gamer br

↓Gamer br [46:50min | .avi | 147.3MB] by Pedro Bayeux and Flavio Soares: is a Brazilian documentary about the game scene around here. It gives voice to gamers, producers, lanhouse owners, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists, politicians, government representatives and game enthusiasts about questions as professional gaming, market, ‘addiction’, piracy, policies of incentive, censorship and the so discussed ‘violence’ in games. [my emphasis] And finally it builds up to a very sensible discussion of ‘the virtual’. All in all I take Gamer br to be a kind of ethnological documentary. Just for the flavor, here are some snippets from the English subtitles: … Continue reading

Share

desperately seeking phil

  ↑Robot goes missing at The Sidney Morning Herald tells a hilarious story:  Philip K Dick is missing. […] a state-of-the-art robot named after the author. The quirky android, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. […] Robotics wizard and lead designer David Hanson built the robot as a memorial to Dick, whose 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the 1982 classic Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. […] In Blade Runner, set in a Los Angeles of 2019, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckhard, a Blade Runner or policeman whose job is … Continue reading

Share

desperately seeking phil

Philip K Dick is missing. […] a state-of-the-art robot named after the author.     The quirky android, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. […]     Robotics wizard and lead designer David Hanson built the robot as a memorial to Dick, whose 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the 1982 classic Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. […]     In Blade Runner, set in a Los Angeles of 2019, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckhard, a Blade Runner or policeman whose job is to track down and terminate escaped human … Continue reading

Share

lara croft 7.0

  Computergame-heroine-turned-pop-culture-icon Lara Croft has a new likeness: ↑Karima Adebibe. Read the whole story at ↑Evolution Of Lara Croft. Just for the fun of it I raided the web’s tombs and compiled the pics of all seven Lara-models. See pic above, from left to right and in chronological order: ↑Lucy Clarkson, ↑Rhona Mitra, ↑Nell McAndrew, ↑Vanessa Demouy, ↑Lara Weller, ↑Angelina Jolie, and ↑Karima Adebibe. Hint to the male audience: click the links if you’d like to have some sleepless nights—but do not forget to turn Google’s “safe search” off beforehand. Ah, hell yes, ↑2R, ya know, liek ↵sex’n’stuff sells, rite? … Continue reading

Share

volkskunde vs. völkerkunde?

kulturwissenschaftliche technikforschung and cyberanthropology    Since quite a time [the first entry is dated 25 May 2005] there is a weblog called ↑Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung published by the ↑Institut für Volkskunde of Hamburg University. The blog’s ↑about is quite enlightening, but unfortunately in German only. The about’s main arguments are culled from the ↑startpage of the Forschungskolleg Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung‘s website. There’s an English version, too, and I take the liberty to quote from it extensively, especially as I second every argument given:  […] “Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung” deals with the question of how—that is, in which ways and with which consequences—, but also … Continue reading

Share

grid

  Only the dim blueish glow of the cartesian grid gives something like structure to the unfathomamble black void. My eyes just lock on the grid. Yet there is nothing else. But the void is ready and set, it waits. It waits for my input via the interface, for my creativity to give birth to something. By defining points, edges, polygons I carve volumes out of the void, or into it. Now there is something the grid can lock on. Joining, subtracting, manipulating the volumes, giving them surfaces and qualities, flipping them inside out. A world emerges. A world other … Continue reading

Share

darth payne

  The external HDD still works like a charm, and I am again at organizing my material. Just found the above unfinished faceskin for ↵MP2 which I did on 10 September 2004. Of course it was intended for ↵LS5, which never saw the light of day. See ↵lightsaber outtakes. It’s not a great deal all in all, I know, but on a small scale the above artefact illustrates a typical process of combining elements and aspects—most artefacts stemming from modding-communities are collages of this kind. The image’s backdrop is the digitally reworked face of actor ↑Timothy Gibbs who gave his … Continue reading

Share

threehundred gig aleph

After having succesfully implemented measures against the plague invading my cyberanthropologist’s hut, I was so elated that I started to realize my plan to enlarge the private parts of my hut by an appendix. Meaning that I wanted some mass-storage device featuring decent read and write speed and with enough space to really organize my material. Of course, I definitely need a godbox for my project—mainly working on a laptop soon won’t be feasible anymore—but I need another solution before I get my thoughts together concerning the right parts of the godbox [this still can take ages].So this morning I … Continue reading

Share

anthropology’s fate?

Montgomery McFate’s article “Anthropology and counterinsurgency” re-triggered quite some debate within anthropology. See e.g. Dustin Wax’s entry at Savage Minds and the appending discussion [references below]. Now McFate has re-surfaced and last monday spoke at the Women in International Security Conference. UPI Correspondent Lucy Stallworthy has written an article on that, called ↑Experts apply anthropology to Iraq. Here’s a snippet:  […] Montgomery McFate, a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, argued for an increased understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi society. She suggested this would benefit the U.S. forces by enabling them to adapt to the … Continue reading

Share