Slashdot:
Malda and his crew didn't have the luxury of putting a bunch of people on staff to do it, and I don't think they were temperamentally inclined to do that anyway. They thought it would be better to let the community do it, and follow an open source model in developing a community itself. And so they built the karma system where everything was evaluated by other members of the community, and if you contributed a lot your karma increases. Moderation filters enable you to look at highly rated things and eliminate things that are not highly rated by the community. And it created a kind of currency within the system that enabled quality contributions to rise to the surface.
I wonder: If you try to develop a sort of rating system in blogs, will it eventually become chaotic too? Can everyone agree on what's high quality? I'm not sure about that one.
All of this has me thinking not just about blogs but about forum as well. Forums (fan forums, cooking forums, forums about movie stars, whatever strikes your fancy) are a form of emergence, wouldn't you say? I mean, The X-Files forum is monstrous, and I've gotten lost in it many a day.
...Guess I let the geek out of the bag with that closing line.
Labels: Blogging, Internet, The X-Files