2011 October | xirdalium

who is it?

Posted on Monday, 31st October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 31, 2011

zeph’s pop culture quiz #1 With all that popular culture material residing on my hard drives, and with all the hodgepodge of “knowledge” and trivia about it residing in my head, I thought it to be a good idea to launch a quiz series in here. To ease your start into the new week, every Monday I will post a screenshot from a movie or television series and ask some more or less clever question. One week later the post will be updated with the solution—which normally will be a screenshot, too, with explanation of course, plus some … Continue reading →

paleofuture

Posted on Sunday, 30th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 30, 2011

Since January 2007 Matt Novak runs the weblog ↑paleofuture, collecting and presenting past visions of futures that never were. Drawing on his “physical archive of materials related to retro-futurism” his project is of such quality that it meanwhile has ↑moved to the Smithsonian. Above that Matt edits an ↑according magazine and produces ↑paleofuture.tv. On the latter’s first episode: The ↑shiny happy futurism of the 1950s gave way to much darker predictions for humanity in the 1970s. With ↑energy crises, fears of terrorism and skyrocketing unemployment, it’s really no wonder that Americans of the 1970s were often pessimistic about the future. … Continue reading →

this is anthropology

Posted on Saturday, 29th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 27, 2011

During a radio interview on ↑The Marc Bernier Show on 10 October 2011 Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (his ↑daughter has a degree in anthropology—and ↑doesn’t like her father’s stance), voiced the following: We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can … Continue reading →

real time source

Posted on Friday, 28th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 28, 2011

One of the arguments I try to make in epic breadth in ‘↑Cyberanthropology‘ is that the cyberpunk discourse gathers ever more momentum. In the book my exemplary strategy for a proof is looking at the movie production. The point is that more and more of the high-end productions [high-end in terms of budget, star-speckled cast, prominent director, or all three of those criteria] fall into the cyberpunk genre. The trend is unbroken: This year we already had ‘↑Source Code‘ (Jones 2011), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, ‘↑Real Steel‘ (Levy 2011 | ↑review), starring Hugh Jackman, and today ‘↑In Time‘ (Niccol 2011), starring … Continue reading →

gods and robots

Posted on Thursday, 27th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 25, 2011

Somehow this one has escaped my attention till today—unfortunately some paywall, moving wall, system bug, or whatyouhave bars my access to it, although my university has subscribed to that publication and pays for the access. Anyhow, it goes together well with ↵the new gods. Here’s the abstract of Vidal’s article: Since the 1980s, a new area of research entitled HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) has been emerging in the field of robotic studies. It focuses on the empirical study of the relationship between robots and human beings. This article aims to contrast the findings of roboticists concerning the interaction between humans and … Continue reading →

paris calling

Posted on Wednesday, 26th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 27, 2011

The ↑12th EASA Biennial Conference will take place in Nanterre, France (near Paris) from 10th through 13th July 2012. The overall theme is “↑Uncertainty and disquiet.” The ↑list of workshops is set and the ↑call for papers open—the latter will be closed on 28th November 2011. You can only give one presentation, so you have to skim through the vast list and make up your mind to which workshop you want to submit a paper. If this one submission is rejected, you save a lot of money, ’cause it’s of no use to journey to a conference without presenting something … Continue reading →

mari0

Posted on Wednesday, 26th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 24, 2011

↑Mari0 is a ↑Super Mario Bros. plus ↑Portal mashup by ↑Stabyourself.net, which in turn “is a two-man studio formed in early 2011 aiming to create enjoyable experiences for anyone to easily get into and enjoy.” The two men are Maurice Guégan and Sašo Smolej, who already have published ↓Not Tetris 2. Mari0 is not a gamemod in the strict sense of the term, as the whole game consists of original code from the base up: Two genre defining games from completely different eras: Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. and Valve’s Portal. These two games managed to give Platformers … Continue reading →

abandoned homes

Posted on Tuesday, 25th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 25, 2011

The best comment I read on this was the wonderfully ironic: ” … and you thought it was made of Lego.” Having recovered from that realization, here’s the next hit: This is a picture of ↑Two Story with Basement, ↑Mike Doyle‘s first Lego creation (not counting what he did as a kid). Meanwhile he has added two more projects to his abandoned homes series: ↑Victorian with Tree and ↑Victorian on Mud. More at Mike’s blog ↑snap (including very insightful essays) and at ↑his MOCpages page. Especially interesting for anthropologists: Mike does not cease to emphasize that his creations … Continue reading →

anthropology meets technology

Posted on Monday, 24th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 27, 2011

The BBC carries a short piece by ↑Genevieve Bell, corporate anthropologist at Intel, on what a corporate anthropologist does: ↑Viewpoint: Anthropology meets technology. And ↑anthropologies has the essay ↑Anthropology in High Tech by John Sherry, yet another anthropologist at Intel. from ↑John Postill via medianthro list—tnx … Continue reading →

far village

Posted on Monday, 24th October 2011 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 24, 2011

Over at the ↑Ethno::log the issue of the ↑Dogon in particular and Africa in general—respectively how they are represented by the traditional mass media—recently has crept up three times in short sequence. First the entry ↑Afrika by mawingu triggered some discussion. Three days later an ↑entry on ↑an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung again triggered a discussion, mainly circling around the topic of stereotypes used in representing Africa, the Dogon in particular here. Finally yesterday ↑the Dogon returned because of ↑an article on them in Die Zeit. To the wider public the Dogon mainly are renowned … Continue reading →

xirdalium

Blog by Zephyrin Xirdal (since 2001)

Monthly Archives: October 2011