Lives Online: CyberCultural Studies

I’ve been collecting URLs and images and video clips for the past few weeks with the intention of posting a long list of briefly-noted items that may spark your interest, imagination, and may even lead to a meditation. That list has grown so unwieldy that it has become psychically oppressive.

So I’ve decided to break it up into little, easy-to-swallow caplets, which I’ll call a “Digital Dartboard.” Think about the series this way: if you’re struggling for a meditation topic, print these out, stick them to a dartboard, and let the magic of chance indicate to you which item(s) the universe thinks you should be writing about.

I’ll be posting Digital Dartboard entries over the next week, so keep your eyes peeled. To read the first installment of the Digital Dartboard, click the link.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT RELATED STUFF

We all know (thanks to my incessant ramblings about it) that World of Warcraft is a big deal with a lot of players. Alice points us to a recent roommate-wanted post on CraigsList (that has since been removed, probably because of worries over copyright infringement) that’s refreshingly up front about what they’re looking for: WoW gamer roomies. Check it out.

And WoW isn’t good only for finding like-minded cohabitors — it’s also useful for bringing the great works of cinema, literature, and televised comedy to life. Well, technically, cinema and televised comedy have already been “brought to life” by the actors/directors/everyone-elses-involved in making the originals, but you know what I mean. Here’s the Warcraft version of Fight Club, “The Pardoner’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Abbott and Costello’s classic routine, “Who’s On First“.

Clearly, all of this critical attention to World of Warcraft indicates that I suffer from some sort of addiction. If only there were a film clip that could help cure me of this dreaded affliction!

IS THE INTERNET A CAT-PERSON?

Not to get all Seinfeldian, but what’s the deal with cats and the Internet? Everywhere you look, someone is catblogging. Now, thanks to Jose, we’ve got cat haiku on a blog. Nevermind that they’re pretty funny, nor that this is yet another example of what Susan B. Barnes calls a “reposted message” (which I’m sure you all remember from her essay “Issues of Attribution and Identification in Online Social Research,” which we read for class), this could be an indication of the previously unknown and unsuspected personality type of the Internet itself. Deep.

MORE ON YOUTUBE

You may remember this guy from the Tra5h Ta1k machinima about YouTube and video blogging. Here, he coins a new verb and starts to explain why he’s doing what he’s doing. My favorite comment on the video: “i like ur cat….”

I WANT ONE, part one of an ongoing (infinite) series…

TechEBlog brings us what is sure to be this year’s hottest wearable tech: the Raptor Rig. Watch and drool.

There’s more Digital Dartboard on the way.