http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/10/professionals-s.html

Following up on the great survey work by Dmitri Williams and others, posted recently on Terra Nova, I have just posted some results from a survey in Second Life.  Social Research Foundation, a non-profit organization, conducted the study, and my analysis is now available at Metanomics.

This is a "panel survey," so it does need to be taken with a grain of salt--these are the first 1258 respondents from a group of 11,000 Second Life residents who have agreed to participant in lots of surveys, focus groups, etc.

My headline for this analysis comes from one of the most interesting results of the survey: people who are using Second Life primarily for professional reasons predict that they will be using Second Life more in 2009 than they are in 2008. Those who use Second Life for personal reason also project  increases in Second Life use, but not as strongly. Among professionals, those seeing increased use outnumber those seeing decreased use by 4.4 to 1, compared to "only" 2.6 to 1 for personal users

There are other results that could have also served as a headline, such as "Second Life Residents May Be More Interested in Your Brand Than You Thought," or "Getting Harder to Find Good Paid Work--and Good Workers--in Second Life."   But the professional/personal twist seemed the most surprising to me.

1. Finished another Iris Murdoch book. I remain fascinated, yet confused. Maybe I am just not old enough, or not philosophical enough. Her writing remains unusual to me in many ways. Which is why I continue to read, despite being unable to say much that is substantial about her works. (I have written up a huge long entry about a book that no one on my flist has read, probably, and probably will never read. Perhaps though, someday someone will google the book, dazed and reeling from having read it, and somehow be helped by my entry.)

2. Thoughts on Persons of InfluenceBNFs, their selection, their responsibilities(?)
( TL;DR )

So hey, I've actually got an excuse to play Tales of Vesperia over the four other RPGs I'm trying to juggle right now (the excuse being an Otaku USA review), and I must say, it's fantastic! The story's pretty blah so far, but the story in Tales games tends to be pretty messy. The real appeal in these games lies in great dialogue and characterization, which Vesperia has in spades. I'm also happy that the in-between character dialogue skits are fully voiced for the first time in Tales localization history. (I have to wonder if they went the extra mile to do that for Vesperia because of MS providing so much financial support for the production/localization of the game...?)

Also, it's becoming very common for RPGs to have dog characters, but I'll be damned if Repede isn't the coolest looking mutt I've yet seen:



Sorry, Koromaru, you're adorable as hell but I think Repede would take you in a fight. Even with Cerberus backing you up.

And a quick one-sentence review:

SONIC CHRONICLES - Not mindblowing, but solid and very fun with great writing!

So, yeah, busy with fun but overly lengthy games right now. How about you guys?

EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot to ask. Is there a music rip for Megaman 9 available anywhere yet?

1. Reading a book about Noh drama.

2. Infodumping, as Ingrid notes, is a form of clumsy overexposition, but what about underexposition? Recently I was reading Bitter Lemons, in which the author gives an account of his life of Cyprus during a civil uprising against the British regime, and I was struck by how parenthetical all of the exposition was. We constantly hear of Enosis (Greek for union, meaning the revolutionary movement to unite Cyprus with Greece), but we never get a definition, or a general history of the movement, we simply see how the island becomes engulfed in violence over the issue. (they don't succeed because the 1/5 of the Cyprus population which is ethnically Turkish was against this, and today Cyprus is a partitioned republic.) Anyway, I think one way you can see underexposition of a sort is when you read a work that assumes a lot of context or knowledge of a subject that you don't have. So for example reading classical works of another culture, without reading the footnotes. I think one impetus behind infodumps is that the author has little faith in the ability of the audience to understand the story without having as much info as possible, whereas I think the readers can generally muddle through, and may in fact become more interested in a story which is parsimonious with backstory and world details.

3. HikaGo fandom has an anonmeme which is surprisingly civilized, by anonymeme standards. In a thread, someone makes an assertion that the fic in anime fandoms is generally inferior in quality to fic in Western media fandoms. If this is supposedly true, why is it so? There are three possible hypotheses: a) as Tari says, it is purely a numbers game, and if anime fandoms are relatively smaller, there will be relatively fewer good writers, b) demographically, anime fans just aren't as good writers as Western media fans, c) there is something in the culture of the anime fandoms in question/this particular fandom which fails to encourage/discourages people from producing really high quality fanfiction. It seems a continual complaint that people in the fandom do not accept concrit or find it socially acceptable, but are people in Western media fandom that much more jazzed about critical comments? It is a good question. What is it about a literary scene which encourages or discourages people from producing superlative works?

Took kel to the foundry yesterday for a tour. Pretty amazing stuff to see a place that can make books from scratch. They poor the lead, make the fonts, set the pages, make the paper, hand sew the books, etc. They had a monotype machine that was freaking amazing to watch in action. good stuff.

Hit the asian art museum for the tattoo show that evening as well. I had never been in there, it was really cool to see "asia" as a whole presented. You can really see how the each of the countries have effected each others art and religion. from Afghanistan to Japan. good stuff.

I dug the chinese wall scroll paintings the most. Some really beautiful work, with distinct movements in the art form that I was unaware of. very cool.

Been reading a manga about Hatori Hanzo. very good stuff so far, done by the lone wolf and cub team.

a drawing from yesterday.....

Huh, is urban fantasy really that much of a cesspool?

Oddly, I'm just the opposite of the OP. I've been reading tons of original fiction lately, and I don't feel dissatisfied at all, in terms of objective quality, with what I've been reading. However, I tend not to use publisher or author homepages to discover whether I am interested in a book. I tend to use word of mouth or review blurbs, or lists of awards. Finding well-written books has never been hard for me. If I were to try and read all of the Hugo or WFA nominees (and that's just SFF), that would take me eons, even when I go and cross out everything that is of a subgenre I dislike. On the other hand, maybe I just have low standards, because I can waltz into a library, or even an airport book store, and come out with ten books that are well written, generally (as I see it), or enriching in some way to read.

I suppose in a way the last hypothesis in the post is also a strike against the "fanfic is harder" idea, in that the heavy lifting comes from the part where you make the audience like the character and know the setting. Therefore even if writing IC is tricky, it's more "the game is yours to lose" rather than "starting from zero." This seems to be borne out empirically, at least as far as English speakers are concerned, otherwise we would also be reading keitai novels.

In other news, I signed up just to read in the bibliophages round. The theme is historical fiction about real people. I wish this comm could get more popular. I mean, all you need to write is a book review! It's not like you need to write fanfic based on the book or anything. Sadly I wasn't able to think of three RPF books that were not gigantic historical epics which it would be insane to expect someone to read for a challenge. (weo) But Tari put the one I was plugging for on her list anyway. XD

I don't know why I couldn't come up with three RPF books. Maybe it's because I don't read enough pure historical fiction? Hmm.

Am also reading a book about Noh drama. Hey, if Noh plays counted as "novels" a lot of them would be RPF! But then also Sengoku Musou 2 is eminently historical RPF as well XD

HOMG!

( SPNNNNNNNNNN CAPSLOCK FLAILING HOLY SHIT )

Wishing a very happy birthday to drmm, who hits the big Three-Oh today. I hope you have a good time.

( I'm a Budget Hero! Well, sort of. )

This game was pretty fun and pretty short. It didn't let me eliminate the military, though...

So hey guys, how about that Wii Punch-Out, eh?

Actually I'm just posting something quick because I'm stupid busy atm and apparently static_fiend gets emo when I don't update. Here you go, hope this tides you over for a couple more days!

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/10/mundie-on-skinn.html

Ian Lamont, who was kind enough to guest-author here a while back, alerts us to some recent comments of Craig Mundie from Microsoft.  Mundie is apparently a bit under-enthused about virtual worlds as separate spaces.  But, on the other hand, he is excited about virtual worlds as augmented reality overlays.  So said he at MIT's EmTech Conference recently:

Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. "Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with," Mundie said. "Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."

Another location-based visual technology demonstrated by Mundie had a lot in common with the "augmented reality" vision that Ray Kurzweil and other futurists have described. He showed how a Sony hand-held computer could display live video overlaid with information about shops and other addresses in the field of view. Mundie predicted that the required processing power for such an application would be available in mobile phones within two years.

Personally, I wouldn't write off real virtual spaces as a "limited audience" kind of thing.  Actually, if Mundie is so down on virtual spaces, he might want to have a talk with the Microsoft Xbox 360 folks, who seem to think there's something to all this "avatar" stuff.  :-)  But whatever -- it's officially "tech mainstream" now to be down on Second Life, I guess. 

The more important thing is that I'm quite in accord with Mundie's enthusiasm for geo-tagged augmented reality.  As I was saying a few years ago, this is a big deal and it's certainly coming down the pike.  It will be really interesting to see where it goes and how it relates to what has transpired so far in the virtual world space.

Update: Wagner James Au has some comments too.

http://www.dicebox.net/asides/dontlookback.htm#page10

Read all "Don't Look Back" by Patrick Farley so far

1. Read Natsume Yuujinchou (Natsume Book of Friends) vols 1-6. Vols 1 and part of vol 2 are translated; the rest you'll have to read in Japanese. There's also an anime. The premise is that the hero, Natsume Takashi can see spirits. The spirits are of the ayakashi variety, sort of like the beings from Kekkaishi. Are all of these series vaguely descended from Ge Ge Ge! Kitaro? However, no one else can see spirits, thusly Takashi has ended up socially isolated, friendless, and unpopular. Also, he is an orphan and has generally been perceived as an inconvenience by his extended family. However, he now lives with a couple by the name of Fujiwara who seem to genuinely like him. One day, he is being chased around by an ayakashi when he releases a powerful spirit named Madara, who takes the form of a cat and becomes his bodyguard, who reveals to him that his grandmother, Reiko, was similarly spiritually gifted. She also didn't get along with people so she instead made "friends" with spirits, by which he means fought with them, and when she defeated them, she put their names in the book. When their names are in the book, that means Reiko can summon and control them. If the page with their name is destroyed, they also die. Actually some of the spirits (including ones she didn't defeat, such as Madara) were her friends, but a lot just seem like random evil spirits. So these spirits are after Takashi to free themselves, or to gain control of the book and other spirits. After Madara explains how to release the spirits, Takashi begins to help the ones who show up. Basically, most of the manga is episodic and deals with different spirits showing up, and the protagonist playing a role in somehow resolving the problem.

Natsume Yuujinchou is above the average shoujo manga in terms of writing, and the art is kind of average at the beginning, but is unobjectionable and gets better. My vague dissatisfactions (?) with the series are pretty much subjective and probably wouldn't bother other readers, unless they think like I do, thus I cut this part. ( more )

2. Read The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind. He's the guy who wrote Perfume, which I highly recommend for people with a taste for powerful prose and strong stomachs. The Pigeon is about a marginal Frenchman whose only passion in life is for peace and quiet, and his grand ambition is to purchase the Parisian chambre de bonne in which he resides. One day, however, he is horrified by the presence of a pigeon outside of his apartment, which sends him into a state of acute terror: the summary makes it sound like that part in the Terry Goodkind book where there is an CHICKEN OF EVIL, but here it's a nearly surreal evocation of the anomic, socially cloistered life of the protagonist. Dedicated only to being left alone, even the thought of any kind of disruption renders him vulnerable to such a spiritual collapse at the slightest of provocations. (Also, I totally mean it about the strong stomach part. There's an incredibly disgusting scene in this novella.)

3. Also read Bonjour Tristesse. I tried to summarize it, but it began to become unfortunately like the Digested Classic version. It seems the author wrote it when she was around the age of the seventeen year old protagonist, and it became a scandalous best seller in the fifties. Of course, by today's standards, the sexual content is tame.
( spoiler notes )

4. Am now reading Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell's account of his life in Cyprus. At first, it begins as a light travel story, with Durrell describing village life, negotiating to buy a house, teaching English, etc., but then it morphs into an account of increasing nationalist sentiment and terrorist violence. As I know nothing about the political history of Cyprus, I began to get very confused.

Wishing the happiest of happy birthdays to mirisa_ardruna today! And I hope it went well and joyfully.

http://goviolet.com/?p=684

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is rightly famous for the epic world-building of future-history tetralogies like Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun. And while these books are unparalled in the scope and complexity of their imagined worlds, my favorite Wolfe book is There Are Doors, a deceptively simple tale of a department store clerk who falls in love with a woman from another world. Two other recent works, The Wizard Knight and his Locus Award-winning novella, “Golden City Far,” are concerned with love: true love, knightly love, adolescent love. Though arguably simpler than his “solar” cycles, Wolfe’s more “grounded” works leave a deeper emotional impression.

The publisher describes An Evil Guest as “a novel in which Lovecraft writes Blade Runner,” which is superficially correct but also misses the point entirely. At its core, An Evil Guest is a romance, a notoriously tough sell to the genre crowd. The three corners of our love triangle Cassie Casey, a struggling musical actress who appears in kitschy off-Broadway shows; Gideon Chase, a dashing detective-wizard who gives the U.S. government the brush off to follow his own investigations; and Bill Reis, former ambassador to planet Woldercan, recently returned to Earth and somewhat changed. Chase needs to use Casey to get to Reis, and he uses his magic to unlock her inner star. Reis wants Casey because she is beautiful and Chase because he is useful, and he finances Casey’s latest production (”Dating the Volcano God”) to get closer to them both. Casey wants them both because — well, she’s not sure what she wants.

The jacket flap claims the story is set “100 years in the future,” but the calendar year is irrelevant. The world has a hard-boiled noir atmosphere — the musicals and showgirls, the diners and automats, cars and trains, and South Pacific island getaways — but it also has interstellar travel, shapeshifting aliens, and superluminal communications. There’s also room for werewolves, fairies, and alchemy…despite the varied sources, the novel isn’t a pastiche; Wolfe’s world is entirely consistent with itself, if entirely confounding to expectations.

And it is, in the end, Lovecraftian. Though only in the end; the first four-fifths of the book will have you scratching your head about why that particular adjective was invoked. The truth lies so far beneath the surface that for most of the story, it’s completely invisible. When elements of the mythos do start to appear, they’re surprising, but also startlingly effective - the lurking horror is unnerving, but the invisible horror is terrifying. The sudden introduction of unknowable evil into Wolfe’s strange-but-rational world has a powerful effect on the reader; having spent the entire book trying to understand the rules of this strange world, it turns out that none of it matters. The surface strangeness was only a distraction from the true forces, both good and evil, at play.

An Evil Guest is not Wolfe’s greatest work. But the way it seamlessly combines Lovecraftian horror, pulp, romance and science-fiction into a cohesive whole could make it his most personal. It’s hard to imagine another author that could keep this many balls in the air.

Hay so uh, I guess breaking up entries doesn't necessarily mean I'll blog more! But I'm trying. My temp job ended recently so now I'm just sitting around my house bored and job-hunting (your help appreciated!!) and hopefully I can kick myself back into the blogging habit while I'm at it. Maybe I'll post that entry on best-buds yaoi I've got lying around! Also I've been trying to update my digicomics collection and should really do some recent comic book reviews for y'all. American comics need more fangirl readers.

Speaking of American comics, if you happened to attend Nan Desu Kan a few weeks ago (Denver's local animu convention), I wound up doing a panel with gookachu on the topic of "Manga vs American Comics" which was more or less intended to tell fans of one about the other. She intended it largely to educate parents of manga-readers about what their kids are reading and why; she felt that a lot of older Americans are familiar with, you know, superheroes and Archie and such but don't "get" manga. I thought she had a great goal, but I also wanted to come at it from the other direction: my POV is from fandom, and I am SO SICK of manga fen who won't even give AmeriComi (as the Japanese call them lol) a chance. I've just realized I was about to recap the whole panel and it should be its own lj entry (or at least share an entry with some comics reviews), so look forward to that, I guess.

One thing I did in the last few months which I wanted to write about was see The Faint in concert at the Ogden. The Faint are this sort of darkwave/emo/electro type band that I am quite fond of (as you can see from my listening stats on my last.fm account), and the last time they came to town, I had tickets and then wound up missing the show because there was a blizzard. That was a few years ago and I was always sad about it, so when I found out they were coming here at the end of July I was all excited and was like DAMMIT I AM GOING TO IT THIS TIME.

( Blah, blah, blah, I like the Faint, the crowd didn't look nearly as prepared for Halloween this time, I attack-elbowed a pregnant chick, and I got groped anonymously. )

( Sample tracks by The Faint posted JUST FOR YOU!!! )

Next music entry will be punk, because roommate J and I got drunk the other night and went to the MxPx & Lagwagon show (we got in free because he works security at the venue). I jumped around a lot and J got security to let him on stage to rub the singer's head during the Lagwagon encore (the guy was cool, just kept right on singing) and J's friend M got his front tooth punched out in the mosh (but he luckily kept it in his mouth so he just kept moshing), and we walked home because we were too drunk to ride our bikes and met these very nice tattooed & pierced gay dudes who sadly did not like The Dark Knight. Anyhow I hadn't seen MxPx in concert since about 1996 so I am feeling very nostalgic and affectionate towards punk right now. XD

Need more live music experiences? Well, if you're local, here's my list of Shows Of Interest for the next few months; feel free to join me at them. I probably won't go to most of them since my degree of apathy towards attending stuff by myself is high, but I haven't listed anything I wouldn't go see with someone else, and I will defintely go to at least a few of them.

( Upcoming Local Shows of Interest (of note: the Notwist, Girl Talk, Electric 6, MSTRKRFT) )

LINKS OF TEH DAY:
*** London fashion designer Giles Deacon's new Pac-Man inspired show. lol.
*** File under "shirts I want."
*** Jack Thompson is So Disbarred that he can't enter a food court. In case you don't know who Jack Thompson is, he was that lawyer who filed numerous cases against video games, faggotry, and other things he didn't approve of. (We agree at this point that he is not just bigoted, but actually has a mental condition, which is kind of sad. But this list of jokes is still hilarious.)
*** National Geographic Best Science Photos of 2008. Science as art. Very beautiful. But why did the Little Shop of Horrors Squid not win???
*** PSYCHIC CHICKEN SOUP AND MEATLOAF RECIPES! Two more recipes to come before the world ends!! I'm totally making meatloaf tonight I think. XD Looks delish. :9
*** You Make Me Touch Your Hands For Stupid Reasons. I lol'd. (I'm sure I'm behind the wave here BUT SO WHAT >:O)
*** John McCain disses David Letterman by ditching his interview to FIX TEH ECONOMY hang out with Katie Couric. LOLOLLOL. Letterman's reaction is fun too. Highlight near the end when he finds out that he didn't just get ditched, but that McCain's still giving an interview -- to Katie Couric. XD

I had more but that's enough for now, eh? I fully intend to post again like... tomorrow or something. Let's all cross our fingers for that! I want to do that "take a picture of yourself" meme. XD While I'm at it I should photo my house and my roommates so y'all can see how I'm living right now. XD

Later.